Opinion: All seemed lost with social media. Then I found Letterboxd.

From washingtonpost.com

Fran Hoepfner is a film critic in New York City and writes the newsletter Fran Magazine.

I’ve spent time on just about every social media app on the planet: for work, for pleasure, for personal gain, for perverse curiosity.

As social media continues to expand, I’ve found the issue — with X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok — is the lack of control over what I see. My X page is inundated with posts by people I don’t follow; the replies to my posts are full of spambots, despite what the platform’s owner says. Instagram won’t stop bombarding me with ads for swimsuits. And TikTok’s algorithmic suggestions know so little about me as to prompt an identity crisis. Maybe we weren’t supposed to “connect with friends and the world around you,” as Facebook advises; just friends might have been enough. Or, rather, imagine the weary obligation of trying to talk to every attendee at a music festival, rather than just the people standing beside you as you wait for your favourite artist to take the stage.

And just as all seemed lost, I found Letterboxd.

In its FAQ, Letterboxd bills itself as “a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery. Use it as a diary to record and share your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past.” But its real omnipurpose shows up a little later: “How should I use Letterboxd?” the site asks; “However you like,” the site answers. What I like is keeping to myself and doing my own thing. And more often than not, Letterboxd allows me to be introverted on a social media app.

I’m not using it to see what other people do — I’m using it the way I did the opening pages of my journal, before I stopped keeping one. For years, I hand-wrote entries about my life, what I got up to, whom I went out with, what movies I was seeing, what I was reading, what inspired me, what drove me insane. At the start of my journals, I’d keep a running log of what movies and books I watched and wrote about. I’d begun to write a bit of freelance film criticism, and I’d been a lifelong reader, and it always made more sense to have an analogue method for keeping track of these things.

I use Letterboxd to be funny, to be astute, to troll. I exist there without rules for myself. I am consistent about neither punctuation nor grammar. Over time, Letterboxd grew to be less of a “social” media and more of an extension of self.

It can be difficult to explain to anyone outside the film community (or even within the film community) what the point of Letterboxd is. Why not simply remember the movies you watched using your brain? Or keep, as my mother has done, physical ticket stubs on your dresser? Perhaps the appeal of Letterboxd is that its usage is almost analog, a means of tracking and documenting. I can lose journals and ticket stubs, but Letterboxd keeps me tethered to pieces of myself the way Facebook once promised to. It is a museum of culture — my own wing dedicated to the development of my taste.

I can scroll back through my diary and see logs of what I was watching five years ago during a bad breakup (Claire Denis’s “Let the Sunshine In,” Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”), I can see what I was watching during the early days of the pandemic (Todd Haynes’s “Safe,” George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road”), I can see what I was watching the first month my partner and I started dating (Michael Bay’s “Pain & Gain,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Point Break”). These logs do not mean anything in isolation or out of context, but to me, they mean just about everything.

Here is the other miracle of Letterboxd: I don’t have to see anything I don’t want to see. I follow those whom I like and respect — critics, friends and strangers alike — those who have proved themselves worthy of appearing in my feed. I often disagree with the people I follow, but live and let live. Users can either turn off comments from those who don’t follow them or turn off comments completely. No one is forcing you to engage.

But you do have to engage on Letterboxd with yourself — your habits, your viewing, your preferences. We tend to think of taste as an objective measure: Does a person have good or bad taste? Taste, like all things, is built not only on the material consumed but also on the day, the weather, the company. But I grew to like what I liked whether I watched it in my bed at 2 in the morning or in a rollicking theatre audience. This cumulative build exists nowhere but my Letterboxd account, and it makes sense only to me. That a diary of mine (even if it’s just film consumption) exists openly — publicly — is an act of trust and exhibitionism, maybe. But you know what? So is a movie.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/26/letterboxd-social-media-film-introverted/