MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY FILM INQUIRER

By Reba Nelson

I have started to live my life through the number 5. It is a nice number, very square, to me the most prime of primes. I will eat a meal, rate it, get dressed, rate it, talk to a friend, rate it. As to why I’ve started doing this – it hasn’t been wholly intentional – well, I blame Letterboxd.

Letterboxd is a social media platform designed for film discussion, accessible both as a website and as an app. It lets you put films on your watchlist, log what you watch and post reviews. On it, you can follow friends or look at strangers’ profiles. Generally, as social media goes, Letterboxd is relatively well loved. It is small, with 3 million users, and it has a function in that it helps users find new movies, acting as a film diary. Like any social media, its use results in a level of performativity. I find the trend for reviews and likes follows a horseshoe revolving around sincerity. Short and pithy is good engagement-wise, but so is long, meandering and emotional. Some users have logged hundreds of reviews. User ‘Karsten’ is one of those. With 1k reviews and almost 90k followers, he is as close to an influencer as one could achieve on the app. And yet, he writes in lowercase, his reviews feel personal, he rewatched Tangled a few weeks ago. He has no real way to monetise his fame, and that’s great.

Most reviews on Letterboxd are jokes, or blindly passionate love letters. You often have to get a little more obscure to find reviews that aren’t trying to be funny, overly relatable, make some kind of The Room reference, or make use of the most visceral, dramatic and sickeningly sincere hyperbolic language possible. They do exist though, and they are really lovely. 

So, consider yourself introduced to the app. Now it’s review time! I give Letterboxd a 4 out of 5, but it’s complicated.

Letterboxd is a key example of how the media-based social media landscape has transformed from a spectacle of collecting to a spectacle of commenting. It is not enough to just have your Spotify playlist filled with the songs you love – that playlist must be curated, must be specific. If you like something, you should be able to say why. This prioritisation of specificity in media enjoyment is, I believe, somewhat related to the rising popularity of apps like Letterboxd. You no longer just put a poster up on your wall of your favourite film. Instead, you also pin it to your Letterboxd profile under the favourites section, and flag its best aspects in your review of said film. The former is somewhat vague, a value judgement that will not necessarily translate what you wish it to or be seen publicly. When using Letterboxd, there is little ambiguity regarding what you want to be seen as liking. 

Additionally, the social aspect introduces competition – you can review your friend’s favourite films, respond to their reviews, argue. I once watched a movie with a group of friends, and, when it finished, we immediately headed to log it on our Letterboxds. 3.5 stars for Nomandland – ‘a little muddled’. Instead of the cliched dating app line “What’s your Spotify?”, I now ask “What’s your Letterboxd?” It’s in vogue, I guess – or at least to me. 

Writing it down, the app sounds a little like some soulless form of taste-making, a way to avoid in-person movie discussions in favour of virtual ones. This is a valid criticism: Letterboxd is a virtual world where appreciation of art is inextricably linked with personality and self-worth. On it, consumption of media becomes conscious, becomes critical, and its use does create a sort of competitiveness surrounding movie viewing. So, does Letterboxd skew friendships, force everyone to fight amongst each other, create a king of the hill scenario where the summit is cinema literacy? And, is this a bad thing?

I watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker because some people I liked had also watched it and rated it highly. I watched Stalker because I knew it was a cinematic masterpiece, because it is well regarded, it is hard to digest. I watched Stalker because I knew I had to. I watched Stalker because I wanted to rate it on Letterboxd. When I watched Stalker, because of all those weird, competitive reasons, I found my new favourite film. I loved its winding dialogue, its ambiguity, the sparse beauty of its landscape, the control and care it displays. My conscious decision to engage with a piece of media thoughtfully, considerately and intensely led to a rewarding viewing experience. I rated it 5 stars, and told all my friends they should watch it. And honestly, maybe pathetically, I felt good hearing not many of them had already, that they were meaning to but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Why do we consume the media we do? Nowadays, not entirely by choice – I am force-fed radio, advertisements, my lectures per the Zoom University of Melbourne. I scroll through Instagram blindly, read worthless tweets. I wade through algorithms. I make lists of books I should (will) read – Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Atlas Shrugged (just kidding) – knowing that they are considered the upper echelon of media enjoyment. That they are proof of time spent wisely. As much as I think the notion of maximising my leisure time (as to be the most knowledgeable person at the party, the housemate who has read the most Russian literature, the tutorial contributor who has actually read that author’s other works) is horribly competitive and contradictory, I know I feel happiest when I engage with so-called ‘harder’ works. Works which are deliberately chosen, works I feel enthused to speak on with others. Wielding this choice is, I believe, incredibly important. Most of us are controlled by algorithms that want us to fit within the lowest common denominator. On Spotify, 90% of streams go to the top 1% of artists. At the movies, big-budget franchise films pack the seats – indie-films barely get a look-in. I hate the feeling of taste being dictated explicitly, inhumanely, indiscriminately, homogeneously. I wanna choose, and I wanna choose right. To choose continuously, on my own accord.

But, can taste even be cultivated? Should we be looking at media consumption in this way? I will acknowledge the issues of placing objective value on what is subjective, and what constitutes good has long been thought of as analogous to ‘Western’. However, I’ll maintain that taste is, on some levels, a skill. You can learn it. I train my mind to recognise connections and equate abstract ideas to larger ones. I learn of David Lynch’s obsession with transcendental meditation and understand better, and maybe enjoy more, the surreal nature of his films.

Aesthetic taste can be easily equated to the taste of our tongues. A good palate can make out the constituents of a strong flavour: it recognises and identifies complexity. Just like our palates, our aesthetic taste can be refined and sensitised to the importance of smaller parts. We all can dissect, assess, contemplate. Taste is not an inherent quality that the rich, powerful, or ‘well-bred’ are born with. It is a skill. 

It is also annoying: cultivating taste requires adopting a reflexive world-view which places choice and interaction with the present at its forefront. It requires taking things too seriously. I refuse to (re)watch bad films because they are nostalgic or funny because of how bad they are. There is too much good cinema out there to get distracted. I have found that people hate this worldview – they love watching the films of their childhood, or the Adam Sandler movies not directed by the Safdie-brothers, Noah Baumbach, or Paul Thomas Anderson. And that’s totally okay!

But me, well, I’ve reached a point in my life where I am okay with being a little annoying, a little pretentious, a little too much. I want good films and thoughtful discussion, a diary of my evolving thoughts on and desires for cinema. I want, to some extent, for social value to be seen through the prism of the media I value. Not everyone will want this. But if you do – consider downloading Letterboxd. Submit to the power of 5. Live consciously. And add me: @r33ba!

You can find Film Soc on Letterboxd too, right here.