Social Semiotics, 2014 Vol. 24, No. 3, 263–282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2013.866781

The Lord of the Rings and : fantasy pilgrimages, imaginative transnationalism and the semiotics of the (Ir)Real Robbie B.H. Goh*

Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Peter Jackson’s decision to make and films in his native New Zealand has given the country a major boost in tourism, but this has also become the paradigm of a new imaginative transformation of landscapes. The zeal with which many tourists visit these sites has similarities to the religious pilgrimage, not only in terms of the degree of enthusiasm invoked, but also in rituals of knowledge, ardour and “spiritual” envisioning. The global fantasy industry thus fosters alternative and dualistic engagements with the land that have come to contest the cultural and physical engagement with and even access to the land, as well as exacerbating the existing racial politics, particularly in smaller and more vulnerable nations such as New Zealand. What might be called the “(ir)realist” semiotics of fantasy – with its own cultural hegemony disguised as playful dualism – becomes a notable form of global remapping, often with positive benefits, but also with dangers to local cultures and identities. Keywords: ; Lord of the Rings; New Zealand; fantasy pilgrimages; imaginative transnationalism; (ir)realist semiotics

Lord of the Rings (LOTR): (Dis)locating tourism in New Zealand Peter Jackson’s LOTR film trilogy – The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), (2002) and (2003) – based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels of the same titles, has been a phenomenal successes, both in terms of tickets and in cultural impact. Each of the three films cost about US$93 million to make, but they collectively grossed almost $3 billion in ticket sales (as of November 2011), making them among the most profitable Hollywood productions in recent times (IMDB). The Return of the King was the most successful of the three in terms of box office sales, coming second only to James Cameron’s Titanic, and collectively all three LOTR films arguably have had a much bigger global impact than Titanic or any other film (Gray 2010, 125–126). The success and influence of the franchise have not only been limited to box office sales, as significant as those have been, but extended also to DVD sales, video games, merchandising and related products. Jackson’s other adaptations of Tolkien’s work – the three films based on , due for release in 2012, 2013 and 2014 – have attracted considerable fan attention and are poised to be major hits as well. Some of the impact created by Jackson’s LOTR and Hobbit films is no doubt due to the novels on which they are based. Tolkien’s LOTR novels have often been regarded as the most popular novels of the twentieth century, and in some polls have been hailed

*Email: [email protected]

© 2013 Taylor & Francis 264 R.B.H. Goh as the greatest of the millennium (O’Hehir 2001). The fantasy market – consisting of characters and worlds depicted in novels, video games and comics that have spawned films, merchandise, cosplay and animated films and TV series – is itself a huge market, with fan interest continuing long after the release of the films or novels, and with several major international conventions held each year. One of the largest and best-known conventions, Dragon*Con, had more than 40,000 paid registrants in 2010 (Dragon*Con “History”). Of the fantasy genre – that is to say, the texts which create alternative (heterocosmic) worlds whose premise is magical (or non-rational) rather than scientific, and which heavily feature “sword and sorcery” adventure plots (Goh 2000,22–24) – the dominant and seminal influence has arguably been Tolkien. Writing in the 1930–1950s, Tolkien helped popularise many of the tropes and devices – forbidding castles and dark realms, of the “light” and their wizard staffs, sorcerer-villains, rings or other objects of power, fire-breathing dragons, elves as an ethereal and yet also warrior race, dour and hardy dwarves who are skilled forgers of weapons, mythical swords, legendary warriors, grotesque and evil gnome-like creatures, and epic battles between amassed forces of good and evil – that have featured in the works of later popular writers like Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey, Michael Moorcock and many others. Director Peter Jackson thus had a considerable fan base to begin with. Star appeal (Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, Liv Tyler and others), impressive special effects, detailed costumes and weaponry, clever cinematography which created a stunning visual beauty and epic quality in many of the scenes all were important features of the films, and elevated the LOTR films above others shot in New Zealand or with equally inspiring scenery. However, Jackson’s film settings, featuring much of New Zealand’s spectacular scenery, and utilising clever camera angles which highlighted that scenery to most spectacular effect deserve special mention. Jackson’s teams of location scouts scoured both islands of New Zealand (including by helicopter and boat) for settings that would realise Tolkien’s landscapes, spending some three years in the planning process (before actual filming of the LOTR films began), and finally constructing more than 300 sets in over 100 locations spread out throughout New Zealand (Brodie 2011, 23–27). Jackson’s locations included remote places for which new access routes had to be created when filming began and some which were only accessible by helicopter – indicative of how important location was to Jackson’s visualisation of the novels. The result of this near-obsessive attention to location is that locations also became stars of the films, attracting attention not only merely as the sites of the action but also for their own breathtaking beauty and dramatic framing. Film setting effects a profound transformation of the actual geo-physical landscape, and utilises devices such as framing, contrast, lighting (natural and artificial/modified), special effects and zoom and panorama to form part of the mise-en-scene as a whole, the entire “world of the story” (Pramaggiore and Wallis 2005, 60). This is particularly true of Jackson’s composite film scenes, which combined actual New Zealand scenery with digitally inserted features that significantly transformed the actual landscapes, while still capitalising on New Zealand’s spectacular natural features. Fantasy, more than most other narrative genres, is a distinct and powerful spatial semiotic, a narrative logic that centres on the interpellation of the reader or viewer into a compelling “other” realm (Attebery 1992, 15; Goh 2000, 21). It is this peculiar quality of fantasy that allows the LOTR franchise to inspire “a type of tourism based on the films’ Social Semiotics 265 mythical structures” which is a “simulation of fantasy” to such an extent that the very notion of a “real” geographical place recedes if not disappears (Tzanelli 2007, 23, 57–58). The impact of the LOTR films on New Zealand tourism has been massive, as can be attested to in a number of ways – from revenues (direct and knock-on) to numbers of LOTR tourists to the range of LOTR tour companies that have arisen – as other studies (Beeton 2005; Tzanelli 2007; Leotta 2011; and many of the essays in Mathijs ed. 2006) have already shown. Yet, the nature and role of the individual tour itself plays a large part in explaining the significance of the LOTR franchise to New Zealand tourism. The structure of the tour itself, with its elements of imaginative play, the journey to hidden or relatively inaccessible “special” places, the reliance on and rehearsal of shared lore (a “fellowship”, in the terminology of the first of the LOTR novels) and the physical interaction with and creative framing of those sites all foster a peculiar experience whose closest parallel might be that of the religious pilgrimage. Unlike the kind of film set tours to shows like Coronation Street that Roesch (2009, 103) describes, the LOTR tourist’s goal is not the “objective authenticity” of manifest sets, actual props used by the actors or the presence of the actors themselves. Tours for fantasy films like LOTR require a different kind of imaginative gaze and experience, one that has to constantly and actively recreate the Middle Earth world out of the real-world setting that the tourist sees. Thus what Tzanelli (2007, 23) calls “a type of tourism based on simulation of the [LOTR] films’ mythical structures” relies on an especially engaging form of tourism, not so much a visit to a recognisable film or television set-world, as the tourist’s active and imaginative insertion of himself or herself into the story, action and world of the LOTR films. The one exception to this – the only real film set LOTR tour – is the Hobbiton tour, created on the farm of the Alexander family at (in , New Zealand) in 1999, after being “discovered” by Jackson’s location scouts during an aerial reconnaissance in September 1998 (Hobbiton “Official Tour Guide”). This commonplace farm has become transformed into a pilgrimage site for LOTR and Hobbit fans from around the world. From the time that tourists congregate at the tour meeting point outside the entrance to the Alexander farm, they are greeted with an increasingly realised material recreation of the LOTR world. The meeting point itself is called the “Shire’s Rest” and is replete with signage on rustic wooden posts, a weathered carved rock ostensibly depicting Frodo’s and Sam’s journey to dispose of the ring, and a café with wallpaper murals and wooden beams to evoke the supposed atmosphere of a Shire tavern (Figures 1–3). When the tour bus takes the tourists from ’s Rest into the farm and to the actual movie set, the immersion into a comprehensively realised world truly becomes complete. The is a meticulous recreation of Tolkien’s Hobbit town, and with its gentle rise dotted with round Hobbit-hole doors and traversed by worn-walking paths, even bears some resemblance to Tolkien’s watercolour “The Hills: Hobbiton-across-the- Water”, familiar to LOTR readers from the covers of the George Allen and Unwin and Ballantine editions of The Fellowship of the Ring (Figure 4). As the visitor walks the little footpaths and climbs the hills of Hobbiton, she/he is greeted by details such as Hobbit- hole doors and garden furniture that are artfully weathered and cracked, potted plants and bundles of firewood in gardens, doorbells, vegetable plots, even weathered wooden sign posts pointing to “Tuck Borough”, “East Farthing” and other destinations from the LOTR world. Some of the hobbit holes actually have working doors to allow visitors to enter, and to peer out of the windows, although the holes do not otherwise have functioning 266 R.B.H. Goh

