THE LAUNCH AND RECEPTION OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS: PART 3
We wish to appoint a Research Assistant to this ESRC-funded project. You will be employed full-time for ten months, beginning 1 October 2003, to support all aspects of this research which will be happening simultaneously in at least 15 countries. You will play a crucial role in organising the research within the UK, but also in helping to coordinate the research internationally.
The best way to explain the project is through the way in which we proposed it to the ESRC:
THE LAUNCH AND RECEPTION OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS III: THE ROLE OF FILM FANTASY
This research proposal is one of a number being submitted in parallel to national funding bodies in a number of countries. The aim of this project is to use the opportunity presented by the launch of the final film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, in December 2003, to contribute to three important areas of knowledge, namely: (1) the cross-national reception of international communications; (2) the functions and role of fantasy within contemporary culture; and (3) the role of marketing and publicity regimes in prefiguring the reception of a film.
1. The cross-national reception of international communications has, until now, suffered from a real shortage of attention. Only two major examples of research come to mind: first, Janet Wasko’s [edited, 2002] Dazzled By Disney?. This book brought together research from 14 countries into the role and impact of Disney, which is involved very widely in many areas of contemporary culture. Wasko’s book was a contribution to the continuing debates about ‘globalisation’, ‘cultural imperialism’ and the ‘Americanisation of popular culture’. The issues that its research addressed are immensely important – especially in as much as it sought to explore the role of ‘figures of America’ in people’s responses to Disney. The other example is Liebes & Katz’s [1993] important study of the reception of Dallas in four countries. Unfortunately in both cases the research methodology has limitations. In Wasko’s case, the questionnaire could be argued to have presumed some of the issues it sought to explore. In Liebes & Katz’s study, there are arguably some problems with their dependence on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, but it still remains probably the most valuable study currently available, and demonstrates a considerable variety of ways of understanding and responding to Dallas. These aside, there is little else, apart from some forthcoming research on the cross-national reception of Big Brother [Jones, Mathijs & Hessels, 2004] and some research on cross-national responses to ‘9/11’. This is a remarkably small amount of research for an issue arousing passionate debate and widespread claims.
The international release of The Lord of the Rings offers an opportunity to carry out a substantial piece of research into how a major internationally-released film is received and responded to in different national contexts. The Lord of the Rings provides a interestingly complicated test-case. Tolkien’s original story was very ‘English’. Tolkien’s biographers have shown two powerful influences at work in the original book: his concern at the erosion of a (romanticised) English rural life within which he grew up; and his regret at the lack of a specifically English national mythology. We also know that, contrarily, the trilogy became a powerful imaginative resource for parts of the 1960s counter-culture in Britain and elsewhere [see Glover 1984]. Now, the film has added layers of complexity. To an ‘English’ story has been added the much-publicised fact that the films have been made in New Zealand. The film was at the same time financed from America, through a production and distribution deal with New Line Cinema, now a subsidiary of AOL-Time-Warner (corporate slogan: ‘The world is our audience’), currently the largest leisure-entertainment conglomerate in the world.
There is no doubting the scale of the phenomenon. Initial filming of the three parts, back to back, cost over $300m (with substantial follow-on costs for continuing post-production work, and the many marketing campaigns). In different national contexts, other companies have invested heavily in associated merchandise and licensed tie-ins. In Britain, for instance, the most substantial licensed connection was – curiously – with the Post Office. The first part of the film was a significant box office success, earning over $800m on initial release, and – although figures are not yet available – believed to be performing very well on video and DVD. Part 2, released December 2002, is already expected to top the box office takings of the first part (and has overtaken its immediate rival, Harry Potter).
There is clear evidence from studies of international film distribution (see for instance Danan, 1995) that marketing of films is frequently adapted to the perceived special characteristics of particular countries. These are supported by studies of global marketing (see for instance Belch & Belch, 1993). What is less clear is what impact, if any, these variations have on audience expectations, experiences or responses to the actual films.
