The Art Machine, on Netflix

Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer and Tom Sturridge as Morpheus in Netflix's Sandman

I can’t binge-watch TV shows online like some people can, so it took me an entire week to watch Netflix’s new blockbuster Sandman adaptation. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I needed to sit with each episode and ruminate over it, like a poem. Like art. Because that’s what it was, with its intricate sets, elaborate costumes, and lush Pre-Raphaelite background vistas: it was self-consciously art.

Like Stranger Things 4, which I also required longer than average to watch, Sandman is notable for its massive, sweeping visual design. Whenever Morpheus, the Dream of the Endless, walks through his Borges-inspired library, or stands on the beach outside his palace to survey his domain, the artistic accomplishments of the landscape behind them is awe-inspiring. Same with Vecna moving through the Upside-Down: it’s plain visual beauty.

For a while.

After the third or fourth scene on that same dreamland beach, I started to notice something: all the action took place very close to the camera. Despite the huge, sweeping vistas behind them, Morpheus and his major-domo, Lucienne, stayed very front-and-center. While the Dreaming moved with the wobbly, fractal energy of human dreamscapes behind them, the principal characters never strayed more than a few feet apart— or a few feet from the camera.

Same with Vecna’s Upside-Down. When Steve’s intrepid heroes wander through immense Dali-inspired forests and dry lakebeds, they’re never pictured more than a few feet apart. In the season’s final, feature-length episode, young Henry Creel, the future Vecna, stands on a hillock in the foreground, constructing the Mind Flayer in the background from raw material and his own will. Both shows have massive landscapes, with which the characters scarcely interact.

The longer I watch, the more conscious I become of actors performing on sound stages, against featureless backdrops, expecting landscapes to be matted in later with chromakey separation. Our screen image presents awe-inspiring landscapes, but eventually, I start noticing that characters don’t look at anything specific in them. They simply gaze into the middle distance, because they’re actually in a twenty-foot room with a greenscreen backdrop.

Matthew Modine and Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things 4

Anybody who’s been to the Rocky Mountains, or Oregon’s Pacific Coast, knows the visceral emotional reaction which the show creators want to recreate. Standing away from humankind’s built environment and watching, in silent awe, the grandeur of creation, can change us. Not for nothing did Buddhist monks, Taoist mendicants, or Christian Desert Fathers seek divinity and enlightenment in wild places, separate from civilization.

But anybody who’s actually visited these wild places knows the vast sweep isn’t the grandeur. It’s also the climate and breezes, the grass or sand between one’s toes, and even the unglamorous parts, like mosquitoes and sand fleas. Vast grandeur is built from thousands of individual moments, countless sensory experiences. It isn’t unitary, and just as important for digital landscape artists, it isn’t physically separated from us individually.

Consider other famous landscapes from genre fiction. Did Tatooine, Middle Earth, or Planet Vulcan appear less real because they were shot in, respectively, Tunisia, New Zealand, or Utah? I’d say not. Furthermore, actors could interact with the space: Luke Skywalker could drive his landspeeder through streets that actually existed. The Fellowship could ascend mountains and sail rivers in the middle, not the foreground, of the shot.

If I’m being completely fair, the creative teams behind these series knew that, too. Though I criticized shots of Morpheus’ library, which, in long angles, are composited together to look even more vast, close-in shots were done at Lincoln’s Inn Library, London. Indeed, nearly all city scenes (even those nominally in America) were shot in London, mainly Canary Wharf. Real places allow actors to interact with the space.

Throughout both Sandman and Stranger Things 4, the digitally composited shots I’m complaining about were relatively rare, and probably expensive. Even locations like Vecna’s exploded house, which could only be completed on a soundstage, were large enough to move around in. Only a small minority of establishing or payoff shots, intended to make the audience reel back and mutter “Woah,” were digitally composited in this way.

However, enough such shots exist that, at least for me, the awe and grandeur wore thin. The longer these shots continued, the more conscious I became of the process, slipping outside the moment. In actual dreams, only the lucky or skilled few ever achieve sufficient awareness to realize they aren’t real. In digital landscapes, though, the observant quickly become aware of the design. And soon, like a drug, we become immune to it.