Figure 1. Gathering point (with signage) outside Hobbiton film set, Matamata, North Island.

Figure 2. Café at Hobbiton, with interior done up in quasi-Shires style. interiors (Figure 5). The result of this detailed scale-model, from the tourist’s point of view, is an actual immersive experience, the sensation of actually walking through “Hobbiton”. On most LOTR tours, however, the experience is far otherwise, with little or nothing by way of realised physical landscapes. In fact, one of the remarkable aspects of LOTR tours in New Zealand is the actual sparseness or paucity of sets or other features recognisable from the films. Popular LOTR tour sites such as Arrowtown (the setting for Gladden Fields and the Ford of Bruinen), Paradise (the setting for ), Twelve Mile Delta (Ithilien), Paraparumu (the Pelennor Fields battle), the part of the Kawarau River near its juncture with the Shotover River (the Pillars of the Kings) and many other locations are all rugged and undeveloped rural settings with no recognisable physical or built-up features to identify them with the places they stand for in the films. The lack of distinctive features in many of the locations used in the films is due in part to the fact that many of the scenes in the films were created with digital effects. Thus, for example, the Social Semiotics 267

Figure 3. Decorative rock at Hobbiton gathering point, depicting (presumably) Frodo’s and Sam’s ascent up .

Figure 4. Hobbiton film set. distinctive landscape of the Pillars of the Kings in the film, although shot at the towering rock narrows of the Kawarau River, had the statues of the kings digitally imposed onto the rocks. Without that digital feature, the narrows (Figure 6) are not immediately recognisable as the Pillars of the Kings and have to be identified as such by an experienced LOTR tour guide. The remote nature of many of the LOTR locations is evident from Ian Brodie’s massively successful The Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook – first published in 268 R.B.H. Goh

Figure 5. Hobbiton film set guide, standing beside a Hobbit Hole door.

