Letterboxd and Gen Z: The Good, The Bad, The Absurd

There’s a strange shimmer of pride that comes when someone asks my “Letterboxd Top Four,” because I have formulated an answer that feels, in some small but resonant way, like it represents me. Four little squares become shorthand for a facet of my identity, signifying: This is what I love. This is what I claim to love. But the “I” has become so tangled up in this exchange. In Gen Z’s hands, the selection of a favorite film often feels less like a private choice and more like a performance in a cultural arena where taste doubles as personality, credibility, and even intimacy.

This isn’t to say that identifying with a set of favorite films is always performative. I actually find that word quite limiting and cynical, dismissive of the vast multitudes of reasons why we are drawn to certain films, what it is they work in us. But, there is no doubt that my generation’s obsession with Letterboxd, with tracking and broadcasting and sharing and picking apart one’s movie watching experience, flirts with both performance and game. It’s a personality test, a diary, a dating profile, a cultural currency. What’s happening here is a complex swirl of good, bad, and absurd impulses that together form a philosophically rich portrait of Gen Z’s relationship with art in the digital age.

In an age of shrinking attention spans and the dominance of short-form media, the platform has reintroduced many young people to the discipline of long-form storytelling. It can feel like some sort of radical self-care to simply switch from a small screen to a slightly larger one. Letterboxd, for all its quirks, has turned movie-watching into a practice of intention. Classic and foreign films circulate through feeds until they become trendy, transforming cinephilia into something accessible, participatory, and cool. Gen Z is learning to engage with film and think critically, and it’s something we can all access. Plus, watching more movies is a wonderful thing. It’s impossible to come out of a film the same person you were when you entered it. Agnés Varda says, “With every new film I see, I feel reborn.” At its best, the app is a bridge between cinepiles and newcomers, between solitude and connection.

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Yet with this accessibility comes a subtle but clear flattening. My journals used to be filled with the films I wanted to watch. When I’d get around to watching them, I’d glide the ink across the page, cross them off, reflect, and write a little entry about how it made me feel. No one would ever see these pages. No one ever has. The thought of other people’s gazes and interpretations of my experience viewing art never entered my mind. Feeling was the only thing at the center of this process.

In hindsight, this was a sacred and personal ritual that I have lost to a machine much more powerful than my sprawling cursive pages that now rest in dark boxes and drawers. This has been both swallowed by and contained by an app. My lists, my opinions, no longer just my own. Letterboxd digitized that intimacy and projected it outward. The act of watching and documenting have intertwined. The dopamine-fueled habits of social media seep into the sacredness of the way I am experiencing art, encouraging quick wit, clever one-liners, and instant judgments. Star ratings flicker in viewers’ minds before the credits roll. Interpretation is no longer something that happens after experience, it is often happening instead of experience. An experience that was once so deep and so whole is beginning to teeter on mechanical and robotic. The act of interpretation is happening in real time. In the past, it was just about presence, and the interpretation came later. I had the space and absence of social pressure to let the story simmer over time.

Viewed in a darker light, Letterboxd reveals how cinema has been absorbed into the same logic that governs productivity and consumption. The platform often turns into a numbers game, grinding through watchlists, tallying yearly totals, measuring progress. What’s striking is how seamlessly the fixation on metrics, so ingrained in social life, seeps into art: Value becomes tethered to quantity, and self-worth is unconsciously measured by output.

There is no one right way to experience art, but I know that the point is to really experience it. Susan Sontag, in her essay Against Interpretation, argued that overanalysis and constant criticism prevent us from fully experiencing art. She argued that art is meant to be encountered with body and soul before breaking it into meanings and dissection. This app, for all its wonders, nudges us in the opposite direction: toward instant interpretation and constant categorization. Letterboxd might just be standing in as a sort of middle-man with his arms spread wide, separating the viewer from the film itself. I feel a distance. I feel a machine-shaped space made of three overlapping colorful circles ensuring that I don’t get too close to the film at hand. And in that space? The eyes of strangers and friends and frenemies and colleagues and cousins.

The app never fails to prove how funny people are, and there are endless hilarious reviews for every film. We are a generation that grew up on both sincerity and irony, oscillating wildly between the two until they collapsed into one mode of expression. Letterboxd, like so much of digital age, is both a blessing and distortion, asking us to identify through consumption, but also to share joy through art. It simultaneously distances us from presence, and binds us to community. Maybe the truest way to hold it is not to resolve these contradictions, but to live inside them, admitting the good, the bad, and the absurd.

In the end, perhaps the most hopeful thing about Letterboxd is that it reminds us we are not watching alone. Even in a culture that reduces everything to numbers, stars, and lists, the simple fact remains that people are still watching, still talking, still caring about film. It is a platform that brings me the most joy when I refuse to take it seriously, but for some, it brings joy when taken very seriously. The app may distort the purity of presence, but it also keeps alive the idea that film matters, and that it matters most when shared.

Audrey Weisburd is an arts and culture writer from Austin, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn. She also writes short fiction and poetry. She shares her work on Instagram @audrey.valentine.