Bring Me Anything But Jokes

please

You already know that I have a lot of frustrations with Letterboxd, the annoyingly-named site for community movie reviews. Still, I like the interface, the archive is truly comprehensive, and most importantly I find the basic premise very attractive. I like movies, I like people’s opinions about movies, and I especially think that a lot of people who would never write professionally about movies have interesting opinions about movies. So Letterboxd should be just my thing, right? Ah, but. Here’s the top-rated reviews for some films that I picked completely at random. I stress: I did not need to go looking for these examples. I found all of these films and their reviews based solely on what just happened to be on my frontpage, in various sections. And I don’t know why Letterboxd, as a company, doesn’t give a shit about this. I find it so depressing.

Commando starring Arnold Scwharzenneger:

Godfather Part II, many people’s pick for the greatest film ever made:

Phonebooth, starring Colin Ferrell:

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a review by actor Ayo Edebiri, who is far too talented and successful to be looking for cheap validation like this:

Leave Her to Heaven, a 78-year-old movie:

I could go on, and on, and on, and on…. Again, I didn’t search for these, I just clicked on the first half-dozen or so movies in my feed, knowing that they would inevitably have a top review that’s an empty, unfunny joke. I was right. Go look for yourself if you doubt my process. I knew I could find these reviews through a purely random selection because that is the entire site. That is what Letterboxd is. It’s a site whose premise (anyone can post reviews of movies, and the interesting and perceptive ones will rise to the top) is ruined by the social mandates shared by anyone under 55 years old (I need to take every possible opportunity to show the world how clever I am, how good I am, that I’m a star!) Yes, there’s some very insightful and perceptive reviews on Letterboxd. And I am not in fact immune to the appeal of humor. You might, I don’t know, embed a joke in a longer, more substantive review, if that’s not too crazy an idea. Some of the ones that are both insightful and perceptive also manage to be funny! I further recognize that some people go too far in the opposite direction; Letterboxd is not the place for the 10,000 word, Film Comment-style exegeses some people write. But you cannot click through more than two or three movies without finding one where the top review, and a majority of the first several pages of reviews, are all one-sentence jokes. It makes me very tired.

Like all social networking behavior, this isn’t the product of feckless individual users, but rather a structural outcome of the site’s systems. People want very badly to have the top review (because they crave attention), and the shortest reviews are always going to earn the most likes, network-wide, because it takes so little time and effort to read them. And Letterboxd lives on the same internet we all live on, where the basic concept of how you’re supposed to comport yourself was dictated by a few thousand annoying people on Twitter in like 2010. (This is Freddie’s Law of Social Media: over a long enough time frame, all social networks become Weird Twitter.) The most active users are, as on any social network, those that play most directly and shamelessly into the unhealthy dynamics baked into the system. Consider power user “Karst.” His profile contains 118 pages of reviews. Here’s his most recent and highest-ranked as of the time I looked.

To me, this is a really good symbol of what makes Letterboxd unusable. The last is at least an earnest reaction to a movie, I think, but of course we are not privy to any explanation whatsoever for why the second Dune film was so moving. None of these contain anything like an actual opinion, in the sense of being a comment on a movie’s quality, the expression of an aesthetic value that’s explained with evidence. The first, for a delicate and moving Studio Ghibli film, is just literally nothing, just a guy saying to his many followers “I would like attention now, please.” That stuff absolutely ruins the user experience at Letterboxd, and seems to afflict more and more of the internet as time goes by. There are thousands of these accounts out there, trying to get noticed by writing “funny” one-sentence reviews. They choke the site. You often have to go pages into a movie’s reviews to get anything that has any substance at all. But because these reviews suck up so many likes (36,684!) everyone who signs up for a Letterboxd account receives an obvious message: being smart, well-written, observant, probing, insightful, or provocative gets you nowhere. Take your swing and tell a shitty twelve-word joke, call it a review, and maybe you’ll get lucky and become a celebrity.

Treating Letterboxd as just another place to tell shitty jokes for a barely-interested audience is the way to become a celebrity around there; it’s a recurring dynamic of internet life that leveraging laziness can be the best path to success. I doubt Letterboxd the company would ever do anything about all of this, given that they would seem to have no incentive to. It’s also not entirely clear what they could do to solve the problem, although a 100-word minimum for reviews or similar couldn’t hurt. But ultimately, people have to want to do more with the internet than to tell shitty jokes, and they don’t. Telling shitty jokes is what they imagine will make them feel accepted so they keep doing it. Until people learn that telling shitty jokes to make fake friends online is just going to make them sadder and more lonely in the long run, the overarching problem will continue.

I could understand someone saying, hey, Ayo Edibiri is hilarious! Why would you complain about her? The problem is not that Edibiri is not funny. She’s clearly funny. Occasionally these one-sentence reviews are funny regardless of who wrote them, I’m not arguing otherwise. The question is, why on Letterboxd? Why can’t Edibiri be funny on one of the myriad other platforms she has to be funny? She’s in every movie and show that gets made right now, she hosted SNL, she can drop into any comedy club in the country and do a set whenever she wants. So why use Letterboxd this way? And obviously, the bigger point is to ask why so many people treat networks and platforms as digital open mic night regardless of their features and purposes. In a world where so many spaces are already dominated by people slinging one-liners at each other, why does every new space eventually become like every other space? Why are so many bored professionals trying to moonlight as unpaid SNL writers on so many networks? Reddit has a lot of good information on it, but any subreddit that isn’t ruthlessly dedicated to some very specific subject becomes a comedy club for people who don’t have the talent or guts to perform at an actual comedy club. The podcast, as a medium, is like 70% people trying to be funny when they clearly don’t have the talent for it. The average Slack sounds like my own personal hell. Given the overall culture surrounding Discord it’s hard to imagine that there are many of them that avoid the same fate. I find it all a big drag!