Figure 6. The narrows in the Kawarau River standing in for the Pillars of the King in the film, unrecognisable from its film manifestation. 2004, authorised and supported by Peter Jackson, LOTR cast members like Viggo Mortensen and Tourism New Zealand (Brodie 2011,5)– which is regarded as the definitive print resource for tourists searching out LOTR film sites in New Zealand. Many of the “remote” locations mentioned in Brodie’s book details are so far removed from any town, built-up feature or even distinctive natural feature, that they can only be identified by GPS coordinates. Thus Brodie, talking about the Whakapapa Ski Field that was used as the setting for several scenes, acknowledges that “as it’s hard to be specific about this location, the GPS coordinates are the only precise direction” (2011, 46). A side panel on a page in the book offers directions to “find the exact locations”:

Viewpoint of rock where Isildur cut the ring from

S39° 14.116 – E175° 33.529′ Social Semiotics 269

Rock wall location of above

S39° 14.114′–E175° 33.522′ (Brodie 2011, 48)

Some locations (such as Dan’s Paddock, North of Glenorchy and the setting for Isengard) are in sufficiently rugged rural terrain to be effectively inaccessible to vehicular traffic, and are best approached by boat, or at least by four-wheel-drive vehicle. The result is a peculiarly dislocating effect for many LOTR tourists (especially the self-guided variety), who often find themselves in the situation that Jerome (2007, 218), relying on Brodie’s book, finds himself in: “90% of the way there [to the film location] and then…stranded without a GPS device handy”. Even with a navigational device with in-built GPS, I found myself similarly stranded following Brodie’s directions to the film setting for Isengard; my rented Toyota Camry made it to about 15 kilometres from the site, before the rugged terrain and shallow water crossings prevented further progress. Thus even as the LOTR films firmly locate New Zealand as an important tourist destination – not only to die-hard fans of the films, but also to others stirred by the publicity generated by the films – they also dislocate tourists by offering (with the exception of the Hobbiton set) undeveloped, unrecognisable and remote rural sites as proxies for the sites in the films. The dislocation is not only merely the difficulty of the tourist to place himself or herself into the film’s mise-en-scenes, but is also the misrecognition of New Zealand itself, and the cultural problems this creates, as will be discussed below. For the individual LOTR tourist, the two hallmarks of such tourism are the journey itself to the film site, with the elements of ardour and difficulty worked into this. and the transformative vision that is required to “see” the film site in the physical landscape. These twin elements of the “pilgrimage” and the “vision” define the model of tourism represented by the LOTR phenomenon, which is in turn the paradigm of a tourist geography of “imaginative transnationalism”.

Imitatio Hobbiti: pilgrimage and spiritual investment in LOTR tours The LOTR novels and films, in particular, foster a form of fandom that has parallels with spiritual pilgrimage, with elements of the protagonist Frodo’s own sacrificial and arduous journey, Frodo’s ring-imparted visions, the sense of an alternative spiritual realm running alongside the physical one and a threatening apocalyptic fate for all mankind. In a sense, LOTR structures reader/fan engagement by positioning them as imitators or disciples of Frodo – a structure which LOTR tours have likewise embodied. The rugged New Zealand landscape, already a favourite with adventure tourists, easily lends itself to the discourse of the pilgrimage with the time and difficulty taken to reach many of the remote LOTR film sites. This is inherent in Jackson’s attitude to his film sites, and in the process of finding and developing those sites: Jackson himself speaks of “the hidden benefit” of “the hardships imposed by difficult country and challenging weather”, which gave the cast and crew “a strong sense of the reality of the characters’ journey through Middle-earth” (cited in Brodie 2011, 6). Likewise, the difficulty experienced by LOTR tourists in reaching some of the more inaccessible locations becomes a way for them to share imaginatively with the ordeal of characters like Frodo and Sam in the films. Unlike studio tours, or tours on locations that are fairly self-contained and accessible, many LOTR tours are far-ranging, typically involving a lengthy drive in an off-road vehicle (some tour companies even use jetboats, planes and helicopters) from the pick-up 270 R.B.H. Goh point to several relatively inaccessible locations, lasting at least several hours to a full day. While the marketing material does its best to assure tourists of a “comfortable” ride in the four-wheel-drive vehicles, they also acknowledge the “remote” nature of many of the locations visited, advise that a fair amount of walking is required and often also warn that at least “an average level of fitness is required”, and thus the tours are “generally not suitable for children under the age of 12” (Glenorchy Air “Trilogy Trail”; Southern Lakes Sightseeing “Trails of Middle Earth”). My own sense of the pilgrimage nature of such tours was highlighted in my experience with the The Southern Lakes Sightseeing’s “Trails of Middle Earth” tour. The tour lasted almost a whole day, with a hotel pick-up in the morning, a stop for lunch and a continuation of the tour until the late afternoon. While a large part of the tour involved riding in a fairly comfortable four-wheel-drive vehicle, the lengthy duration of the tour, the relatively long distances covered and the occasional bits of rough off-road driving (especially in the Twelve Mile Delta area and the area outside of Arrowtown where stretches of bumpy terrain and shallow water crossings were encountered), contributed to the sense of a major journey whose passage was not always easy or comfortable. The tour also involved a significant amount of physical activity, with several hours on foot into areas unreachable by the four wheeler, including climbing hilly terrain (at the Twelve Mile Delta area), squatting and crouching to re-enact Frodo and Sam’s adventures and to capture camera angles from the film and encouragements to wield replica LOTR weapons with vigour and replay fight scenes from the films (Figures 7 and 8). Many LOTR tourists go on self-guided tours, armed with Brodie’s best-selling location guide, and here too, the atmosphere of the pilgrimage is discernible. The most arduous kind of self-guided pilgrimage would be a driving tour of the major film sites on both North and , a trip which could easily take 12–14 days at a fairly hectic pace, and even then would only be able to cover select sites which appear prominently in the films. The long distances and the difficulty of navigating many of New Zealand’s roads and highways – which are relatively narrow carriageways with deceptive soft shoulders, often twisting through mountain passes and coated with slippery black ice, and

