Brooding over its surroundings like Castle Dracula, Douglas's hilltop lair — a "wood butcher's palace" containing a room "that felt like the world's greatest conversation pit" — is not so much a backdrop, more like an architectural character in its own right.
Here, sparkling, it's so much more than a backdrop.
While the presidential election campaign gets underway in Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency has produced its latest quaterly report on the country's nuclear programme, which does so much to shape the backdrop to Iranian politics - and not in a good way.
Here is a work that seeks not so much to explain the backdrop to early European imperialism as to describe for modern readers the visions and sufferings of the driving personalities who accomplished the conquest of so much of the globe in so short a time.
Venice, I imagined, must be a pretty cruel place if you are a new artist trying to make an impression against the backdrop of so much dead glory.
And so to last night's documentary The Secret Rules of Modern Living (BBC4), about those strange little sets of calculations, so compact yet so powerful, that now form the unseen backdrop to so much of our lives.
From where I sit typing, without even craning my neck, I can see a classic red barn, a weathered stone wall, the white tapering of a church steeple, and -- staring into the distance now -- the mix of high meadow and hardwood forest that serves as the gentle backdrop for so much else.
What's not to love about tailgating, getting together with family and friends for a shared communal experience, dressing up and partaking in the fashion scene, commiserating with a diverse and wide spectrum of people about the sheer excitement of competition (man and animal, with all its subplots) and so much more, all in a beautiful backdrop?
Why were adults dressing up in fantasy outfits against fantasy backdrops, and investing so much money into it?
Global warming and its undeniable impact is just a fact, a backdrop now, upon which so much is playing out.
