I Know Exactly What I’ll Find In My Letterboxd Tomorrow

I still like Letterboxd overall, and the appeal of an ongoing movie diary is enough that I’d want to keep using it even if I were to stop using the social media features altogether.

But I have been tempted to stop using those social media features, because they keep directing me to the most easily ignorable yet still profoundly, eye-rollingly irritating takes. Obviously it’s the most annoying when it’s about a movie I love, but even for ones I thought were fine, or didn’t like very much but still tried to find the merit in them, it pushes my buttons like nothing else.

If you’re going to take to social media immediately to complain about a franchise blockbuster being a franchise blockbuster, why even go see it in the first place? Your mind has already been made up before the trailers even finished. It seems like you could’ve saved everyone’s time by staying home and watching The Bicycle Thief or The Seventh Seal or even Saló again, you dang weirdo.

The one that set me off today was about Superman1:

It just drops you in expecting you to have the cultural awareness of everything Superman, from Krypton, Kryptonian, Lex Luthor, the Daily Planet, etc.

Which is similar to my main complaint about Ben Hur, really: the story’s going along fine, but then the movie suddenly expects the audience to be familiar with who this “Jesus” character is.

I wish Superman had at least included some opening text or something to retell the origin story of this obscure comics character.

Ultimately, that review goes on to make the case that a character so well-known in pop culture can’t possibly be counter-culture. And more pointedly, that a multi-hundred-million dollar movie from Warner Brothers has no business telling people what qualifies as “punk rock.” And if I’m being charitable, I guess that’s an argument that maybe could’ve held some weight… ten or fifteen years ago.

But the core argument is asinine, on multiple fronts. Again, Superman is not a subtle movie. It makes it explicitly clear that its theme of “punk rock” has little to do with the familiar definition of counter-culture, but simply that in a culture overrun by cynical, joyless chodes, being kind and looking for the best in people, without fear of being perceived as corny or naive, is counter-culture.

Dismissing that message as phony or insincere is a perfect example of what the message is railing against in the first place. And on top of that, if the movie’s budget, source material, and the studio that released it automatically render anything it has to say invalid, then why bother seeing it at all? It’s not like they slapped an A24 logo on the movie, to disguise the fact that Superman is a movie about Warner Brothers-owned DC character Superman.

It’s a tedious spiral of pointlessly incurious cynicism. Complaining about super-hero fatigue, but still making sure to register a complaint about every new entry. Insisting that they have no cultural relevance, while immediately dismissing even the potential for the movie to have an uncontroversially and universally positive message.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. There have been similar complaints about every big franchise picture. Like how Jurassic World: Rebirth didn’t need to exist (wow, no shit!). Or the endless stream of complaints about MCU or Star Wars installments, which always feel more pre-written and tediously obvious than the movies themselves.

To the (small) credit of the Superman review I quoted: at least he made a half-assed effort to glean some meaning out of the movie, even if he completely beefed it on the interpretation. Better that than the people who’ve cursed themselves with the Sisyphean task of repeating the same criticism that super-hero movies are bad because they’re super-hero movies, over and over and over again.

A big part of the reason these reviews are so able to push my buttons is because I know that in an alternate universe, where normalizing factors hadn’t intervened, I’d be one of those people. I’ve written a ton of insufferable stuff on here, but the ones that make me cringe the most are when I made a point to be dismissive of something for being trash without trying to find any merit in it, or even worse: when I thought it was funny to rail on how bad something was.

Something that Letterboxd has helped me appreciate is the same thing I realized back when The Force Awakens came out: ultimately, I don’t actually care about people’s opinions. When something is able to break through my own cynicism or skepticism and connect with me in exactly the right way, there’s pretty much nothing anyone can say otherwise that’s going to change my own experience with it.

So the challenge isn’t actually defending my opinion of something I loved (or occasionally, hated or disliked) from differing opinions, even though that’s the kind of challenge that’s most easily prompted by reading a strongly-opinionated review. The real challenge is silencing the voice in myself that feels obliged to defend, justify, or rationalize that opinion. As if there is a right way to engage with media, and I still somehow haven’t found it after 54 years.

Obviously, an insightful critique of a work of art can help deepen your interpretation or add nuance to it, point out details you hadn’t noticed, help justify some decisions that were made at the expense of other ones, or help realize the amount of thought and work that went into making something.

But that’s extremely rare, even from reviewers I like. I write about movies on here trying to focus on one particular aspect that makes it work (or occasionally, not work) or makes it interesting, and I still feel like I’m only occasionally able to identify something that is more than just “here’s what I liked” and is genuinely insightful.

And one more thing I realized recently about Superman: my nostalgia for it isn’t really nostalgia for the character or even the Super Friends cartoons, since I always liked them but was never extremely invested in them. Even with The Force Awakens or The Mandalorian, it’s more nostalgia for the kind of unabashed enthusiasm I had for stuff as a kid. When I could just go apeshit over something without fear of being perceived as corny or naive. Maybe that’s not actually “punk rock” by some gatekeepers’ definition, but at least it’s New Wave, and I’m through being cool.

1
Which, if you haven’t been following this blog lately, is a movie that I’ve gone absolutely apeshit over.

1 Which, if you haven’t been following this blog lately, is a movie that I’ve gone absolutely apeshit over.