Figure 7. Rugged trails at Twelve Mile Delta. Social Semiotics 271

Figure 8. Tourist in imaginative play with LOTR “relics”, in Southern Lakes Sightseeing’s “Trails of Middle Earth” tour. which regularly account for a number of fatal accidents especially amongst tourists unaccustomed to driving in New Zealand – all contribute to the sense of arduousness so different from the film set tour more familiar to fans of various film franchises. Even less ambitious self-guided tours, for example to a single specific site, have in-built elements of difficulty. Equipped with Brodie’s book, I set out on a drive from Queenstown in South Island to Dan’s Paddock, the setting for Isengard. Half of the journey – up to Glenorchy – was problem-free, through scenic roads running alongside Lake Wakatipu, although the absence of all other traffic except for the occasional passing car accentuated the sense of removal from the everyday world. North of Glenorchy, however, the way quickly changed to unfinished rural roads, including one long stretch of forest road only wide enough for one vehicle in either direction and numerous stretches of rough tracks with shallow water crossings. The indeterminate nature of Brodie’s directions (in the absence of major landmarks) and the fact that the terrain eventually became too rough for my rented front-wheel drive sedan left me stranded tantalisingly close to the fabled location – one which, at any rate, I would not have been able to recognise (Isengard itself was digitally inserted into the Paddock) even had I reached it, except for the approximate GPS readings on my in-car device. Like religious pilgrimages, the difficulty of the journey is emphasised by potential dangers. The hazards of self-guided LOTR tours may not be extremely high, but they do exist: tourists have died in car crashes en route to LOTR sites, and others have been threatened by eruptions and falls in the national parks that Jackson used as settings in his films (Kingkade 2012). In addition to the ardour of the journey itself, another thing the LOTR tourist shares with pilgrims is the role played by relics in the journey. In mediaeval Christianity, relics of the saints were invested (in the minds of pilgrims) with a special significance or aura of “praesentia, the physical presence of the holy”, so that the journey to the relic (no matter 272 R.B.H. Goh how arduous) was meaningful because it brought the pilgrim into the “presence of an invisible person” deemed worthy of the pilgrims’ devotion and enthusiasm (Brown 1981, 88). Part of the investment of meaning in the LOTR tour is the presence of the films’ equivalent of relics: props, memorabilia, costumes and other signs which invoke the magical “praesentia” of the films’ creative talents and processes. Paradise Safaris advertises that on their tours, the movie locations will be “brought to life with our authentic replica props” (Paradise Safaris “Lord of the Rings Heaven”). For the Southern Lakes Sightseeing company, their “large and very rare collection of weapons and costume items from the trilogy” and their “top secret items from the making of the movies” are important features of their tours (Southern Lakes Sightseeing “Trails of Middle Earth”). The rarity of most of these items is actually debatable: weapons are replicas made by a popular American cutlery company and which (while quite costly) can actually be purchased by any fan. Other forms of relics include photocopies of scripts and crew instruction sheets used on set, and – in the case of the Hobbiton movie set – an actual plastic leaf from the “party tree” (plucked from the tree or picked up from the ground nearby and given to each tourist) recreated on the set to suit Peter Jackson’s vision of how the tree in the Shires should look. While the mass-reproduced nature of many of these objects (photocopies, reproductions and plastic leafs) mitigate against their having any kind of unique or irreplaceable aura, they do foster the tourist’s imaginative evocation of the world of the films and of the film sets (Figure 8). Porter (2007, 83) makes a similar point about the air of the “‘real’ museum artefacts” that is conferred on LOTR items shown in travelling exhibits. No arduous pilgrimage to a remote and meaningful location would be complete without a catechism or shibboleth, a display of insider knowledge that marks the initiated. This, too, is evident in LOTR tourism, especially in the constant tests, quizzes and prompts which the tour guides use as part of their tour narratives, and to contextualise particular locations or sites. Thus on the Hobbiton tour, the tour guide pointed out the spot from which Frodo jumps onto ’s wagon in the film, and asks the group if anyone can finish the line which Frodo utters at that point: “You’re ______[late]”; when a young American tourist named Rachel answers correctly, this singles her out for special mention and other tests and challenges later in the tour, and confers upon her special status as a die-hard devotee of the films. In a sense, the experience of LOTR tourism as a whole is precisely about marking out one’s distinction from run-of-the-mill watchers of the films, by demonstrating that one’s zeal and enthusiasm is at a higher level, as evident in the time, effort and cost one undertakes in travelling to New Zealand and participating in these tours. LOTR tourism, like many other orders (including religious and secret ones), is about marking distinctions between the initiated or dedicated on the one hand, and all the other, more casual film viewers on the other hand.

