When I joined Letterboxd, I was an undergrad in film studies. I was thrilled to discover this website that would allow me, first and foremost, to catalog every movie I’ve seen. I watch more movies than the average person, and I have already lost years of movies to the recesses of my memory. The other features were something of a bonus, but recognizably I felt that the ratings and the reviews would be fun to indulge in as well, myself not yet an amateur critic.
But what I noticed that I was doing not long after I created my account—logging movies and declaring them between half a star and five stars, as per the site’s allowance—is I was sitting down to watch a movie, be it at home or at a theater, and, almost unconsciously, trying to figure out where my star rating would fall based on the first few minutes. And the thought never strayed very far as I continued to watch, it would simply evolve and change—an initial four-star would regress into a two-star, a three and a half would develop into a five, and so on and so forth.
My brain was unintentionally racked for those 90+ minutes with stars dancing around in my head. I didn’t want to stop using Letterboxd, because the utility of the site was meaningful to me. But I wanted this particular occurrence to stop, and I felt it was directly impacting how I engaged with film. It reduced my complicated web of thoughts and feelings during and post-viewing to a series of concrete numbers applied in a way that I didn’t even fully understand.
Then, sometime during the 2020 leg of the pandemic, I made a change. I was watching more films regularly than I had in my entire life (lockdown, despair, etc.), and was tired of being held back by my relationship to stars. I deleted all my star ratings for every film I had ever watched and logged on Letterboxd, and I began rating films on a simple binary: heart, or no heart. Like, or dislike. This overall positive shift was catalyzed by my friend and fellow film lover, the King of Hollywood himself, Rob Franco, who had abandoned the stars and implemented the heart/no heart system long before me. Suddenly, I was no longer watching films and troubling myself over, not just how I was going to end up rating them but how other people would perceive my rating. I was simply watching and enjoying, or not enjoying, films.
“Heart/no heart” is a shift in the Letterboxd rating functionality that a swathe of users have gone on to adopt, effectively doing away with the given system that Letterboxd’s interface offers. Instead of simultaneously complicating and simplifying one’s thoughts after a film on a scale of a half star to five stars, one only has to click the little heart button, or not click the heart button, and then log the film in their diary. The true utility of the heart function on Letterboxd seems to be an accoutrement to the primary system—you can give a film any rating, and tack on a heart to note that you actually love it even if you maybe only gave it one star, or that you really love it in addition to granting it five stars. The heart adds a notion of emotional connection to an otherwise cold and clinical system.
But for people who have had a similar experience to me with using the star system, the heart system offered a way out. And after receiving feedback from over 50 Letterboxd users, I found that this experience was incredibly widespread: the struggle to watch films when a numerical quantification is hanging over your head; the enjoyment that this sucks from movie-watching; the feeling of being on a chopping block once you display that finalized rating on a social media website for millions of people to see, judge, and critique; the increased issues with self-doubt over your opinions versus the opinions of others. And all of this when you’re not even being paid to review the films you’re watching. But the fear of judgement is enough to turn people off from using the Letterboxd stars entirely. Why is it that a simple and ultimately meaningless app functionality, for a site whose prime function is to look at and judge people’s opinions on art, has become a plague for so many cinephiles?
Part of the basic charm of Letterboxd is that you don’t need to be a critic to offer your thoughts on a film and have people read them—all you need is to sign up for an account. Letterboxd is mostly positioned as a social networking site: “a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery,” as per the site’s official mission; “Like GoodReads for movies.”
But there are contentious clashing perspectives on the utility of Letterboxd. Unlike, Goodreads, you can be a random person with enough of a hook per review and a popular enough base and suddenly you’re on the same playing field as real critics, and sometimes even more influential (which speaks partly to the diminished profession of film criticism). Some people, like me (a small potatoes film critic), use the site purely casually, a way to simply log films, note whether or not they liked them, and maybe offer a brief one-liner. Others take the site very seriously and despise the one-liners; the site is their substantive means of getting their film analysis out into the world for people to read, and thoughtless joke reviews often steal the spotlight.
Back when I was still using the star system, my ratings were typically nebulous and primarily “vibes-based.” But they were usually grounded in a combination of how the movie made me feel and my thoughts on its overall subjective quality. The weight everyone gives to each star is evidently going to be different, but I would often feel pressure or insecurity seeing mutuals give a film five stars that I didn’t feel the same about, or vice versa. I also have a not-small amount of Twitter followers, so if I posted screenshot glimpses from my Letterboxd diary, I would receive at least one reply skewering me for my choice to award one movie two stars and another four and a half. “Why did you do this but not that?” “What made this movie a three and a half as opposed to a three?” I was annoyed at this. Why did it matter? I didn’t have an answer for these pedants, and I didn’t have an answer for myself.
