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Priamo Gregory
Last week I saw M3GAN, the new horror-comedy starring Allison Williams and a robot-doll in a blond wig. I liked it enough. The doll character is genuinely well-done\u2014a seemingly hard-to-nail mix of creepy and campy\u2014but I walked out of the theater with a vaguely empty feeling. I couldn\u2019t quite place it until I started talking with my friends about where the movie was set, and I realized I had no idea. One answer is somewhere in Silicon Valley, given its bald critique of big tech. It didn\u2019t actually feel like Silicon Valley, though. It didn\u2019t feel like anywhere at all. (Update: I\u2019ve been informed it\u2019s set in Seattle, although it didn\u2019t feel like there either.) Every backdrop was generic and crisp: the scrubbed tech-compound where Gemma (Allison Williams) works; the bland, Wayfair-decorated house she lives in; the clean, non-specific streets she drives on. I thought little of this while watching. The movie looked expensive and professional, or at least had the hallmarks of those things: glossy, filtered, smooth. Only after it ended did it occur to me that it seemed, like so many other contemporary movies and shows, to exist in a phony parallel universe we\u2019ve come to accept as relevant to our own.
To be clear, this isn\u2019t about whether the movie was \u201Crealistic.\u201D Movies with absurd, surreal, or fantastical plots can still communicate something honest and true. It\u2019s actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def. This applies to prestige television, too. There are more green screens and sound stages, more CGI, more fixing-it-in-post. As these production tools have gotten slicker and cheaper and thus more widely abused, it\u2019s not that everything looks obviously shitty or too good to feel true, it\u2019s actually that most things look mid in the exact same way. The ubiquity of the look is making it harder to spot, and the overall result is weightless and uncanny. An endless stream of glossy vehicles that are easy to watch and easier to forget. I call it the \u201CNetflix shine,\u201D inspired by one of the worst offenders, although some reading on the topic revealed others call it (more boringly) the \u201CNetflix look.\u201D
In a 2022 Vice piece called \u201CWhy Does Everything on Netflix Look Like That,\u201D writer Gita Jackson describes the Netflix look as unusually bright and colorful, or too dark, the characters lit inexplicably by neon lights, everything shot at a medium close-up. Jackson discovered this aesthetic monotony is in part due to the fact that Netflix requires the same \u201Ctechnical specifications from all its productions.\u201D This is of course an economic choice: more consistency = less risk. They\u2019ve also structured their budgets to favor pre-production costs like securing top talent. So despite the fact that their budgets are high, they\u2019re spending it all on what is essentially marketing, pulling resources away from things like design and location. This style-over-substance approach is felt in most things Netflix makes, and it\u2019s being replicated across the industry. (For more proof of concept, Rachel Syme\u2019s recent New Yorker profile of Netflix Global Head of Television Bela Bajaria is perfectly tuned and genuinely chilling. I\u2019m still thinking about her \u201CArt is Truth\u201D blazer and lack of jet lag despite constant world travel. She\u2019s a walking metaphor.)
I\u2019m not a film buff, so I write this from a layman\u2019s perspective. But every time I watch something made before 2000, it looks so beautiful to me\u2014not otherworldly or majestic, but beautiful in the way the world around me is beautiful. And I don\u2019t think I\u2019m just being nostalgic. Consider these two popular rom-com movies stills: The first from When Harry Met Sally, shot on film in 1989, the second from Moonshot, shot digitally in 2022.
The latter is more polished and \u201Cperfect,\u201D but to what effect? It looks strange, surreal, both dim and bright at the same time. Everything is inexplicably blue or yellow, and glows like it\u2019s been FaceTuned. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, meanwhile, are sitting in a downtown New York deli that actually exists. The image is a little grainy, the lighting falling somewhere in the normal daytime range, and they look like regular human beings. The table\u2019s lopsided, the kitchen\u2019s bent out of shape\u2014the charm is earned. Today the restaurant might be built on a sound stage, or shot in front of a green screen, the appearance of daylight added in post-production. They could make it look convincing and moody, but it would lack character. It would feel somehow outside the world we inhabit every day, because it would be.