2. At the same time, the marketing campaign and associated publicity drives have seen an apparent shift in the ways in which the film is being perceived and understood as a kind of fantasy. Chin and Gray [2002], in a study of the internet debates around the first part of the trilogy, found that these concentrated around the issue of books/film relations. This did not necessarily take the form of ‘textual purism’; the books nonetheless constituted the ground for assessing the coherence and acceptability of the film as an adaptation. A close study (conducted in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth) of the British marketing and reviewing associated with the release of the second part in December 2002 has revealed a large shift. The books have largely dropped out of consideration. Now, the discursive centre of commentary in Britain has been around the epic nature of the film, within which the grandeur of the special effects combines with the scale of the conflicts to give a particular meaning to the film as ‘fantasy’.
The concept of ‘fantasy’ is of great importance, but difficult to operationalise in research. Until recently, discussions of ‘fantasy’ have tended to veer unhelpfully between three poles. There is, first, a tendency in much public debate for ‘fantasy’ to be equated with ‘escapism’ [on this see Dyer, 2002] – a loose commonsense word often operating to forestall debate (‘it’s only escapism’). Secondly, the term has often taken on a psychoanalytic cast, within which ‘fantasy’ is seen as primal, and accorded a key role in people’s development. Third, there has been a political tinge to some uses of the term – Dorfman and Mattelart’s much-cited [1973] work on Disney’s comics comes to mind – within which the notion of the ‘colonisation of the imagination’ is seen as a substantial form of power in contemporary media-saturated society. These three have frequently combined in complicated ways in work on film (see for instance the interesting critique by Gordon [1989]), but with an almost determined disinclination to test claims by empirical research. Our aim in this research is to make ‘fantasy’, and the question of its meanings to different people, empirically researchable. In doing this, we are extending the work of Elsaesser and Buckland [2002], who have shown the potential of deploying Lewis’ [1979] ‘possible worlds’ approach to films as ‘texts’. Their aim has been to move film studies beyond a trap imposed by the long-standing assumption that films should be studied through the lens of ‘realism’. This proposed research aims to extend their work by exploring how different audiences conceive The Lord of the Rings as a possible world, and what relations they perceive between that and their lived world.
3. This research will combine two recently emerged fields of enquiry, which together offer a set of methods making possible a new way of tackling these questions.
First, American reception studies has demonstrated its considerable power in investigating the discursive frames within which films have been marketed and reviewed – the work of Staiger [1992, 2000], in particular, but also of Klinger [1994], Erb [1998] and others constitutes a substantial development. Recent critical examinations of reception studies have noted the tendency in their work to favour the most articulate, ‘literary’ forms of journalistic review. Making their work readily applicable to popular film, where more celebratory and ‘visual’ modes of publicity and reviewing are prevalent, requires some adjustment to their methods. Finally, other commentators [e.g. Telotte, 2001] have drawn attention to the way in which marketing has a second, temporal logic, through which it is necessary to see campaigns unfold over time. Amended to take account of these criticisms, reception studies offers a valuable set of procedures for investigating and analysing the range of prefigurative materials which accompany a film to the point of release. Using these amended approaches, this research will explore systematically the main frames which accompany The Return of the King to its release, and the associated promises made for kinds of experience and pleasure. Our research will analyse, among other things, the extent to which purely filmic or extra-filmic frameworks are offered through publicity, reviews and other commentary.
Second, Austin [2001] has demonstrated how it may be possible to examine both marketing and reviewing discourses, and audiences’ take up and response to these. This research will do the same, using as its main method the approaches developed within various strands of discourse analysis. The work of a number of researchers [for instance, Buckingham, 1996] has demonstrated the considerable power of discourse analytic procedures for disclosing audience relations to media materials. Here, these general approaches will in particular be coupled with the recent work of Kress & van Leeuwen [eg, 2001] whose work on modal discourses provides a way of operationalising the concept of ‘fantasy’. This will be a development from two previous funded studies, on Judge Dredd as an action-adventure movie, and on Crash in the context of the major controversy in 1996, in which Barker with colleagues [1997, 2001] used versions of this kind of discourse analysis in order to disclose the nature of audiences’ orientations to particular films.
