Carolyn Michelle

Discursive manoeuvres and hegemonic recuperations in New Zealand documentary representations of domestic violence

This paper examines three television documentaries--entitled Not Just a Domestic (1994), Not Just a Domestic: The Update (1994), and Picking Up the Pieces (1996)--that together formed part of the New Zealand police ‘Family Violence’ media campaign. Through a Foucauldian, feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, the paper examines how these texts assert and privilege particular understandings of domestic violence, its causes, effects and possible solutions. The analysis illustrates the way in which five discursive explanations of domestic violence--those of medical pathology, romantic expressive tension, liberal humanist instrumentalism, tabula rasa learning and socio-systematic discourse--are articulated and hierarchically organised within these documentaries, and considers the potential hegemonic effects of each text’s discursive negotiations. It is argued that the centrality of personal ‘case studies’ and the testimonies of both battered women and formerly violent men work to privilege individualistic rather than sociopolitical explanations of domestic violence. Additionally, the inclusion of extensive ‘survivor speech’ means that women are frequently asked to explain and rationalize their actions as ‘victims’ of domestic violence, while fewer demands are placed on male perpetrators to account for their violent behaviour. Consequently, the documentaries leave the issue of male abuse of power largely unchallenged, and in this way ultimately affirm patriarchal hegemonic interests.

The Hobbit hyperreality paradox Polarization among audiences for a 3D high frame rate film

The 3D high frame rate version of Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit film was touted as offering one of the most realistic and engaging movie-going experiences to date, its innovative projection technologies promising to greatly enhance viewers’ sense of immersion in the fantastical world of Middle-earth. However, our empirical research suggests the specific combination of technologies in The Hobbit had paradoxical perceptual and experiential effects. Whereas the groundbreaking hyperrealistic aesthetic enhanced both spectacular and narrative immersion for many viewers, a significant number experienced this same visual aesthetic as unconvincing and distracting and as undermining suspension of disbelief. In this article, we identify key factors contributing to polarization among Hobbit viewers on aesthetic grounds and offer empirical insights into how emerging cinematic technologies may be reshaping film spectatorship.

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

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.

Modes of Engagement Among Diasporic Audiences of Asian New Zealand Film

The formation of a diasporic community within a host society may be signalled through community members’ creative contributions in the realm of cultural production. The ways in which diasporic audiences engage with diasporic cultural texts potentially offers social and cultural trajectories of their understandings of themselves as they negotiate their new environment. This article examines these trajectories, focusing on the ways New Zealand audiences of Asian descent engage with Asian diasporic films. It addresses three key questions: How do audiences’ referential reflections on diasporic films intersect with and contribute to their diasporic journeys and perceptions of themselves in New Zealand society? What kinds of values and beliefs do diasporic audiences feel are important to affirm and negotiate, both within representations of diasporic communities and in their New Zealand-based lives? And what roles do diasporic films play in this ongoing negotiation process?

Pleasure, disaffection, ‘conversion’ or rejection? The (limited) role of prefiguration in shaping audience engagement and response

This article examines the extent to which prefigurative ‘horizons of expectations’ shaped audience engagements with Peter Jackson’s 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (AUJ). Whereas previous research often focuses on examining prefigurative materials, discussions and debates themselves, this article draws on audience surveys conducted before and after the film’s release to illustrate the impact of prior hopes and expectations on post-viewing responses. While Hobbit pre-viewers were often deeply familiar with various prefigurative materials and intertextual resources, AUJ nonetheless retained the capacity to delight, confound, impress and distress viewers in ways that superseded pre-existing structures of meaning. Thus, while our findings illustrate that processes of reception potentially begin prior to and continue beyond initial moments of viewing, they also affirm the need to engage – theoretically and empirically – with the complex specificity and fluidity of actual reception experiences.

Researching Audience Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy: A Unique Methodological Approach

This chapter provides a detailed overview of the unique methodology adopted for the Hobbit Audience Project. It begins by outlining the key insights from previous research on Tolkien fandom and audiences for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that helped inform the project’s core questions and research focus. Then, it explains the rationale for conducting a large-scale longitudinal investigation of transnational receptions of the Hobbit trilogy, focusing in particular on the potential to make contributions to theory-building. To that end, the chapter also outlines the Composite Multi-dimensional Model of Modes of Audience Reception, which provides the theoretical framework for the project, before detailing the specific methods employed to gather data, including Q methodology, conventional questionnaires and interviews.

On the Transformation of Meaning and Cinematic Desire

This chapter illustrates The Hobbit’s evolving significance for different kinds of fans, casual viewers and critics, and presents a comprehensive understanding of the factors that led to continued engagement versus progressive disenchantment and disaffection among different groups of viewers. Drawing on the project’s unique longitudinal dataset, it shows that an increasingly widely shared sentiment was disappointment at a failed adaptation and at the missed opportunity to replicate the heady success of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Disappointment primarily centred on issues pertaining to the quality of the adaptation and crystallised around the chief controversy surrounding the second and third Hobbit films: the introduction of a non-canon female character and a controversial love triangle. This issue is explored in depth here.

Conclusion and Methodological Reflections on a Unique Project

This chapter highlights the wider contributions of the Hobbit Audience Project and relates its major findings to wider processes shaping the conceptualisation and realisation of blockbuster franchise adaptations. The key theoretical insights that can be gleaned from this research are highlighted, along with their relevance to studying receptions of blockbuster adaptations more broadly. The chapter also outlines the project’s wider significance and contribution to audience and reception studies and reflects on the value of the pioneering longitudinal methodological approach used, its strengths and limitations and its possible applications for future research on audiences and media engagement.

Unexpected Controversies Cast a Shadow Over Middle-Earth

This chapter focuses on a controversy that shaped public discussion and debate around the Hobbit production before the first film’s release. The extended Hobbit union dispute, which threatened to derail the trilogy’s New Zealand production and prompted widely criticised reforms to New Zealand labour law, reveals much about how processes and imperatives of blockbusterisation are reshaping transnational film production. Audience reactions to this issue demonstrate how and why a transnational production such as The Hobbit can have varying degrees of salience for differently located audiences, while also demonstrating the potential for cinematic desire for fetishised cultural commodities to ultimately trump consideration of the conditions under which such commodities are produced.

Adaptation, Anticipation and Cinematic Desire: Prefigurative Engagements with a Blockbuster Fantasy Franchise

This chapter explores the ways in which receptions of the Hobbit trilogy were prefigured by Tolkien’s written works, Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy, and an array of marketing and promotions materials, news coverage, discussion and debate. Drawing on data from an online pre-viewing survey, the chapter outlines the main shared viewpoints of 1000 respondents before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’s (AUJ) release and documents their prefigurative activities in anticipation of a long-awaited cinematic experience. To further clarify the orientations and expectations of those who later participated in multilingual post-viewing surveys for AUJ, the chapter outlines the specific constellations of meaning, value and affect that pre-viewers were ascribing to The Hobbit in advance of seeing it.