An unexpected controversy in Middle-earth: audience encounters with the ‘dark side’ of transnational film production

Abstract

This paper addresses local and global audience understandings of a sequence of events that exposed the play of politics and power underpinning the transnational production of a globalised entertainment product – Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy (2012–14). More often obscured by processes of commodity sign production, circulation, and desire, the clash and confluence of global and national ambitions became subject to often heated public discussion and debate during the New Zealand Hobbit labour dispute and in its aftermath. In this paper, we draw on findings from a large-scale online Q methodology survey of pre-viewers for the first Hobbit film to document how differently located audiences made sense of these complex events, their local ramifications, and potentially global implications. We argue that the interests of global capital were able to prevail materially and discursively through the construction and naturalisation of a concordance of interests between Warner Bros. and the neo-liberal New Zealand government. Furthermore, while geographical, political and professional proximity to the context of production provided some respondents with access to alternative discursive understandings, competing forces of fetishistic desire and obfuscation undercut the willingness of most others to seriously contemplate any criticism of the social and material conditions of The Hobbit’s production, lest it ‘spoil’ a longed for consumption and cultural experience.