With these as its frameworks, this research aims to answer the following questions:
1. How is the final part of The Lord of the Rings prefigured for audiences? How is the marketing campaign organised, and what are its main rhetorical features and claims? How is the film further publicised and distributed to potential audiences, via press, magazines, television, radio and the internet? What range of associated merchandise, advertising, and other licensed tie-ins appears along with the film? What are the main available circulating resources and discourses for understanding and placing the story-world of The Lord of the Rings? What kinds of judgement on the film and its pleasures do these offer? What proposals do they make for the importance of the kind of ‘fantasy’ the film offers and how it might relate to our world?
2. How is the film received, understood and judged by a range of different audiences? What distinguishable patterns of response and pleasure (orientations, for short) are there towards the film? What aspects of the film take on particular significance? What are judged to be its most and least important, memorable, and successful, aspects?
3. How do these different orientations relate to patterns of use of prefigurative materials? What kinds of prior knowledge and wider understanding are sought or avoided by different kinds of audiences? What pointers to subsequent use and continuing engagement with the story-world are there?
4. What main modalities of response to the film are identifiable among respondents? How do these throw light on the functions of ‘fantasy’ for different kinds of viewers – as, for instance, ‘fairytale’, ‘myth’, ‘allegory’, ‘game-world’, or ‘moral fable’, and what these terms mean to different audiences? How do the different modalities of response associate with ways of conceiving the story-world of The Lord of the Rings? ‘Where’ is Middle-Earth as an imaginary location? How are its geography, characters, moral scenarios, and narrative related to our world? How do different kinds of audience choose to participate in these?
An important frame for these questions and issues will be the fact that this research project will be carried through simultaneously in a number of countries. Therefore attention will be given at all points to the ways in which these processes may be related to their particular British context, and how it may be possible to compare British responses with those in other national contexts. Partly in preparation for this, this research team, as will all the others, will be putting together a sketch of the history of Tolkien as a cultural presence within Britain – the inclusion of such sketches is one of the most striking and useful elements in the essays in Wasko’s book.
Stages to the research
The research will be conducted in three stages:
a) Following the appointment of the proposed Research Assistant, there will be a two-month period of intensive collection and cataloguing of prefigurative materials, drawing on 10 national newspapers, 7 film-specific magazines, and a sample of television programming. In addition, film-related internet resources will be studied (in the awareness that it is difficult to draw national boundaries around these). Materials will be mapped for informational contents and kinds, for frequency, for developments across time, and emergent discursive frameworks. This work will continue until 10 days (for press, and sampled radio and television broadcasts) and one months’ issues (for magazines) after the release of the film. Analysis, drawing on the approaches of the reception studies tradition, will establish the main discursive frameworks offered to audiences through the various media.
b) At the point of release of the film, a wide-ranging survey of audiences will be undertaken, using a standardised questionnaire. Respondents must have seen all three parts of the trilogy All results will be databased. The aim will be to achieve a minimum of 2,000 completed questionnaires. Methods of reaching audiences will include: leafleting of cinema queues (for which we will be seeking the agreement of cinemas and the film’s distributors); publicising an on-line version of the questionnaire (with an embedded question enabling sorting of responses by national origin – versions of the questionnaire are also likely to be posted in other languages, for use in particular areas of the world); approaches to particular interest groups; letters placed within national and regional publications; approaches to a number of ‘captive audiences’ (via schools and colleges, community groups and associations).