So, what are the parameters of evaluating art as a hobby? Letterboxd brings together people on different ends of this spectrum and many in between: the casual film enjoyer, the devoted cinephile, the horny stan account, the serious critic who uses the site lightly but might link—when necessary—to their paid, published reviews. There are even people purely using the site as a movie-watching index, logging films sans stars, reviews, or ratings of any kind, and perhaps checking in to see what their friends watched and liked.
Though I’m a film critic, I fall closer to the latter kind of user. But because I am such a writer and have a not-small Twitter following, there has always been a scrutiny I didn’t really want towards how I watched and engaged with a film on a site I used frivolously. If someone’s curious as to more of my thoughts on a particular film, they can read a review or essay that I’m being paid to write. If I don’t have one to offer, then they’re SOL. What more should anyone need than whether I liked or disliked a film on a site such as Letterboxd? I suppose, then, it’s unfettered access to my thoughts without all the fuss and frills of a long review.
Regardless of how or why someone uses Letterboxd, this feeling of heart/no heart as liberation from a constrictive system is one which pervades the perspectives of those users who have done away with this crucial facet of Letterboxd’s popular interface. Some experienced self-imposed pressure to not look stupid and be a dissenting opinion among friends and respected peers, others felt that it was reductive to quantify abstract feelings towards art according to a numerical scale; or they felt conflicted giving two vastly different films the same rating, putting said films on an equal playing field that they might not really be on. Most, like me, primarily found it distracting and detrimental to be fretting about where their rating would fall while watching a film. But are we all just making this too complicated? At the end of the day, Letterboxd is just social media, after all.
For those who enjoy the stars, it’s not quite as melodramatic, even if a number of these same users take Letterboxd and the methodology of their ratings more seriously. Some Letterboxd users like Esther Rosenfield (@capybaroness) and Dan Simpson (@danpgsimpson) prefer the ability to quickly abridge their own thoughts on a film in a clear and direct way to their followers. The furthered simplification of switching to heart/no heart additionally obfuscates users’ ability to know what friends or critics or users they admire really thought of a film—especially if they don’t attach a review to their diary entry.
In fact, some users find the binary of hearts even more reductive. The star ratings allow for a type of nuance that the heart/no heart system does not, as well as the option to go back and see what you once thought of a film even if those feelings have changed over time. At the end of the day, the star-lovers appreciate the shorthand ability to summarize their feelings on a film and share it with others—more or less, the very mission of Letterboxd itself.
But Letterboxd didn’t invent star ratings, or expressing a simple binary reaction to a film. Siskel and Ebert made thumbs up or thumbs down the pop movie criticism arbiter for years, and academic critic Jonathan Rosenbaum used his own sliding scale star system out of four stars (as opposed to Letterboxd’s five). Indeed, many film review sites still use some sort of letter grade or numerical score to streamline a critic’s takeaway from a film as a supplement for their complete, well-rounded thoughts. Letters and stars are simply shorthand, a way to neatly package complexity into something digestible and shareable. Don’t want to read the full review? Well, here’s something simple to let you know that Roger Ebert thinks you should see this film.
But shorthand ratings can catalyze instantaneous rage in readers should a critic give their own version of “thumbs down.” In his article from 2005, “Saying It With Stars,” Rosenbaum clarifies that “As a reviewer, I’m obliged to give movies star ratings, but they’re simply a summary of my personal response, not a declaration of some objective value and certainly not of any sort of consensus.”
He goes on to describe an experience in which he was harangued for giving the Star Wars special edition re-release no stars, a film that was “worthless” to him: “I’m not qualified to speak about its value to anyone else.” And Rosenbaum continues on in the article by further clarifying his process to any disgruntled readers, noting the number of individual star ratings he arrives at for varying aspects throughout a film’s runtime—maybe three stars for acting, but one for plot contrivance—that leads him to his ultimate, averaged star rating for the film as a whole.
It’s a good example of how a critic can have a diverse collection of thoughts about a film that range from positive to negative, even if they overall like or dislike it, and how that letter grade or star rating is simply a way to neatly bundle shades of nuance. But Rosenbaum’s detailing of each characteristic’s star rating comes across as a way to further streamline his own complexity for the sake of those who are unwilling to interrogate it, and the impersonal methodology inherent to film-watching when a ratings system becomes involved. In no way a knock against Rosenbaum—star ratings are a necessary evil in paid film criticism that have been getting clicks, pageviews, and, perhaps most importantly, butts into theater seats for years.
