Letterboxd logging and an endless watchlist: Do you ever feel guilty for not watching enough movies?
When I first downloaded Letterboxd about six years ago, I was delighted to find an app that suited my obsessive list-making and media-tracking needs.
Since the age of around 14, I’d got into the habit of writing lists of movies I wanted to watch or films that I had recently seen (often with little reviews and star ratings by the side), alongside lists of books I’d read and albums I’d listened to. I’ve always been that way inclined – my notes app full of every possible list, from TV shows to every band I’ve ever seen – so when Letterboxd arrived in my life, I was thrilled to input every movie I could ever remember watching onto my profile (clearly I had nothing better to do in my first year of uni), using an extensive archive of lists I’d composed over the years.
Then came the watchlist section, which became increasingly filled with classics I was embarrassed I hadn’t yet seen or obscure foreign movies I didn’t want to forget. Some of these films, practically undiscoverable unless you trawl the internet for a subtitle-less link, remain sitting in my watchlist, a certain shame looming over me for neglecting them – it’s as if they have feelings, and when I look at my row of Blu-Rays, I feel sorry for the titles I still haven’t taken out of the shrink-wrap. Am I insane?
As Letterboxd started to become popular and more and more friends added me on it, it morphed into a real social media platform where your every watch – and star rating – is open to scrutiny, and while that sounds fun, and it sometimes is, I often find myself tailoring what I watch in fear of people judging my tastes. What if someone saw me log the 2007 musical Hairspray, missing the fact that a few hours before, I’d watched Kenneth Anger’s short film Invocation of My Demon Brother?
It really shouldn’t matter, I mean, it’s surely rather pretentious to care about that kind of thing? But here I am, fretting that people are going to judge me for only recently logging It’s a Wonderful Life as a first-time watch, or for logging Scream for the fourth time in two years.
The thing is, Letterboxd has turned film-watching into a more public arena, where you can easily see which of your friends have been watching the most films and who has been slacking. To most people, the number of movies they watch a year probably doesn’t matter all that much, but if you’re as neurotically obsessed with films as me, then perhaps you’ll relate to the wave of guilt you experience when you realise you haven’t watched a film in a week.
Am I pathetic, or do I just really love films? Both can be true. There are so many films I want to watch, and knowing that I probably haven’t stumbled across a movie I’d absolutely adore – one that might change my life – pains me far more often than I’d like to admit. But of course, the real world never stops, and sometimes I have to attend to other matters, see friends and family, go to gigs, or simply switch off a screen and try and tackle this same issue I have with books, too.
While some of my Letterboxd friends have tallied up over 100 films this year already (no seriously, and it’s only February), I’ve come to realise that there is a fine line between being a cinephile and being a bit of a loser who forgoes social events to sit in a dark room- you have to find a balance, and guess what?… the world won’t stop spinning if you go a whole month without watching a film, your watchlist will always be there, just a few clicks away.
In an ideal world, I’d stop tracking what I read and what I watch, but I love statistics. I love getting my Letterboxd ‘Year in Review’ as I do my Spotify Wrapped and my Storygraph reading statistics, full of graphs and charts showing my most loved genres and artists. Letterboxd has a monopoly over film lovers these days, and it’s not going to go away anytime soon, but one thing we must all remember is this: no one is intensely scrutinising what you’re watching, unless you’ve a particularly nosey ex. And no one is going to crucify you for not watching many films in a month, or even a year. Life sometimes just gets in the way.
Seriously, though, I have friends who have found out that their ex has a new girlfriend just through Letterboxd alone, matching up profile activity and tags pages. The app is so much more than just a place to log what you’ve watched. Anyway, that’s not my main point – what is important is to discover new films and recommend your pals movies you think they’d like. Nothing has to be a competition over who has watched the most, who has a more impressive top four favourites, and who has left the wittiest reviews.
Films are just films; they are pieces of art meant to be experienced and indulged in – for enjoyment, to teach us something about life, or to teach us something about ourselves. I will always advocate for watching as many films as you can, but cinema should never turn into something associated with competition or social media clout. Letterboxd has certainly tainted that, but will I open it up the moment the credits roll on a film? Of course.