This research does not require a statistical ‘sample’, representative of a wider population. Rather, it works through seeking a wide range of kinds of response, via a questionnaire which asks people to assign themselves among a range of positions, the likelihood of whose presence is indicated by the prefigurative materials. (The questionnaire also of course allows for an ‘other’ position than those pre-indicated.) At the same time, respondents are asked to indicate, through more extensive answers, what they intend and understand by these self-assignments. The research seeks large numbers of respondents to enable us to explore internal patterns and consistencies within each self-assignment category. And because the questionnaire contains both multiple-choice questions and requests for discursive elaborations of answers to these, it permits both quantitative and qualitative exploration of responses. This form of questionnaire was used to good effect in the research on Crash’s audiences (see ‘Methodological Appendix’ to Barker et al. [2001].
In this case, the self-assignment dimensions will be indicated levels (and thence kinds) of enjoyment of the final film; the degree (and thence kind) of importance attached to viewing the film; and audiences’ perceptions of the kind of story it is. The questionnaire (which will be piloted with audiences of the second film) will ask, among other things, what prefigurative materials audiences remember encountering, ranking their importance to them; key recalled moments in the film; whether they read the book, and how that relates to their viewing of the films; and how they would summarise any ways in which the film matters to them.
c) From a preliminary examination of these, and from a semantic mapping of responses [see Barker et al, 2001 on this], a range of respondents typifying the different patterns of response in the questionnaires (with a target of 100) will be selected for interview, either individually (usually by telephone) or, as appropriate, in groups. The interviews will be designed to draw out the detailed nature of people’s orientations, as indicated in their questionnaires. Attention will be given to any ways in which the different modes of interviewing may be affecting their content. It is obviously not possible to determine their formation and distribution at this stage. All interviews will be recorded and transcribed. A close discourse analysis of the resultant transcripts will be carried out, following an elaborated set of procedures derived from Barker, et al 2001.
Dissemination of findings
The findings of this research project will be publicised in the following main ways. First, a conference of participating research groups will be organised in late 2004, hosted by the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. This will include a comparison of findings across the different participating countries. To assist in this, sample materials with exemplary analyses will have been exchanged among participating research groups. Following this, we will assemble a book of the findings of these researches, along with articles in Journals dealing with particular (including methodological) aspects. In addition, the major materials from the project will be made available to other researchers not only through the ESRC’s Data Archives, but through the website of the new on-line journal for audience studies, Participations, whose launch is planned for late 2003.
References:
Austin, Thomas, Hollywood, Hype and Audiences, Manchester UP 2001.
Barker, Martin & Kate Brooks, Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, its Friends, Fans & Foes, Luton: University of Luton Press 1997.
Barker, Martin, Jane Arthurs & Ramaswami Harindranath, The Crash Controversy, London: Wallflower Press 2001.
Belch, George E & Michael A Belch, ‘Towards development of a model and scale for assessing consumer receptivity to foreign products and global advertising’, European Advances in Consumer Research, 1, 1993, pp. 52-7.
Buckingham, David, Moving Images: Understanding Children’s Emotional Responses to Television, Manchester UP 1996.
Buckingham, David, The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics, Routledge 2000.
Chin, Bertha & Jonathan Gray, ‘"One Ring To Rule Them All": Pre-viewers and Pre-texts of the Lord of the Rings’, Intensities: Journal of Cult Media, 2, 2001
Danan, Martine, ‘Marketing the Hollywood blockbuster in France’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 23:3, 1995, pp. 131-40.
Dorfman, Ariel & Armand Mattelart, How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, International General 1973.
Dyer, Richard, Only Entertainment, Routledge 2002.
Elsaesser, Thomas & Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis, London: Arnold 2002.
Erb, Cynthia, Tracking King Kong: a Hollywood Icon in World Culture, Wayne State UP 1998.
Glover, David, ‘Utopia and fantasy in the late 1960s: Burroughs, Moorcock, Tolkien’, in Chris Pawling (ed), Popular Fiction and Social Change, Macmillan 1984.