The imaginary real: visions and dualistic seeing on LOTR tours In addition to the component of the lengthy and arduous journey, LOTR tours resemble pilgrimages in the degree of spiritual investment involved, in significant part because of the strong Christian overtones in Tolkien’s novels. The link between Tolkien’s novels and Christianity has been noted by a number of scholars (Smith 2002; Wood 2003; Agoy 2011; Mooney 2011). Christian themes of suffering and sacrifice permeate Tolkien’s novels, and accordingly landscapes (in both the novels and the films) bear special Social Semiotics 273 signification as (variously) external correlatives of internal struggle, despair and discouragement, the victory of the human spirit, and havens or spots of peace along the life journey. Beyond the specifically Christian elements, scholars such as Brisbois (2007), Barker and Mathijs (2007) and Nilubol (2007) have pointed to the larger spiritual connotations in the LOTR films, the elements of “utopianism”, the journey to a “higher state of consciousness” and “purification” that may be symbolised in Frodo’s journey. Central to both the spiritual resonances in LOTR, and thus to LOTR tourism, is the notion of the spiritual vision. Tolkien, as a devout Catholic and also a mediaeval scholar, would have been aware of a long tradition of Christian visionaries and mystics (including literary ones like William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and historical figures like Julian of Norwich and Joan of Arc), as well as visionaries in the Bible. The correspondences between the biblical visions of prophets like the Apostle John or the prophet Isaiah – with their threats of world-ending apocalypses, evil overlords, warfare, besieged cities, the misery and suffering of the common people – with elements of Tolkien’s novels are marked. John’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for example, have much of the same atmosphere of mystery and dread as Tolkien’s horsed and faceless Ring Wraiths, while the winged “fell beasts” they ride at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields resemble Satan’s form as the “the dragon, that old serpent” (Revelations chapters 6, 20). The besieged and seemingly doomed (but miraculously saved) city Minas Tirith, whose fate is in some ways aligned with the fate of mankind, bears more than passing resemblance to the historical Jerusalem besieged by various enemies such as the Assyrians (which experi- enced both miraculous salvation as well as conquest – II Kings chapter 19, Jeremiah chapter 52), and to the Millennial Jerusalem besieged by Satan’s army (Ezekiel chapters 38–39). Unlike the more overtly allegorical writing of Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s fiction does not create an “equation” of fictional figures and Christian meanings, but instead insists on a dualistic coexistence of the “supernatural world” and the “historical consistency of the natural world” (Wood 2003,5–7). The process has more than passing resemblance to the “religious sublimation” of the “pilgrim” (Tzanelli 2007, 71), the subsuming of the individual tourist’s identity into a visionary realm through a process of desire and zeal. Roesch (2009, 119) recounts a young German male tourist who had a great desire to see “the location of the Argonath”: “I have dreamt of seeing that. I didn’t know if that was possible. Then I found out that it is possible with this tour and…I wanted to book it”. The aspect of longing and desire represented by this tourist’s dream of visiting the Argonath site indicates some similarity with religious sublimation and zeal. Barker and Mathijs, in their analysis of overseas audiences’ response to the LOTR films, highlight the fact that many respondents as a consequence of the films imaginatively transform New Zealand into a “spiritual” and “moral” landscape, an “utopian” place as much about their own inner values and needs as about the films or the country (2007, 120–126). Brisbois (2007, 198–199) likewise speaks of the “collective escape” fostered by Tolkien’s world, manifested by the imaginative imitation of fans who transformed themselves into “living” elves and . At the heart of fantasy, fandom is the imaginative vision which transforms the fan into a living participant in the imaginary, “utopian” world of the fantasy text; Tolkien’s LOTR is the exemplary model of this fantasy envisioning. Yet the dream-like and transformative envisioning fostered by the LOTR films does not, of course, fully supplant the tourist’s or filmgoer’s own identity and quotidian reality, being merely a temporary (albeit compelling) experience. Fantasy seeing is thus a 274 R.B.H. Goh persistent dualism, alternating between the real/everyday and the alternate/spiritual – a duality which again resembles the visionary archetype seen (among other things) in the Bible. The visionary in the biblical tradition is constantly torn between two landscapes: the actual one that he or she inhabits and the landscape that is transformed by the presence of the spiritual dimension. The juxtaposition or switch is often dramatic and disconcerting, as when the prophet Ezekiel suddenly sees God and the cherubims: “as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar,…the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God” (Ezekiel 1: 1). He goes on to record his vision of the four fantastical cherubims, each with their four faces, two sets of wings and encircling rings, and the vision of God seated on a “sapphire” throne, before finding himself deposited back on earth: “Then I came to them of the captivity at Telabib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them seven days” (Ezekiel 3: 15). This biblical prophetic quality finds a close correspondence in the dual vision of the LOTR ring-bearer, as realised in Jackson’s film: on slipping on the ring, Frodo departs (as it were) from the physical reality of his surroundings recede, and into a shadowy other realm where he senses the essences or spirits of the pursuing ring-wraiths and the malicious power of the dark lord. The transition from spiritual to physical realms, and vice versa, is as abrupt as it is with biblical prophets like Ezekiel, the Apostle John and others. Indeed, as Wood (2003, 72) points out with regard to the novels, as Frodo’s exposure to the ring increases, the intensity of his visions increases. He begins to see visions “even with his waking eyes”, and experiences an increasing conflation of the “waking” every day and the spiritual realms (Tolkien, Return of the King, cited in Wood 2003, 72). There is this difference, that Ezekiel’s vision is of God and His cherubims, while Frodo’s is of the dark lord and his evil minions; yet to have visionary access to the spiritual realm is not only to see the good in that realm, but also (on occasion) the evil, as when John in Revelations sees the threatening four horsemen, the dragon-like beast and the massing of the beast’s armies against the holy city (Revelations chapters 6, 13 and 19). Tolkien’s creation of a spiritual reality underlying and betimes irrupting into the everyday physical reality of his characters bears noticeable resemblance to the duality of the spiritual-physical, apocalyptic-everyday tension experienced by certain biblical prophets. The modes of seeing structured on typical LOTR scenic tours also resemble this dualistic tension. The LOTR tourist is expected to imagine the world of the films in the landscape before him, even as she/he negotiates and traverses the actual hills, roads, trails and bumps of the New Zealand landscape. In the tour vehicles, on foot or even at stops for meals, the tour guides constantly switch the tourists’ gaze from the physical to the imaginary, from New Zealand terra firma to Middle Earth, through various techniques such as: playing film clips (on laptops or portable DVD players) which show the tour locations as they appear in the film, giving verbal narratives which allow tourists to imagine themselves “on location” during the shooting of the film, letting tourists look at copies of film scripts and letting them wear or handle replica costumes and props. In this way, tourists constantly move back and forth during the tour, occupying the dual realities of New Zealand and Middle Earth. One strategy used by some LOTR tour companies, in particular, epitomises dualistic seeing: tour guides will hold up a movie still from the films, in such a way that the actual landscape and the filmic one are juxtaposed (Figure 9). Even more than the other invocations of filmic reality employed by tour Social Semiotics 275

