Changing lives, challenging concepts: Some findings and lessons from the Lord of the Rings project

A B S T R A C T This article presents a series of key findings from the international Lord of the Rings project, around the meanings and implications for audiences of choosing to describe the films as a „Spiritual Journey‟. Drawing on a combination of quantitative results and qualitative responses, and presenting one woman‟s responses in detail, it proffers a set of implications for the fields of film, and cultural studies. K E Y W O R D S adaptation theory, audience research, Lord of the Rings, meanings of „epic‟, spiritual experiences. I have never before had a film experience that literally changed my life and the way I look at things. This trilogy could be a religion. 1 In this article I draw upon materials generated in the course of the international Lord of the Rings audience project, to attempt two things. I seek to explore and explain a remarkable set of results which emerged from the project‟s core quali-quantitative questionnaire. Briefly, in concert with this, I point to a number of conceptual and methodological implications for the ways in which, currently, cultural studies tends to talk about texts and about audiences. This latter part is consciously provocative in scope. The 2003–4 the Lord of the Rings project was designed to tackle the following overarching questions. What is the function of film fantasy in the lives of different kinds of audiences? How is the film‟s reception affected by its simultaneous English (Tolkien‟s story), New Zealand (the film‟s locations) Table 1 What kind of story is The Lord of the Rings for you? Please choose up t