Social media and the modern fascination with Letterboxd
Only slightly nervous about looking like a lanky, lonesome prat, I’d recently attended a club night on a solitary outing. However, whatever anxiety had resided within me as I approached the queue that night diminished rapidly throughout the evening as I met a swathe of lovely folks, only some of whom had eyes more expansive than the English Channel. One thing that struck me, though, was that I’d discussed the cinema social media platform Letterboxd with many of my new trance-loving compatriots.
Gone are the days, it seems, of swapping Instagram usernames; instead, nowadays, the thing to do is to share one’s four favourite movies of all time per the guidance of Letterboxd. The cinematic medium is at an all-time high, according to that night at Corsica, and Letterboxd enables its users to consult the many brilliant works of film from eras gone by and the modern age.
Whipping our phones out in the smoking area, my fellow jaw-swinging dancers and I (primarily sober) shared our favourite movies with one another: Claire Denis’ Beau Travail for Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life for Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break – at least someone had a non-pretentious top choice. Someone had leant over me and asked, “Is that Letterboxd?” with a smile, proving that the platform has spread far and wide.
The fascination with Letterboxd seems to have transcended the public realm, too, for at each red carpet event in the film industry, actors and directors seem to be utterly delighted at being asked their favourite movies, as opposed to the half-arsed, faked responses to the usual questions by the press, say the notably dreaded, “Who are you wearing?”.
By contrast, there’s a genuine smile on the face of the cinema world’s biggest stars as they reveal their most treasured works of film. But what is it about Letterboxd that makes it so alluring? Well, for starters, there seems to be a lack of pretension about the platform whereby users can employ it to whatever degree they feel, whether writing in-depth reviews, outrightly ironic and daft ones, or just keeping track of the films they have watched or those that they would like to in the future.
Perhaps there’s also a frustration with the endless cycle of more traditional social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, where the content rolls by so quickly that there’s barely any time to consider it, let alone discuss it. Letterboxd, on the other hand, is bespoke and niche, and it feels like it has been made solely with cinephiles in mind – providing them with the perfect way to find new movies to watch without having to go through the laborious process of searching through Netflix and Prime Video homepages.
In that light, Letterboxd is the perfect antidote to the distractive contemporary nature of the online world, merely serving as a guide to something far better than could ever be achieved by mindlessly scrolling: engaging in one of the countless works of masterly cinema that have been released over the last 100 years.
It’s plain to see that Letterboxd has captured the hearts and attention of social media users and cinema fans alike, and it’s been a refreshing experience to have it result in real-life interactions about the medium of cinema itself. Letterboxd is going nowhere, having taken over from Rotten Tomatoes ten times over, and the future looks bright for the platform, as does the love for the film medium past and present.