Gordon, Andrew, ‘Science-fiction and fantasy film criticism: the case of Lucas and Spielberg’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2:2, 1989, pp. 81-94.
Jones, Janet, Ernest Mathijs & Wouter Hessels (eds), Big Brother International, Wallflower Press forthcoming 2004.
Klinger, Barbara, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Indiana UP 1994.
Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, Arnold 2001.
Lewis, David, ‘Possible worlds’, in Michael M Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1979, pp. 182-9.
Liebes, Tamar & Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross Cultural Readings of Dallas, Cambridge: Polity Press 1993.
Sreberny, Annabelle, ‘The global and the local in international communications’, in James Curran & Michael Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society, London: Arnold 2000, pp. 93-119.
Staiger, Janet, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton UP 1992; Perverse Spectators: the Practices of Film Reception, New York UP 2000.
Telotte, J. P., ‘The Blair Witch Project Project’, Film Quarterly, Spring 2001.
Wasko, Janet et al (eds.), Dazzled By Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project, Leicester UP 2001.
Since the submission of this application, we have heard from our international collaborators that the research will be taking place in at least the following countries: New Zealand, USA, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, India, Russia, Greece, Denmark, Australia, China, Italy. It is still likely that research groups in a number of other countries may yet join the project. It is clear that the University of Wales, Aberystwyth will function as the hub of the research, and the duties of the Research Assistant will reflect this fact.
The key duties of the Research Assistant will be as follows:
1. to carry out acquisition of the selected print and broadcast materials, to monitor and code these for all TLOTR references to an agreed system, and to arrange for copying of relevant materials onto preserved tapes;
2. to arrange for production and distribution of questionnaires with appropriate guiding instructions to all fieldworkers;
3. to publicise, both on-line and via other means, the web questionnaire and to monitor its hits;
4. to carry out questionnairing, as appropriate, in local and regional areas;
5. to receive back and coordinate data-inputting of written questionnaires;
6. to carry out telephone interviews, to an established template;
7. to coordinate and participate in transcription of interviews.
8. to carry out preliminary analyses of questionnaires and of interview transcripts, working to briefs set by the Principal Postholder;
9. to maintain contact with other international research groups, and to assist in the coordination of the international dimensions of the research;
10. to carry out such other detailed duties as are consonant with the level of the appointment and the nature of the research.
You will work under the supervision of the Project Director, Professor Martin Barker, but may also from time to time and for particular purposes work to the other members of the project team, Dr Ernest Mathijs, and Ms Janet Jones.
The work will be a combination of necessary clerical, administrative and organisational work, and also involvement in the intellectual processing of the data and materials that the research will generate. For this reason, we are looking to appoint someone with the following qualifications and experience:
1. You should have a good First Degree, and ideally postgraduate experience, in a field which has brought you into contact with the broad area of audience and reception studies.
2. You should ideally have experience of conducting your own research, at least in an undergraduate dissertation and preferably in an MA dissertation.
3. You will need good organisational and administrative skills, and preferably a range of basic IT skills (word-processing, data-inputting, and web-searching).
4. You should ideally have good awareness of audience research methodologies, and of contemporary debates about audiences.
5. You will need to be capable of working in a team, to deadlines, and keeping good records. You should have experience of working with people and excellent communication skills.
This post will terminate on 31 July 2004. However as far as is possible, an opportunity will be provided for the person we appoint to participate in the post-project conference which will bring together all participating countries, probably in December 2004. The person appointed will be employed on the University’s Research Assistant Scale RA1A at the rate of £21,125 per annum, pro rata.
We will also be seeking to employ a clerical assistant to the project, to begin on 1 January 2004, for a period of 3 months.
The closing date for applications is June 13th. Application forms may be got by emailing to the following address:
Interviews will take place in the week beginning July 21st. For informal conversation about this position, please contact Professor Martin Barker (email: mib@aber.ac.uk, telephone 01970-622369).