\u201CEveryone is lit perfectly and filmed digitally on raw and tweaked to perfection. It makes everything have a fake feeling to it. Commercials use the same cameras and color correction so everything looks the same. Every shot looks like it could be used in a stock photo and it looks completely soulless. No film grain, no shadows on faces, and no wide shots. I have a theory that going from tungsten to LED lighting added to this as well. Tungsten allows for more accurate color in camera but LEDs are cheaper, cooler, and more convenient. So the solution is to film on a nice digital camera and fix the color in post. However, this makes for less creativity on set and less use of shadows. Green screens make it worse as they also require flatter lighting to work. Marvel films are very obviously mostly made in post and they all look very flat and not real. Even shitty low-budget 90's comedies look better and I think this can be attributed to the lighting.\u201D
Another user mentioned that shooting on film required a level of forethought, planning, and patience that digital simply doesn\u2019t. Similar to the predicament brought on by smartphone cameras and our now-endless photo rolls, the result is more, sure, and at higher fidelity, but not necessarily better. A photo today has never been worth less. I\u2019ve long believed that constraints can improve creative work. But today\u2019s shrinking production budgets, paired with the limitlessness of computer technology, aren\u2019t inspiring scrappiness. They\u2019re inspiring laziness. It\u2019s too easy to fix things in post. Why wait around all day for the light to be just right when you can make it look half as good in Final Cut Pro for half the price? There\u2019s an expansive possibility to digitization that defies the logic of constraint.
That the film and TV industry is obsessed with making as much money as possible isn\u2019t a surprise. But as with any cost-cutting strategy, the approach is necessarily an expression of priorities. What\u2019s worth the trouble? What isn\u2019t? Looking at what studios are and aren\u2019t willing to spend on today paints a pretty unflattering (if predictable) picture of modern values. And what\u2019s interesting is how recognizable those values are across other pillars of culture. To name a few: the idea that imperfection is inhibitive to beauty; an over-emphasis on growth, speed, ease, and innovation; a cynical over-reliance on marketing; a lack of interest in locality and place; the funneling of resources to the top; the focus on content over form, entertainment over art. I could be talking about anything here\u2014the beauty and cosmetics industry, tech, corporate America, manufacturing, social media, politics, labor disputes.
I\u2019m not saying the proliferation of shitty-looking shows and movies will bring about our cultural downfall, only that they express, in a satisfyingly literal way, a specific wrong-think that\u2019s pervading our off-screen lives, too. Most usefully, their hollowness offers, by way of counter-example, a key to what does feel meaningful: texture, substance, imperfection, slowing down, taking the scenic route, natural light, places you can touch, making more considered creative choices, making less. There\u2019s a certain momentum to the mid right now, but there are other ways forward, if we\u2019re willing to indulge them.
I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)
Given our discussion in the What is Cloud Computing? chapter, you might expect Netflix to serve video using AWS. Press play in a Netflix application and video stored in S3 would be streamed from S3, over the internet, directly to your device.
Another relevant factoid is Netflix is subscription based. Members pay Netflix monthly and can cancel at any time. When you press play to chill on Netflix, it had better work. Unhappy members unsubscribe.
The client is the user interface on any device used to browse and play Netflix videos. It could be an app on your iPhone, a website on your desktop computer, or even an app on your Smart TV. Netflix controls each and every client for each and every device.
Everything that happens before you hit play happens in the backend, which runs in AWS. That includes things like preparing all new incoming video and handling requests from all apps, websites, TVs, and other devices.
In 2007 Netflix introduced their streaming video-on-demand service that allowed subscribers to stream television series and films via the Netflix website on personal computers, or the Netflix software on a variety of supported platforms, including smartphones and tablets, digital media players, video game consoles, and smart TVs.
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