Heritage Entropy in New Zealand: The Hobbit (2010) Protests, Film-work, and Post-colonial Cosmology

The paper examines how culturally situated worldviews survive in the technological spaces of late modernity in the context of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, two cinematic enterprises that established New Zealand as an international tourist destination. It traces the narrative threads of the literary and cinematic plots in European cosmological themes (suffering, the battle between good and evil), arguing that the production process enabled an imaginative cinematic travel by the makers of the films that drew upon culturally situated memories to rectify the wrongs of New Zealand’s colonial past. A controversy over employment rights induced by an Australian union that sparked strikes and protests against the relocation of the Hobbit shootings outside New Zealand (2010) transposed this visual celebration onto the global political plane, allowing it to inform stereotypical narratives of New Zealand’s “character” and to reiterate the country’s value as a tourist destination.