In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Frodo Baggins travels through the Dead Marshes on his way to fulfill his quest: to destroy a very powerful ring. As Frodo plods along, sidestepping eerie flames that burn on the ground, he stares into pools of murky water. The faces of the dead, killed in a long-past battle, gaze back. Frodo falls in and the ghostly specters reach to claim him.
The Two Towers is hardly an outlier in its negative portrayal of wetlands, a new study finds. Many movies make wetlands into obstacles filled with danger and death. That mirrors how many people in Europe and North America thought of wetlands prior to the environmental movement, which began in the late 1800s.
“Wetlands used to be considered these nasty places that were difficult to control. And not only difficult to control, but were considered useless,” says Jack Zinnen, a plant ecologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Dead Marshes is an “excellent example,” he says, of how these historic tropes show up on screen.
As Zinnen kept noticing dismal swamp scenes, he wondered if he could collect data and draw trends about how these environments appear in movies. He and his colleagues searched movie plot summaries for terms related to wetlands. They rounded up 163 films from 1980 and later. The researchers watched the films, taking note of themes, imagery, biodiversity and the wetlands’ role in the stories. They shared their results September 11 in Wetlands.
Wetlands tend to present a trial for the film’s main character, the team found. “They are an obstacle. They are something that is literally pulling them down and trying to kill them or sink them,” Zinnen says. For example, in The NeverEnding Story, the Swamps of Sadness swallow anyone who succumbs to despair — which is all too easy, given the dark, dank nature of the place. Wetlands also often hide villains. They may provide a place for a fight or chase…
Read the full article here
