I really like tracking things. I use websites to maintain a log of the music I listen to, the books I read, the films I watch, the number of keyboard keys I press, and the restaurants I eat at. I maintain a daily journal and a monthly log summing it all up.
Some of these tools also encourage you to interact with other users of the tool. To me, it’s certainly interesting to see what my friends have been up to, but that’s not really the primary reason why I do all of this; it’s more to be constantly creating time capsules for myself, and to also help set up a system to know what I want to interact with next, which these platforms all also support to varying degrees.
I’ve been a fan of Demi Adejuyigbe’s comedy videos for a while, but I serendipitously stumbled across one of his Letterboxd reviews and was like: oh, cool, it’s Demi Adejuyigbe, I should follow him. Like his videos, his reviews are precise, clever, and laugh-out-loud funny.
A lot of these websites encourage you to rate things as you log them. Letterboxd, like other websites, gives you the ubiquitous “five star” system, with half-star increments. Each person’s approach to rating their entertainment ends up being slightly different, but these roughly end up corresponding to how much you like a thing.
I really admire the way Demi approaches his ratings though — on Letterboxd, he will:
- mark films as seen, sometimes leaving reviews,
- if he liked it, mark it as liked,
- if he really liked it, give it a 4.5 or 5 star rating,
and that’s it. No ratings below 4.5 stars.
In his own words, from a 2021 interview (emphasis mine):
[…] it’s so loaded to rate a movie publicly and then have people feel like “It should be higher! It should be lower!” And then also sort of think about, like, if I have to meet with someone who worked on this movie or like a company that made this, and just get all in my head about it.
And I was just like, I don’t want to do this. And also, sometimes it’s fun to just write a joke about a movie and not have it feel like “Oh, he’s writing that joke, because he didn’t like it. He doesn’t want to say that.”
So I just cleared all of my star ratings aside from anything that was four and a half or higher. Which is just my way of being like, I need you guys to know that I really, really loved this movie. And everything else, I’m like, I don’t care. I like it or I don’t like it. It’s a binary system.
And even there are some movies that I don’t have as likes that I still am like, it’s really good. It just didn’t hit me.
And I just feel like it was helpful for me in making it clear that I not using Letterboxd more for the front facing rating aspect of it as much as I am as a journal for myself to just be like, here’s a movie I saw. Here’s kind of what I vaguely thought about it or what I care to say about it.
[…] and it just also makes me feel a lot less pressured to say the right thing about a movie. Being like, people will interact with it no matter what. So I just don’t have to worry about the hassle of people taking it too seriously, or whatever.
I’ve decided to adopt this habit this month, though I think I’ll tweak it a bit. Not every platform is as fully-featured as Letterboxd — in addition to star ratings, they also have the ability to mark a film with a “like.” I’ll likely continue to just skip the “like” button entirely, and continue to mark books and films as read or seen, and only applying 4.5 or five star ratings.
I think this will more-closely align with the way I want to interact with the world: I want to share positive opinions, but not spread negativity; I want to be able to look back on media in the aggregate, but I feel like, once I’m reminded of a particular book or film, I’ll still remember how much of a stinker it was without having to announce that to the world, too.
