I had two separate topics in mind for this edition: going to movies by yourself (strong pro) or rewatching movies (pro).

Then I listened to the Slate Culture Gabfest a couple of weeks ago. In the bonus segment, the panelists talked with Carl Wilson about his book (19 years old now!) Let's Talk About Love, and more specifically about how the critical and cultural landscape has changed since it came out.

One word that they used caught my ear: idiosyncratic. Carl says that one classic job of a professional critic is to articulate their idiosyncratic tastes.

Which got me thinking about Letterboxd, as one does.

I love Letterboxd. I’ve had an account since 2012, and I started paying for it back in 2017.

But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with some features of the site. It bills itself as a social network, but I’ve never thought it was very good at the social networking part of the site — and that’s been a good thing. It’s most useful to me as a log, a place for me to track what I’ve seen, and when, and what I thought about movies.

“What I thought about them” brings up ratings. Ratings can be interesting, but reviews are the important thing about anyone’s response to a movie. I don’t review everything I see, but I try, and it's those logs of my thoughts that are particularly useful over time.

What does this have to do with critical idiosyncrasy? One problem with Letterboxd ratings is that people care about them. They care enough to try to make their own ratings line up with the ratings that already exist.

Public ratings are interesting. But they are also clearly subject to Campbell’s law:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

(I used to think this was Goodhart’s law in action — the one that says “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — but while I think that’s also true, Letterboxd suffers more from Campbell’s law.)

People fixate on ratings. They get mad that a movie they love is not in the Letterboxd top 500. They get mad that a movie they hate is in the top 500. They think their favorite movie is rated too low. They get caught up in trying to game their own ratings and assume other people are also rating things to make some kind of statement.

One of my favorite perennial posts: People asking why other people love or hate a movie. Which means they’re on Letterboxd, a site that includes reviews where people can explain their ratings, but they just look at the rating and pop off to Reddit to ask for other people to explain the people on Letterboxd itself.

Some of this is because a lot of popular reviews on Letterboxd are jokes or one liners, a regular topic on r/letterboxd.

Another regular topic: Fretting about rating curves. Letterboxd lets you see an overview of all the ratings you’ve given in your time on the site. Here’s mine:

Ratings are handy, but more as one piece of data. I’ve come to learn over the years that I use 3.5 stars more often than any other rating, which could be because I’m an easy grader and could also be because I don’t make a point of seeing movies that I don’t think I might like. (More evidence that I’m an easy grader: my second-most-common rating is 4 stars.)

People regularly post screenshots of their own ratings curves and ask “is my ratings curve bad?”, typically because they see more movies that they like than that they find mediocre or don’t like.

(They also post screenshots of other people’s ratings curves, where most ratings are low, and wonder why someone who “hates cinema” so much watches them at all.)

There are also regular posts from people explaining in great detail what each of their ratings means. Five stars: favorites, flawless, “stayed with me,” perfect. Three stars: slightly above average, didn’t hate but wouldn’t rewatch, etc. A lot of effort goes in to trying to turn subjective ratings into some kind of objective system. (And to be fair, a lot of people also make fun of those efforts for being pretentious.)

Paying too much attention to ratings — or rankings, or other metrics — ignores that movies are ultimately an experience that you can’t easily convert into data. An aspect ratio or number of frames is an objective measure; 3.5 stars is not, no matter how much work you put into your rubric.

Getting too caught up in the numbers feels like cinerexia, an effort to control something ineffable by turning into data, making the data more important than the experience. (Yeah, the etymology doesn’t line up, let me have my rebracketing.)

Idiosyncrasy suffers when people try to line their experience up with a rating they see as objective or desirable, rather than having the confidence to own their own taste, whatever the data ends up saying.

What I’d like from Letterboxd: The ability to make my ratings private. I’m not rating movies for anyone else; I’m rating them for me. It’s useful to see, at some point, which Hitchcock movies I’ve liked most, or my favorites from Barbara Stanwyck.

They’re still caught up in adding TV shows to the app, so I don’t see that happening soon. They may not be a fantastic social network, but they’re trying to improve that, based on whatever metrics they themselves are addicted to.

The much bigger takeaway from that episode of the Culture Gabfest: They announced that the podcast is ending after 18 years.

This is my all time favorite podcast, and while I respect them deciding to pull the plug when they were ready, I’m still at a loss about what if anything I’ll be listening to instead.

I can only handle so much Screen Drafts and Blank Check. Virtually hanging out with one group of people for 18 years, occasionally having comments or questions make their way onto the show, isn’t a relationship that a new podcast, even a great one, can quickly replicate.

Heading off in a couple hours to start my Bleak Week, which kicked off in Portland last night. I'm starting with new-to-me The Deer Hunter; last night was Irrevérsible and while I may rewatch someday, 24 years later is still too soon.

More interested in my thoughts on solo moviegoing or deciding what to rewatch? Let me know which topic you prefer — I read all my email, I'll be happy to hear from you.

James