It's true that Letterboxd is only a social media site, not someone’s profession. But it is also a very public platform for users to be honest about their reactions to works of art. It’s an act of vulnerability that can sometimes be quite scary, particularly when people often view others’ opinions on art—especially on film, and especially opinions from film critics—as personal attacks against them and their character, as we increasingly attach our identities to the pop culture we consume.
As Esther Rosenfield expressed to me—and as I’ve experienced as well—Letterboxd cinephiles can be just as nagging and scornful towards ratings as the Star Wars fans who felt they were on the receiving end of Rosenbaum’s barbs. It’s ultimately why Esther ended up returning to the star ratings after jumping on the heart/no heart train: she was tired of the lack of clarity that the hearts offered, and the reactions she got from people because of it.
Ratings systems—and lists, too—not only aspire to easily communicate whether a film is good or bad for the consumption of theatergoers, but often try to untangle feelings that can never be untangled in such a way. It’s a fool’s errand to appraise art so clinically, and yet we will always try to do so. Take the esteemed and controversial Sight and Sound list, which aims to rank the 100 greatest films of all time every 12 years, and saw cinephiles on Twitter knocking their heads in furious anticipation for months over the latest installment. The film that earned the top spot this time—Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—was never going to objectively be the best film of all time even if many (myself included) believe it to be a masterpiece.
Not that this is necessarily the absolute goal of the Sight and Sound list: to act as an objective adjudicator of quality. It’s an averaging of top 10 ballots from a number of participants ranging from lowly critics like me to industry professional and famous directors, to get an average top 100 of what we movie “experts” believe to be the best. And lists have a useful utility. Like stars, thumbs, and letters, lists can act as a helpful shorthand, an accessible avenue for novice cinephiles eager to explore canon classics and obscure gems, or for the pure quantifying pleasure of the list-maker themselves.
But too often, these lists eclipse more meaningful discussions surrounding art, in our attention deficit culture that is prone to favor quick bite snippets and clickbait rankings over thoughtful articles and discussions. And in its very endeavor, the Sight and Sound list attempts to offer an ultimate answer to an unanswerable question—a panacea to the undaunted plague of artistic subjectivity. For one brief moment, there’s a solution, a way out, before we return to the discourse trenches where we’ll always be (a somewhat intentional return spurred by the very list itself).
What’s a consistent thorn in the side of arts criticism is the excess and clutter of rankings and ratings; assigning absolute meaning to that which has none. It’s not like it’s something that we can even escape, but it’s what makes the wheels of a site like Letterboxd well-oiled. Putting ourselves on display, holding our opinions outstretched to be praised and ridiculed for the pleasure and pain of self-exhibition. Was it always like this? It’s all part of the narcissism that feels inherently unique to the age of the internet, giving us the ability to offer our “takes” on everything with the push of a button. Now that everyone’s opinion can be heard, we all have to have one.
But as Esther noted, the system one uses to catalog their thoughts on Letterboxd simply depends on the person and what that person wants to get out of both Letterboxd and their relationship to watching films. What do you want to communicate to others and to yourself about art? And which is more important to you? How art makes you feel is very personal, even on a website as public and as seemingly superficial as Letterboxd. When I asked Rob Franc—the person who got me to make the switch over to heart/no heart—how his shift in Letterboxd rating had changed his own relationship to watching movies, he told me that a friend in high school once said to him on the topic: “It’s arbitrary, Robert. Either you liked it, you didn’t like it, or it’s as good as it gets.” With that, Rob changed the way he looked at Letterboxd and how he rated films. A heart, or no heart, or, yes, a star rating—five stars: as good as it gets.
To me, the beauty of this ideology, and of heart/no heart, is that what’s in between is up to you. Many star-lovers believe the hearts to be far more limiting of a system, but the reality is that the gaps spanning these two quantifications can be as expansive or as infinitesimal as the rater wants them to be—it’s just not something that others can perceive. Does that negate the entire point of using Letterboxd? What is most important to the people, like me, who have made the switch from Letterboxd stars to hearts is what they are getting out of the films they consume. Sure, we could stop using the app, or we could use it only for its most base function: logging films as we go.
But I think the choice speaks to two things. It speaks to the desire for silence and space, for breathing room during and after we submit ourselves to art, and to not be so quick to assume that we yet understand our own feelings (something that, as a critic, I am not often afforded in my paid reviews). But it also speaks to the inescapable compulsion for attention, for others to know and to see. Even we heart-lovers can’t refuse the siren song of putting our feelings on display; it’s just not our problem if you want more than we’re willing to give. In that case, maybe you should just watch the film and see what you think—then maybe rank it on a scale of one to five.*
STARS FOREVER! HEARTS CAN GO DIE IN HELL!!