ABSTRACT
An interest in fantasy cinema has long been a pretty minority pursuit, looked upon with a degree of condescension. After all, are not such fi lms, and their audiences, “childlike,” simplistic, and not much up to exploring “reality”? The astonishing success of The Lord of the Rings-from potential company-buster, to must-see trilogy generating nine Oscars, and a multibillion dollar global franchise-for a while moved the axis of amusement. This was among the many reasons why in 2003-4 we mounted the largestto-date attempt to study audience responses to a fi lm. With a research base in twenty countries, and operating in fourteen languages, the international Lord of the Rings audience research project set out to explore the meaning
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and signifi cance of fi lm fantasy in the lives of different kinds of viewers around the world. Oddly, our most important fi ndings may not have been directly about “fantasy” per se.1 But it is what I focus on in this chapter-in the teeth, as it were, of other traditions of talk about fantasy cinema which have long had a tendency to “know in advance” what is involved in embracing this kind of fi lm. Using Peter Jackson’s fi lms as my case-study, I want to broach the question: how do people go about being audiences for a fi lm that they regard as “fantasy”?