Figure 9. Heterocosmic seeing at Arrowtown/Gladden fields. companies, this scenic juxtaposition heightens the ongoing sense of a dual vision structured by the LOTR tour. The consumption of landscapes in such LOTR tours is thus not purely an enjoyment of nature for its own sake, nor strictly speaking is it what Baudrillard (1994, 1) would call the “precession of simulacra” where the mental image of the fantasy landscape (internalised from repeated viewings of the films) largely replaces or comes to be taken for the physical landscapes. Rather, fantasy tours like LOTR foster a dualistic perspective structured by what we might call the semiotics of (ir)realism, in which both the film/ fantasy landscape and the physical landscape are juxtaposed. “Irrealism”, borrowing a term from phenomenology –“being which peculiarly has neither spatial nor temporal location”, possessing an “eidetic” vividness and power distinct from the laws and constraints of the physical real – conveys something of the consuming and quasi-religious power of fantasy texts, and the imaginary realm that they so vividly construct in the minds of their many devotees (DeGrood 1976, 121–122). Manifested in the activity and economy of fantasy pilgrimages, however, the irreal of the fantasy realm has to meet the physical contours of real landscapes, resulting in a constant fluctuating duality which we might call the “(ir)real”, simultaneously eidetic and actual, functioning in both the fantasy mind and the geo-physical landscape. LOTR tours recognise and play to this duality of the (ir)real by their constant juxtaposition of fantasy and physical scenery. Tour guides assume a considerable degree of eidetic investment on the part of LOTR tourists, constantly referring to scenes from the films as if they were present and accessible in the tourists’ minds and imaginations. Cues like “remember that scene where…” or “What’s ‘taters, Precious?’” (a well-known bit of dialogue involving the character ) are used by tour guides to instantly invoke familiar scenes and landscapes while standing amidst or in front of parts of the New Zealand landscape that are otherwise unrecognisable from the film. Film stills and even Brodie’s authoritative guidebook are used, as it were to convince the tourist of the authenticity of the landscape, its actual status as a mise-en-scene from the film (Figure 10). 276 R.B.H. Goh

Figure 10. Using Brodie’s book to re-imagine landscape at Arrowtown.

(Ir)Realist semiotics and cultural contestations: dichotomising the national The pragmatic effect of this (ir)realist tension can be seen in New Zealand’s official discourses on place names and tourist promotion material in the wake of the LOTR franchise. New Zealand’s promotion of the creative industry, and of the country and its stunning landscape as a film location, is having for New Zealand a similar effect that Canada’s promotion of itself as a film location did for that country, first in the 1930s as a way to help Hollywood circumvent “quotas” on films produced in different nations set by the British, and then from the 1970s onwards with various measures such as tax shelters, collaborations between American and Canadian companies, and various incentive schemes for Hollywood companies choosing to film in Canada (Melnyk 2004,48–50). Yet unlike Canada, which also benefited in large part from its close geographical proximity and visual resemblance to America, New Zealand’s rise as a film location is despite its remote location and distinctively pristine landscape. Considering the case of LOTR, Hobbit, Avatar and other hit fantasy and speculative films, it might be said that New Zealand’s success (different from that of Canada) is precisely because of the fantasy- like nature of its landscape, the way in which this facilitates the projection of a fantasy world, the exercise of imaginative engagement that is characteristic of fantasy fandom, and also the rapport of computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects with the ruggedly beautiful, underdeveloped and sparsely populated locales. A marketing study noted that most respondents whose image of New Zealand was initially derived from the LOTR films were particularly impressed with the beauty and diversity of the landscapes in the films, and consequently formed an image of the country as “magical and mystical”,a “land of make believe” (Larsen and George 2006, 126–127). New Zealand’s landscape in effect becomes a kind of tabula rasa, an open and blank slate on which film directors can project their image that they wish to create for fantasy films, and fans can insert themselves imaginatively as participants in the fantasy world of the films they consume. The response of the New Zealand government has underscored this tabula rasa nature of New Zealand as film location, and particularly as a fantasy Social Semiotics 277 place: as Lawn and Beatty have observed, the swift and spectacular rise of New Zealand as a film location itself has a certain fantasy quality to it, which is increasingly part of the national consciousness:

Fantasy has become permissible in the Kiwi imaginary, not only as a cinematic genre but also as the capacity to imagine ambitious futures, and the New Zealand government now woos foreign, big-budget film production with all the trappings of expensive star talent. (Lawn and Beatty 2006, 44)

