Letterboxd: Log or It Didn’t Happen
Goodreads for film might be a way to describe Letterboxd. Launched in 2011 by Auckland natives Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, Letterboxd is a social media platform created to log and review films. You can log a film you’ve watched by rating it out of five stars, leaving a review, or saving it on a watchlist for later. Just like any other social media platform, the app allows you to follow your friends and favorite their content on the app, including their reviews or watchlists. While Instagram or Twitter mainly consist of short interactions through likes or replies, reviews on Letterboxd range from tweet-like reviews to fully cited five paragraph essays. From its lack of images and other visual content, the platform uniquely allows you to document your opinions in a format similar to a diary.
Beyond just exchanges of favorites and comments, Letterboxd is a place for discussion. Possibly due to its extraordinarily interactive conversational nature, as COVID-19 forced people to isolate, the app’s user base doubled in numbers. People turned to the internet to connect with other people as they lost their physical spaces to discuss films since in-person screenings were put on pause. Along with the increase of users, Letterboxd has expanded from its cinephile sphere to the general public, welcoming more than one million new users in 2020.
Perhaps one of the factors that has brought so much attention to the platform is its informality. On the app, you may find that most top rated reviews of films are comedic one liners. Some reviews may not even be reviews of the film itself but a personal account on their viewing experiences. A recent popular review of the film Dune notes, “got the 4D experience by forgetting to drink water today and watching this extremely dehydrated,” collecting over 11,000 likes. Twitter accounts such as @InsaneLetterbox compile this trend of humorous reviews, posting screenshot submissions of the bizarre reviews on the platform. Even the most popular review on the platform is telling of the jocular attitude on Letterboxd: “fifth watch: fight club is the best satirical gay romcom ever made.”
In many ways Letterboxd has unearthed a new lens for film watching. Many users no longer follow the conventions of sophisticated film critiques, boiling down their remarks to witty jokes or a couple of sentences on what stood out to them. In an interview with The New York Times, popular user Lucy May, currently sitting at almost 80,000 followers, notes this shift in reviews by calling it a “modern wave of criticism.” This shift in film criticism can be explained by its young social media proficient user base as well; 75% of its users are aged 18 to 24 years old. With seemingly little repercussions compared to status heavy social platforms, Letterboxd offers an accessible way to document opinions, without being tied to the formality of traditional film reviews.
The spike in Letterboxd users during the pandemic could also speak to the larger innate human desire to document ourselves. The trend for self documentation existed long before the internet: notable individuals would pose for a portrait, families made their own home videos, and some wrote in their diaries. Before that, ancient civilizations literally etched their history onto stones and wood. Even telling our friends funny personal anecdotes could be a way we attempt to leave some trace behind that we exist, by verbally actualizing our experiences. The need for self documentation has long been approached through different mediums; Susan Sontag taps into this in her acclaimed book On Photography, calling photographs “trophies” of evidence; Joan Didion describes her purpose as a writer to “see enough to write it down.” Though social media, including Letterboxd, has allowed us to share these documentations publicly, our human tendency to capture, whether it be an internal thought or a picture of a friend, has remained the same throughout history.
In an uncertain time where our physical interactions with others could easily be imperiled, Letterboxd provides a reliable space for conversation. Perhaps it isn’t movies that we want to talk about, but simply that we just want to hear ourselves talk.
