There is a powerful metaphor for the world of unmetabolised ancestral trauma in a scene from The Two Towers (Tolkien, 1965), the middle volume of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy which is hauntingly depicted in Peter Jackson’s film of the same name (Jackson, Osborne, Walsh, & Ordesky, 2001-2003).
Through an examination of three special issues devoted to The Lord of the Rings trilogy in Pavement, a New Zealand magazine, I propose to discuss the way in which the representation of these films suggests the complexities of the intersection between the global and the local within New Zealand culture and its consequences in particular in terms of the marginalisation of an indigenous discourse. I draw upon the work of scholars such as T. Bennett and J. Woolacott to define and examine the “reading formations” mobilized by the LOTR phenomenon within such publications as Pavement, directed towards a local NZ ‘hip’ readership.
The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting