The Projector #12: I See A Darkness (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Last night, a fight broke out during the Emmys broadcast. It didn’t happen at the Emmys, which seemed to have gone pretty smoothly. It happened on Twitter between our own Scott Tobias and our good friend Noel Murray. The subject of the fight: Ozark, the Emmy-winning Netflix crime series. The fight wasn’t directly about the quality of the show, but its look. And it wasn’t even a new fight. It’s one Scott and Noel have had before and will likely have again. But this round got started with a tweet from Noel reading, “If Ozark continues to do well at the Emmys, maybe Netflix will spring for a second light bulb.” Scott followed with a tweet reading: “What's crazy about the Ozark-is-dark crowd is how blithely we accept the plastic-y brightness of 95% of all digital movies and TV shows. Go enjoy Motherless Brooklyn. It's like motion-smoothing noir.” (It wasn’t written as reply to Noel, but can it be called a sub-tweet if you know the person you’re talking about is reading.)

Then it got ugly (but not really). 

Noel: We've had this argument many times in person, but to reiterate: When I say "properly lit" I do not mean "turn on all the lights." There's a middle ground! You can evoke darkness without just making everything harder to see!

Scott: To paraphrase The Big Lebowski: At least it has an ethos. People never say anything about how most shows look because what is there to say? At least form and content combine into some sort of aesthetic here. (One that, again, I enjoy.)

Noel: I believe this is the point in our recurring conversation where I point out yet again that these TV cinematographers are not Gordon Willis (and that not everything he shot was dim)

And so on. It essentially ended in an agreement to disagree, but it raised some compelling points along the way, about television and film. Our other friend Matthew Dessem chimed in with this, which may be the most salient point: “Gordon Willis was shooting film to be projected in theaters! Digital video that's getting fed into a cable company's compression algorithm and dumped to millions of uncalibrated LED screens should have a margin of error on the lighting.”

TV and, increasingly, movies have to take in account how a movie gets watched, and that’s changed over the years. With movies, it's easy to get sentimental about 35mm projection. I can recall many bad experiences watching films projected on film. (Visible boom mics because of incorrect masking, house lights left on for entire movies, etc.) But the ideal remained the same: a skilled projector would make sure a film was shown in optimal circumstances. That’s changed with the coming of digital projection, and digital cameras. The images we see and the way we look at them has undergone some profound shifts, and there’s arguments to be made for both the old and new ways of doing things. (Unless you’re Scott.) For the best distillation of the issue, I recommend the Keanu Reeves-hosted and produced documentary Side By Side, which is available on a variety of streaming services.

It’s also important to think, as studios do, about how the films will be watched, which is increasingly via barely supervised digital projections and then on HDTVs that remain on factory settings. There are many reasons for the broad appeal of the MCU movies including a house look that emphasizes bright colors and flat lighting. (Though some branches of the MCU get a little more daring than others.) And modern TVs, for all their wonders, still have limitations, as do cable networks and streaming platforms. When Twin Peaks: The Return began airing, I watched it both via DirecTV and Showtime’s streaming platform and thought to myself, “I can’t wait to watch this on Blu-ray so I can see what it’s supposed to look like.” When controversy erupted over the dark look of Game of Thrones’s “The Long Night” episode, defenses included the insistence that most viewers didn’t have their TVs set correctly. I’m pretty fussy about such matters, and a lot of it looked like, well, a long night to me.

One solution has been the introduction of a “Filmmaker Mode” on new TVs, which turns off the dread motion-smoothing and adjusts brightness levels to settings preferred by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Ryan Coogler and others. But will this solve every problem? Probably not. Would Ozark still look too dark to Noel and just fine to Scott on the most finely calibrated television in the world? At a certain point, it becomes a matter of taste, and some feel more comfortable in the dark than others.

Updates: Look for our TIFF recap episode later this week. It’s a little late, but it will be worth the wait and we’ve got some more fun bonus episodes up ahead. Are you enjoying them? Would you like more one-off reviews, more TV coverage, more of something else? Let us know in the comments.

Some suggested reading:

• If you want some background reading for our Hustlers episodes, here’s the original New York Magazine piece that inspired it. And here’s our friend Rachel Handler talking to director Lorene Scafario and others about the making of the film.

• Rachel also had a fun piece in Vulture demanding that Liv Tyler be sent into space (because the movies keep leaving her behind on Earth).

• For The Ringer, Keith Phipps wrote about the history of movies inspired by First Blood to re-fight the Vietnam War.

Bilge Ebiri had a long talk with Antonio Banderas in Vulture. 

Vikram Murthi did the same with Steven Soderbergh for Filmmaker.

In the Washington Post, Scott Tobias spoke to Scott Aukerman about making Between Two Ferns: The Movie

At ScreenCrush Matt Singer makes an argument for the “bad” Terminator sequels.

And at Fishnet Cinema, Jourdain Searles unpacks the racial and sexual politics of Save the Last Dance.