Letterboxd Four Favorites: Why Do We Care So Much?
Letterboxd, the social media app for rating and reviewing movies (akin to Goodreads, for the uninitiated), has hit critical mass. Since its founding in 2011, and especially since the height of the pandemic in 2021, Letterboxd’s user base has swelled to over 10 million, and users have collectively logged over 1 billion films. While the site’s popularity is ultimately a net good — many community theaters and local video stores have credited Letterboxd with helping them survive after lockdowns were lifted — the format of the platform can create an invisible social anxiety. Because Letterboxd is so numbers-oriented, users may feel motivated to watch films only for the sake of logging and rating them without taking the time to digest them. Even rating systems, one could argue, unnecessarily quantify the way we engage with art. The most subtle (and pervasive) example of the way Letterboxd turns movie watching into a competition, though, is the “Four Favorites” feature.
On a Letterboxd user’s page, they have the option to select four films as their favorites. Some limit the scope of their four favorites, only selecting from what they watched in the last month or the last year, but most take it as an opportunity to distill their taste and let potential followers know what they can expect. The feature is admittedly helpful for finding like-minded movie lovers, but can also be insidious. The Letterboxd media team, who are now present at film festivals and red carpet premieres, also uses “Four Favorites” as a quick-fire interview question. Stars and directors are asked for their four favorites on the fly, opening themselves up to the ruthless judgment of anyone who may see the cleanly edited bite-size videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. These videos can help popularize little-known films and allow those who watch them to expand their palate, but the lists are usually shoddily assembled and given little thought. Like all of us, these celebrities have fluctuating tastes and enjoy a much wider range of films than could ever be encapsulated in a list of four movies.
The reaction to said videos reflects the way young cinephiles connect identity and self-worth to taste in films. If a celeb’s four favorites are too “mainstream”, or even too homogenous in genre, there is a camp that will lampoon them as uneducated and boring. If the list of four includes relatively esoteric films, another camp will parody it as pretentious and tryhard. These attitudes have almost certainly bled into the way non-famous Letterboxd users carry themselves; there’s a pressure to present the perfect version of yourself on the site; not too pompous, but not too basic either. We are expected to create a unique brand of films we enjoy rather than enjoying the medium holistically. The more films we watch in our lives, the harder it becomes to narrow down to only four (a sentiment often expressed by interviewees put on the spot), and the more it feels unfair to be expected to do so at all.
