Letterboxd and the Generation Game

The illusion of completeness and cinephilia

Nota Bene: Something I have to note before I even begin. SubStack or my browser, whoever does the default spellcheck here doesn’t like “cinephilia” as a word. Necrophilia was the suggestion.

When I was small there was a quiz show on British television called The Generation Game, which featured pairs competing for at games and quizzes. I don’t remember all the details but the last round involved the winning contestant sitting in front of a conveyor belt as a series of prizes went by. Once they’d all gone by, the contestant would recall them - there was always a fondue set and a cuddly toy - and each prize remembered they would win.

I often think of The Generation Game as a metaphor for life and obviously its dark twin, death. The conveyor belt is the time we experience and the prizes are cultural experiences we wish to attain and retain. Each generation obviously starts at a different point in the conveyor belt and the prizes are different (except for the cuddly toy). For my generation, The Generation Game itself is one of those experiences, along with Saturday morning Elvis movies and Laurel and Hardy on TV, Ghostbusters and Spielberg at the cinema, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Eurythmics on the radio. Now that’s what I call music! by which I mean compilation double albums with gate-fold sleeves. We grab the prizes and we stow them away in our memory palaces which look like the places that have disappeared, the end of Brighton pier and bustling town centres, youth clubs and large palatial cinemas.

I also remember as a young kid wanting to have read all the books; wanting to be the sort of expert who quotes literature effortless like Sean Connery in The Rock, or Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. Yearning for pop art erudition, I was blessed with a library card and well funded libraries, where I could movies and music as well as books. I got my first listen to a Birthday Party LP, my first watch of a Roger Corman horror film (The Dunwich Horror) and Robert Kolker’s Cinema of Loneliness from Barrow-in-Furness public library on the same day.

Nowadays, everything is free - as Gillian Welch sang - and I’ve lived enough life that I’ve accrued the sort of cultural education I always aspired to. I’ve read deeply of a hefty section of the canon. I’ve read every Shakespeare play and every Charles Dickens novel. I’m familiar with most genres of music to a depth that goes beyond The Greatest Hits. I’ve enriched my life enormously with the joy of great writing, beautiful music in all its forms and the dreams of cinema. I have big gaps. I listen to opera and ballet but I’ve only seen a handful of performances. I never got into the habit of going to the theatre, though whenever I have I’ve loved it. And art galleries fill me with an odd mixture of insecurity, loathing, good humour and gnawing hunger.

As someone who always wanted to be a writer, reading everything was a no-shit-Sherlock plan (read all the Holmes stories and novels). It was only when I started writing about film that I began to systematically make my way through the Great Directors and the History of Film lists. I found not so much gaps as Grand Canyons of ignorance which I enjoyed spanning. This was before Letterboxd and so I was on my own. It was the age of box sets. So an Ingmar Bergman box set and away we’d go: Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Varda, Herzog, film noir, John Ford, Ealing Comedies, Godard and Truffaut.

Sometimes I felt like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club when he talks about buying a couch and he says “And you think you have the couch situation sorted for a good ten-fifteen years.” Ticking off the boxes, filling in the missing parts of the jigsaw, seeing the connections, understanding what all the fuss was about. In some cases never understanding what all the fuss was about. The Dardenne brothers and Eric Rohmer fill me fill me with so much ennui I find myself googling how to say bored in French.

Being the completist and greeting the arrival of Letterboxd was like finding my dealer had no cocaine but would I like to buy some cheap heroin. Here was the opportunity to really go to town. Every screwball pre-code comedy I need to see from best to worst (there is no worst). Film noir lists, westerns, top one hundreds, top one thousands! And all the time on the front page all these new films keep popping up and are shepherded towards the burgeoning watch list. Every six months or so I empty the watch list completely, hose it down and start to fill it up anew (sometimes with the same titles as before).

I mention Fight Club because Ed Norton’s IKEA-inspired consumerism is something we might scoff at, but cultural consumerism is a thing as well. My window shopping on Letterboxd can creep into and disrupt my actual watching of movies. I’m scrolling through what else this director has done while I’m watching the film; instead of watching the film. Letterboxd holds out the ideal that we should watch all these films, but better still would be to have watched the films. Not to be experiencing them but to have experienced them. According to Letterboxd, I’ve watched 6983 films - already 132 this year. Some of these films I’ve watched several times. I’ve watched Casablanca and Star Wars multiple times. Double figures easy. But this makes me feel a bit ashamed: self-indulgent and unserious.

You see no one enjoys the prizes going by on the conveyor belt. We’re too busy trying to memorise them so that we can win them. Everything is geared to bring you back to an app and record your achievement. Stressed out by my phone use, I started meditating and downloaded an app to help, but then the app kept rewarding me if I meditated for a series of days and wouldn’t grant me shiny badges of virtual virtue if I skipped one or two. I found myself cheating. Putting on the timer while I was doing other things so I wouldn’t break my streak. I lied to my digital guru.

Ultimately, no one really gives a shit that you have the cultural equivalent of a fondue set and a cuddly toy. It’s nice to talk to like-minded people with similar interests, yes, but the chances of having to win a quotation battle with Ed Harris or put Agent Starling in her place with some quite unnecessary Marcus Aurelius rarely arrives.

And when it comes to movies what’s really interesting is when you meet people who make movies - with some exceptions - there are a lot of filmmakers, actors, producers - who don’t watch movies anywhere near as much as the average punter. The most embarrassing moment in interviews is when you tell someone their work reminded you of x, y or z and they bridled (they think you’re accusing them of being unoriginal) and it becomes plain that they’ve not seen, perhaps not even heard of the film you’re talking about.

There is a myth that once upon a time Aristotle had read all the books that had been written. A. because he was a genius and B. because there were only seven or eight books in existence at the library. A was true but B wasn’t. This wish for some sort of completeness remains. This idea of mastery. Nowadays, there are more films and books, more media, more music created than ever before simply because there are more people than ever before with better technology to create and publish or broadcast their creations. And there’s more past now than there has ever been.

I have to be content with my content, but always excited for the new discovery. I have to be aware of what I’m watching right now, alert to the fact it might not get better so I could go to bed or for a walk, or go and read something, or meditate (21 days in a row!) None of my achievements means anything. None of the badges is real.

I’ve come to the point where I think I can slow down. I think I should stop watching stuff I don’t like simply to feel I’ve educated myself. I don’t have to watch all the new releases for instance, so I won’t. Not watching films is an important part of life as well.

After all, there are still a lot of books to read.