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.
This treemap shows attitudes of wetland portrayals in 163 films. Treemaps are similar to pie charts but in the shape of a rectangle. Here, similar colors group similar data. For example, films that depicted wetlands in a negative light throughout the movie are shown in dark purple. Those in which the depiction became negative over time are shown in light purple.J. Zinnen et al/Wetlands 2024
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 scene.
From monsters to magic, wetlands also tend to be associated with strange things or people. In the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker crash lands in a bog on the swampy planet Dagobah. There he meets odd little creatures and the mystical, mysterious Yoda, who helps Luke hone supernatural abilities. These strange characters are often those on the edges of society — like small, green, exiled Yoda. Other outsiders include outlaws, those who escaped enslavement or Indigenous people.
Most films portrayed wetlands negatively, Zinnen’s team found. At the same time, many films highlight the biodiversity of wetlands. Movies often showed animals and vegetation, and depicted how these places provided characters with resources, such as food.
But not all movies dunk on wetlands. In Shrek, the movie’s namesake ogre lives in a swamp. Shrek is isolated and literally a monster, Zinnen says. “Shrek leans into a lot of these stereotypes and tropes about wetlands,” Zinnen says. But over time, viewers see how the swamp provides refuge from a society that doesn’t accept Shrek. And (spoiler alert!), eventually the swamp becomes a home and haven for Fiona and Donkey, too.
Data Dive:
Look at the treemap. What percentage of films show wetlands as negative?
How does that compare with the number of films that show wetlands as positive?
What’s another way you could present the data in this treemap?
Look at the table. What are the four most common themes in wetland scenes?
What are some of the least common themes in wetland scenes?
What examples have you seen of wetlands in other types of media, such as TV shows, books or games? How are these wetlands portrayed?
What other environments’ portrayals might you want to study? Can you think of stereotypes about them? How would you perform such a study?
