✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨

“Letter-boxing” is when you put black bars on the side of a movie so that it can be centered properly on a television. But when you google “letterbox,” the first thing that comes up is the app. That’s reason enough to dislike Letterboxd. The film industry is already psychically ravaged; do we really need literally uprank cinematic insight from people terminally addicted to online attention over actual industry terminology?

In recent years, Twitter’s crash-out has inflicted its fleeing users upon the greater internet like shrapnel to worm into whatever remaining platform will allow them to post banal <100 word observations about being horny and stupid. And Letterboxd, “the social network for film lovers,” has opened its arms to these stateless posters, welcoming them to retell the same nine jokes in their reviews and pages-long minutiae about their personal star rating system.

I hate Letterboxd. I hate that there’s an app that makes Jeff Bezos’s Goodreads seem respectable. I hate that when I’m at the theater and the credits have just started to roll, the people next to me already have their phones on maximum brightness as they try to decide if Companion deserves an extra half a star because of a “cunty headband.” I hate that celebrities now roll out a PR-approved spiel about their “four favorite movies” on every red carpet, and it’s only four because four thumbnails are what’s visible on a phone screen. I hate that our era of post-post-post irony reduces every single project to the most obvious Cro-Magnon meme, and I hate that people who could be writing the sick ass movie blogs I came of age reading are instead handing over their insight and their data over to some obviously sinister New Zealander web designers.

Letterboxd was valued at $50 million when it was sold in 2023 because of a user base that supplied terabytes of information about how, where, and when it spends hours of their free time. Don’t y’all want privacy? Don’t you have interests outside of needing to constantly perform your rabid consumption of media to an imagined micro-audience and building yourself a tomb of online proof that you once existed, like a mad pharaoh terrified of your obsolescence? You are going to die whether or not your 14 followers heart your “why that monkey looking kind of thiqq” review on whichever CGI ape movie is currently in theaters.

I’m starting to think there are no number of studies or racist billionaires that will convince people to get off of social media. People knew smoking was bad for them and kept doing it, but at least cigarettes look cool and gave people an excuse to talk to each other. Letterboxd launched in 2013; that same year there was a Google spike for “loneliness.” I’m not saying Letterboxd caused the male loneliness epidemic, but I am asking if we need to outsource one of the last socially-approved interactions with strangers — asking someone what they thought of a movie — to an app.

Normally I wouldn’t lie awake at night because of people being dumb online but, like the black mold that has left my closet and drifted onto my ceiling, Letterboxdification has crept off the app and into the film world. Film studios have started offering screenings for Letterboxd “power users” because they realized that influencers have never read Roger Ebert’s rules for critics and will shill for a movie if they get a candle and dad cap out of it. It’s Letterboxd influencers who are now securing press badges at film festivals, pushing out critics who wasted precious time learning film history when they should have been voting on making lists of movies with “coquette vibes.” I give it a year before Letterboxd has an AI scandal and a studio is accused of using bots to artificially inflate their reviews. It will be front page news on four outlets before Charli XCX goes viral for sharing her Letterboxd Wrapped.

Because if you need a surer sign that the app is washed, consider that now actual celebrities are on it, a marketing ploy even more obvious than when they all pretended they bought NFTs to “democratize art ownership.” Pop stars don’t actually want to read your thoughts about the slippery physicality of Edward Norton’s performance in Rounders: they’re on there because it will guarantee that a close-read of their last twenty-five watches will be the most shared article of the day on Vulture.

“But I have fun on it.” Congratulations on turning any opportunity for an emotional response to an artistic experience into a tongue-slobbering, Trainspotting-style pursuit of dopamine. Every time you log the same movie with the same eerie simultaneous timing as your situationship, I wish you’d just break up for good.

—Pauline Bail

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