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but when I lived in Chicago in my mid-20s, 2004-2006, my best friend there was involved in the Chicago comedy scene. He did improv and sketch comedy and a little standup. Sometimes he’d bring me along to parties held by people in that world. I had a good time partying, did some good drugs, hooked up a few times. And some of the individual people I met in that context were smart and cool and legitimately funny. But as an experience, in total, those parties were usually unpleasant, and I say that as a man who loves and misses parties. I would come home afterwards and realize that I was exhausted, not because I had stayed out too late or drank too much but because I had spent the entire evening hearing people’s material. The kind of people who moved to Chicago in an effort to make a name in comedy at places like Second City or Upright Citizens Brigade were the kind of people who were always on. They didn’t know how to be off. I’d go in, I’d meet some people, the next thing you know, someone was saying, “Didja ever notice….,” and suddenly I was a one-man Tonight Show audience. Again, these weren’t bad people, and sometimes they were funny. But they had been so marinated in the culture of being “funny” that I feared they didn’t know what normal, authentic, vulnerable human expression even was.

The ensuing two decades, and the rise of the social internet, have taken that condition and made it essentially universal. I can never leave the party. People went from being always on whenever they were around other people to being always on whenever they were awake. The demand to tell jokes vastly outstripped the supply of funny jokes to tell. We live in a hell of other people’s comedy, and over time more and more spaces are colonized. In recent years the need to be on generalist social media like Twitter and Facebook, for writers, has significantly diminished. This is not entirely good news - you don’t need to be on Twitter or Facebook anymore because those networks no longer drive traffic, which is killing media as an industry - but I am hoping that more writers of my generation will jump ship if they haven’t already. I hope they realize that spending all day long trivializing everything they do just makes their own lives trivial. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure other people have too, but when you make everything a joke, someday you’ll realize that you’re the joke. No one can take you seriously until you take you seriously. Pardon me for sounding a little self help-y.

Consider this piece for Vulture by Hershal Pandya. It’s about a podcast by the Lonely Island comedy music collective. It’s always a strong possibility that I’m just old, or dumb, or both. But I am telling you that I cannot parse what Pandya’s attitude is towards the Lonely Island podcast, I just cannot, cannot do it. On the surface, the piece suggests that Pandya finds the episode something of a disaster. But it also suggests that the disaster was planned and Lonely Island was doing a bit. And then there’s the layer of Pandya’s affected dry tone and performatively-amused detachment. It leaves me completely unclear as to whether the podcast episode was a success or an intentional failure or an unintentional failure and, worse, whether Pandya himself thinks it was a success or not. This happens more and more often now, where I just genuinely cannot tell what level of irony people are operating at and so the basic work of language breaks down completely. Choire Sicha just made the same complaint in his newsletter for New York yesterday, and I trust he means it. (Choire is occasionally ironic, but never when he complains.) Whenever I write about this stuff people accuse me of wanting some facile “New Sincerity” or whatever, but I would honestly just like to know what the fuck people who communicate for a living are talking about.

Do those freaks who keep ranking Michael Mann’s Heat as one of the best American films of all time on IMDB or wherever really mean it? I don’t know. Do they even know if they mean it, or of it’s ironic or half-ironic or quasi-ironic? I don’t know; the implied air quotes are stacked so high I can’t tell. Do the YouTubers or whoever that pushed them into overrating that (very good! but c’mon let’s not go crazy here!) movie know if they really think it’s a top ten, top five, top one all-time movie? Unclear. That whole thing is wrapped in so many layers of studied bro frivolity, I can’t tell.

Look, I like to give young writers advice, in part because most professional writers are too consumed with humility (real or faux) to give any. Besides, being able to claw some mild career success out of this wreck of a human being suggests that I know a thing or two. And I have told people that they need to be individual to have any chance, to be weird, to sell something other people aren’t selling. Being weird isn’t sufficient to make a living as a writer, good lord, no! I don’t know what’s sufficient. No idea, really. Go back in time and start a blog in 2002 I guess. This industry is cratering and I’m very depressed about it. But it can help, a lot, if no one else writes like you. When you’re a writer, like it or not, you are selling something in a market. And to succeed in a very crowded market, you can’t be selling the same thing as everybody else. We’ve reached this place with YouTube and podcasts and newsletters and so many other creative endeavors where there are just such a vast number of people trying to make it that the odds of being noticed are incredibly slim. (Unless your parents are famous, in which case random chance has blessed you for life.) This is all ultimately downstream from the way that digital technologies opened up creative tools and platforms to everyone, and then in a consequence of cruel but beautiful irony so many people crowded those platforms that a different kind of velvet rope went up, womp womp. It’s like all those people from the Chicago parties tried to take the stage at the same open mic night.

Well: the particular kind of rude-character-in-a-Nickelodeon-show perpetual jokiness that you see on Letterboxd is something that can be found in abundance in just about every creative field we have. The genre is saturated. If you’re looking to make a name for yourself, or even worse a career for yourself, then you should be selling something else. If you’re still basing your entire online performance on that same copy of a copy of a copy of Chandler from Friends (RIP), I would invite you to consider what year it is, and anyway aren’t you getting too old for that sort of thing? You want to be the only person in the nursing home talking about how you’re going to dunk on Jon Chait? If you want to treat Letterboxd as your own personal HBO special, in perpetuity, I ask that you please consider whether you would be better off keeping that in the group text so that the rest of us can actually talk about movies. Perhaps there can be a time and a place for jokes other than “all the time” and “everyplace.” And maybe someday we can all escape a curse that I know many other people must chafe against as much as I do - that 21st century affliction of always living under the suffocating weight of other people’s insecurity.