The shiny, tiny restaurant stood out against a desolate evening backdrop, like Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" painting.
Even the backdrop of the September 11th 2001 attacks cannot relieve the sensation of having read all this before.
This essentially Puritan strain in Wilson's thinking makes his characters reductive, simple silhouettes projected onto an even simpler backdrop.
Mr. Wuorinen's piece was surprisingly steady and even; its backdrop, with the sun setting magnificently behind the downtown skyline, was sometimes queasily not.
New York, or at least a fantasy version of it, was even the backdrop for Mr. Lumet's most uncharacteristic film, "The Wiz," his 1978 musical version of the "The Wizard of Oz" starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.
And all of this happens, of course, against an even larger backdrop of destruction, with which New Yorkers have recently become familiar: James LeMayne's riveting, terrifying "In the Storm," from 1992, is a first-person account of Hurricane Andrew, after which "a hundred square miles" of Florida "was blasted or simply gone".
Now Rockstar is moving into perhaps the only genre that provides an even better backdrop for those themes: the western.
Of course, everyone else ages, too... even the backdrop ages... with regular references to current events and issues.
Nearly everything now billed as world music involves some degree of crossover and packaging, even video backdrops.
Even the backdrops, designed by the McQueen production team of Joseph Bennett and Sam Gainsbury, express a foggy gloom with their gray-speckled mirrors.