The “postmodern and post-nationalist policy environment” ushered into New Zealand by the success of LOTR not only encourages creative industries like film-making and related ones like digital design and post-production, but also is itself inherently creative and imaginative, willing to see New Zealand no longer as an isolated and inward-looking predominantly-agricultural country, but rather as a realm of new and hitherto-inconceiv- able possibilities (Lawn and Beatty 2006,44–45). This imaginative national consciousness is perhaps most clearly seen in the way New Zealand has begun to imagine itself as a fantasy site, with evidence of the heterocosmic and dual-vision perspective also exhibited by filmmakers and fans. The imaginative overlaying of spaces was evident when Tourism New Zealand mounted a major campaign “projecting New Zealand as Middle Earth” (Lawn and Beatty 2006, 48). The conscious overlay of Middle Earth and New Zealand terrains involved using a LOTR actor (Karl Urban, who played Eomer) to voice-over a tourism promo involving a map of Middle Earth, and the deliberate identification of various New Zealand sites with names derived from the LOTR film (Jones 2006, 286). As Jones (2006, 285–286) has shown, New Zealand media, tourism and related institutions have undertaken a process of “adapting and applying the fantasy of Middle Earth”, including the renaming of the section of state highway 43 from Taumuranui to Stratford as “Hobbits’ Tunnel”. Matamata, the location of the Hobbiton film set, has industriously marketed itself as “Hobbiton”, including adopting that sobriquet as its unofficial town name (National Geographic News 2001). Air New Zealand has adopted the LOTR films in a large way, including painting a picture of Frodo prominently on the side of one of its aircraft, and using a LOTR-themed safety video in which it refers to itself as “Air Middle Earth”, and in which crew and passengers are depicted as a range of LOTR-type characters (elves, dwarfs, ring-wraiths, hobbits and wizards). As signs such as the dual-naming of Matamata–Hobbiton and New Zealand-Middle Earth indicate, the (ir)realist semiotics catalysed by the LOTR phenomenon is not an either-or, but must necessarily be a both-and. Herein lies the problematic cultural politics of fantasy tourism. The cultural impact of a large-scale phenomenon such as LOTR on a relatively small nation such as New Zealand has been considerable, and has given rise to a number of protests and contestations. Chief of these have involved issues of the actual ownership of the land, race and the imperialism of representation, and a more general sense of “misrecognition” or dislocation of place on the part of New Zealanders as a result of the alternate significations imposed by the LOTR-inspired fantasy economy. Perhaps, the most prominent contestations have been those involving the Maori people and their attachment to (including the sacralisation of) the landscape. As the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, the Maori (like indigenous groups elsewhere, including Aboriginal Australians and First Nation peoples in various parts of the Americas) have been involved in a number of clashes over land rights, rights of access and sacred 278 R.B.H. Goh investment in versus public and commercial uses of specific sites (Evison 1997; Boast 2008). The entry of the LOTR fantasy economy has exacerbated issues of Maori landownership and stewardship, as well as the cultural politics of Maoris vis-à-vis pakehas (whites). Thus (together with neighbouring ) in central North Island became transformed by LOTR discourse to become the film franchise’s Mount Doom. In filming the trilogy, Jackson used distance shots of Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Ruapehu to stand for Mount Doom, while filming Frodo’s trek towards Mount Doom in the rocky slopes off Ohakune Mountain Road (Brodie 2011,49–51). However, problems arose when Jackson wanted to film on location at Mount Ngauruhoe for The Hobbit, sparking protests from the local tribe, which considers the mountain sacred and refused to allow Jackson to film on it (Milne 2011). While the filming of LOTR and the Hobbit sequence has created a variety of jobs for New Zealanders, this has also given rise to charges of racism concerning Maoris, who are typically cast as “bad” characters such as and Urukhais, their violence, gruesome appearance and fearsome war-cries possible caricatures of Maori culture (McKenzie 2005; Fordyce 2013). In contrast, the main “good” characters were all white, whether New Zealanders, Americans or other nationalities. The issue of racist casting took a further twist when a British Pakistani woman, Naz Humphreys, charged the casting manager of The Hobbit with racism upon being rejected for a role as a Hobbit extra because the company only wanted “fair-skinned” actors (Cardy 2010). While accusations of racism have attached themselves to a number of films and television shows over the years, and the responses to Ms Humphreys’ plight have been mixed, there is a particular poignancy to the condition of native New Zealanders who have been twice-misrepresented, first in terms of a predominantly white New Zealand culture and second as the grotesque villains of a burgeoning fantasy semiotics and economy. The personal web page of Maori actor Lawrence Makoare makes this clear in good-natured but telling fashion. Makoare speaks with pride about some of the roles he played in realist dramas like Once Were Warriors and Crooked Earth, before going on to say that he is “best known for his various roles in the Lord of the Rings movies” (Makoare “Official Website”). Makoare played three roles in the sequence: chief Urukhai Lurtz, leader Gothmog and the spectral Witch-King. Underneath Makoare’s pride in his participation in this successful film franchise is a good-natured but clear complaint, about being typecast as villains whose prosthetically enhanced horrendous appearance reinforces their role as evil characters, and who come to violent deaths. Comments such as “yet another blatant attempt to make this nice guy as ugly as possible”, “to transform him into the evil-looking Chief”, “ and swoop in and kill him with excessive force” and (in connection with another film) “Lawrence dies – again!” reveal something of the underlying resentment at this racist typecasting (Makoare “Official Website”). Fantasy semiotics more strongly foregrounds the problem of real social margin- alisation and inequity, because the imaginative transformations within fantasy open up more possibilities (of casting, effects, digitisation and mise-en-scene) than narratives which are more closely bound up with social and historical realism. While films like Once Were Warriors (1994, dir. Lee Tamahori) are obliged to cast Maoris in the roles of ex-convicts and dysfunctional parents to show the real social problems besetting the Maori community, fantasy films like LOTR are under no such social or historical realist Social Semiotics 279 obligations and, moreover, are able to use special effects to transform the physical appearance of cast members where necessary. LOTR’s casting of Maoris as evil creatures exerts a kind of (ir)realist duality on their representation, on the one hand imposing a fantasy semiotics in which they stand for creatures with no spatial-temporal correspond- ence in reality, but on the other hand leaving intact a realist resemblance to their marginalised position as violent and grotesque Other to an European conception of New Zealand. With the landscape, too, fantasy’s (ir)realist semiotics has opened up a cultural problematic by creating a landscape of desire and consumption – in the first place, consumed within the fantasy aesthetic which transforms real landscape sites into sites for the investment of fans’ and tourists’ consumption, but subsequently as real estate for a foreign consumption fuelled by the fantasy-inspired interest in New Zealand. At a practical level, interest in New Zealand real estate on the part of foreign buyers has increased sharply, for a variety of reasons (including New Zealand’s perceived social and political stability, and rising demand from buyers in China and other parts of Asia), but including to a significant extent the international interest that has been sparked by the LOTR films (Lilley 2004; Bendemeer.co.nz “Buying at Bendemeer”). Quite apart from the actual inflationary effect attributable directly to LOTR’s work in transforming New Zealand into a landscape of desire, the fantasy semiotics and economy have also had other effects on New Zealand land, inflecting it as a place of desirable cosmopolitan possibilities, and in the process awakening local protests against a “foreign” appropriation of land which should be for New Zealanders. One very concrete result of New Zealand’s fantasy economy is the purchase of a 2500-acre farmstead in South Wairarapa by James Cameron, whose blockbuster film Avatar was shot in New Zealand, and who intends to film the sequels there as well (Cieply and Barnes 2012). Cameron’s purchase has raised anxiety amongst New Zealanders about a “land grab” by foreigners, about good New Zealand farmland turned into unproductive luxury homes for the rich, about New Zealanders being denied access to lands for recreational purposes, and about the possible start of an influx of Hollywood types and other rich cosmopolitans with little or no real connection to the nation. These fears have been exacerbated by other recent high-profile land transactions, including a similar purchase of a large estate by Peter Jackson, an application by singer Shania Twain to purchase a 42,000-acre farm near Wanaka, the sale of 16 dairy farms to a Chinese group, and a consortium of local and foreign banks backing the Mighty River Power Ltd geothermal project near (Lilley 2004; Bourke 2012). Tellingly, these purchases have been described in terms of fantasy texts: the lush natural beauty of Cameron’s estate is compared with “Pandora”, the fictional planet of Avatar, while the Mighty River project and the protests raised by Maoris and other New Zealand interests has been described as a “battle…by Mount Doom”, alluding to the fact that the geothermal project site is close to Mount Ruapehu, one of the sites used to depict Mount Doom in LOTR (Cieply and Barnes 2012; Bourke 2012). Once again, the Maoris, as indigenous New Zealanders, are at the forefront of the opposition to these transformations of the landscape. Just as Peter Jackson’s attempt to film on location at Mount Ngauruhoe for The Hobbit garnered opposition by the Maoris because they hold that site to be sacred, the Mighty River Mount Ruapehu project is also garnering opposition from Maoris because they see this as an attempt to seize and control “taonga”–natural treasures and resources like waterways (Bourke 2012). Such protests by the Maoris, and also by other New Zealand groups, are concrete instantiations of what 280 R.B.H. Goh

