Watching The Hobbit in Aotearoa/New Zealand: the affective resonance of landscape, race and greed

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the responses from people in Aotearoa/New Zealand and New Zealanders overseas to the online questionnaire of the World Hobbit Project, an international audience research project on the reception of the film trilogy The Hobbit involving 145 researchers from 46 countries. As the trilogy was filmed in their home country, New Zealand audiences were uniquely positioned to interpret The Hobbit. ‘Affective resonance’ played a role in relation to three interrelated issues that Aotearoa/New Zealand is struggling with as a postcolonial nation: the use of the landscape, the representation of race and the notion of greed. In all three cases, audiences saw parallels between the narrative of The Hobbit, the context of the trilogy’s production and longstanding issues resulting from Aotearoa/New Zealand’s colonial history.