An unexpected controversy in Middle-earth: audience encounters with the ‘dark side’ of transnational film production
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".