Consensus Empire: Empowering the Spectator through Letterboxd Reviews

This is an academic essay on contemporary spectatorship which I quite enjoyed. Excerpt:

Not everyone uses Letterboxd to record their immediate reactions, but I’d argue that this is the best way to participate. Keeping a log of every movie you watch, along with as many gut-reaction writeups as possible, provides an exciting, humorous, and sobering record of the spectator’s experience. The philosopher Sianne Ngai might classify this brand of marginal criticism by the various “aesthetic categories” it derives opinions from.8 “Zany,” “cute,” and “interesting” are her main focal points, each bearing sociopolitical weight despite how trivial they might sound. But we could easily expand that to include “dollar-store Scooby Doo” – my Letterboxd review of From Justin to Kelly (Robert Iscove, 2003) – or “manufactured by a secret NFL supercomputer” – 80 for Brady (Kyle Marvin, 2023) – or “literally just a porno, but with worse acting” – Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong (Charles Band, 2013). The point is that “aesthetic experience is attached, in some way, to our nonaesthetic encounters with the world… To judge something ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is to participate in a bigger conversation about what kinds of aesthetic choices are culturally valid.”