Fordyce (2013) call the “misrecognition” of New Zealand’s land by New Zealanders, a process which has been catalysed by the fantasy semiotics and economy of films like LOTR. Misrecognition is not merely the failure to identify oneself and one’s own engagement with the land in film and other fictional texts; as the fantasy effect on New Zealand shows, misrecognition is also a wider cultural politics which dislocates older significations of land and people by juxtaposing them with plausible alternative ones. The plausibility of fantasy significations lies precisely in their (ir)realism, their suggestion of their coexistence with rather than replacement of “real” (geo-physical or historically- precedent) meanings. That this coexistence ultimately creates a duality that challenges and undermines historical claims, affective attachments and local engagements with the land is becoming evident from nationalist objections to the fantasy effect on New Zealand, particularly on the part of indigenous New Zealanders.

Conclusion: fantasy culture, imaginative geographies and imaginative transnationalism LOTR tourism, as a focal point of the “fantasy” quality of New Zealand’s creative industries and tourism, indicates the way in which global tourism is shifting to new imaginative conceptions of space in which elements of “fantasy and entertainment” are structured as total or immersive experiences (Shaw and Williams 2004, 244). Imaginative conceptions of space, and their projection onto physical landscapes, are by no means new, and evident even in classical geographical mappings, and there has been a wide range of such manifestations of fantasy spaces, including cartographic embellishments, fictional narratives of journeys, pictorial and narrative constructions of sites like the American West, fully-realised replicas of fantasy places such as Disneyland, pilgrimages to project inner spiritual meanings onto physical landscapes, and so on (Hawthorn 1991; Mansvelt 2005; Hoelscher 2008; Roeller 2010). However, the extent and symbolic power of imaginative geographies in the contemporary world is certainly on the rise, no longer contrasted pejoratively with “real” or “factual” spaces, but legitimised as alternative perceptions and powerful consumption experiences and economies. New Zealand’s example is particularly instructive, in being a small nation hitherto at the margins of global touristic and cultural flows, which has heartily embraced fantasy signs, discourses and economies as best embodied in the LOTR franchise. Yet LOTR is far from being a unique phenomenon, as the proliferating Hobbit sequence, James Cameron’s Avatar and its planned sequels and other major fantasy productions indicate. Nor is this a combination of factors unique to New Zealand: HBO’s hugely popular Game of Thrones television series, based on best-selling author George R. R. Martin’s novels, is already spawning a fantasy tourism industry in Iceland, another small and remote nation whose cultural production is likely to be heavily impacted by fantasy’s (ir)realist discourses. The irony of course is that it is precisely the smaller and more culturally and economically vulnerable countries of the world that are most likely to become the sites for such film and television projects, but that are also much less well-equipped to withstand the powerful cultural and economic hegemonies unleashed in their wake. The growing popularity of fantasy texts, and the increasingly transnational nature of cultural, economic and human flows, are likely to combine to impose other such imaginative transformations of small nations in the years to come. Social Semiotics 281

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