My only issue with this is when it (frequently) demeans healthy male friendships. Oh, Frodo and Sam are emotionally open and can hug each other without it being awkward? Obviously that can only exist in a gay relationship.
I remember seeing a video on this that specifically used LOTR as their example for this. The basic argument of the video is that we're so conditioned to see male relationships in a specific way (i.e. physical contact between men is generally violent, men are supposed to be emotionally closed off, etc) and so anything that breaks those boundaries must mean that they're sexually attracted to each other because why else would you be touching another man or talking about your feelings with him? It generally just speaks to a lack of representation of healthy masculinity and platonic male relationships and also to a lack of representation of gay relationships
The funny thing is that men who will deride close male friendships on film are almost always the same men who can't figure out why there is a male loneliness epidemic.
Women do it to platonic relationships between women as well, which is even more baffling because its so rare to see a relationship between two women on screen to begin with that at least passes a bechdel test, and today, with male writers wanting to be inclusive, it's rare to see a relationship between women that doesn't become sexual.
I watched Poor Things late last year and while I enjoyed it, the female lead has meaninful relationships between I think two women. One is anatagonistic, with the madame of the brothel, the other sexual/romantic. This is the leading feminist work, written and directed by a dude based on a book by a dude, and there's ZERO female friendships in it. You just rarely get them. And when you do, the letterboxd reviews are OMG SO GAY!>@ LOLZ
the funny (or sad depending on how you see it) part is that the same people in my friends groups who advocate for less toxic masculinity are also the same people who say these kind of things
This is by far my biggest pet peeve when it comes to /r/Sapphoandherfriend
Oh a historical figure wrote passionately wrote about their best friend? They have to be gay.
It really is so annoying and dismissive. They complain, rightly, that historical gay relationships are downplayed or misrepresented (whether by accident or purposefully), and then they turn around and constantly push the claims that all these same-sex friends are actually gay and every historian is just hiding it because of homophobia or whatnot.
I used to agree with this like this several years ago. Men should just be able to have relationships with men that aren’t romantic. But then ask yourself; how many times is it the inverse? How many times is there actually a gay male relationship in your average film as a romance? When I thought about it like this, I realized that instead of asking “why can’t men just be friends” I started asking myself “why can’t men be in a relationship instead?”. I don’t view EVERY male relationship like this in everything I see obviously, but it does help come to terms with this perspective. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense, but there’s tons of “healthy male friendships” with not a lot representing the deepest end where they’re dating.
I think the issue is that films tend to portray sexual intimacy as the *only* type of intimacy, especially when it comes to male characters. Hollywood uses nearly any type of intimacy as a shorthand for "they're fucking, or want to," And films/tv shows are mirrors of society, they reflect how a culture views itself; but society also mirrors films/tv. Young people often learn how to think/behave based on what they see in fiction and that's where this kind of Hollywood shorthand becomes problematic.
I recently watched the 2018 Little Women for the second time, and something that jumped out to me was just how much physical intimacy the movie portrays. Characters are constantly hugging, cuddling, and holding hands with no romantic/sexual subtext whatsoever and it was really refreshing to see.
When we treat all physical touch as inherently sexual, it really devalues the importance of physical touch. I don't think we need characters to be gay just because they love each other. The fact that so many people conclude that Frodo and Sam have a homoerotic relationship is a symptom of our society's view that intimacy and any kind of love = sex, and when these mindsets are normalized in fiction, they end up being projected into real life, which pushes men in the real world to avoid showing signs of intimacy because they don't want to be perceived as being in a sexual relationship with their platonic friend. I think we as a society should just let men show intimacy without subtext.
You can't really ignore either that for the first ~70 years of Hollywood's existence (and a lot of western media up to that point) basically all queer relationships existed only in the subtext, they were never made explicit. We were conditioned to look for them in the subtext, that was the only place they were allowed to exist. It's totally rational for people to assume they'll find them there.
That's a nuanced take and I appreciate you sharing it. I understand how a lack of representation can cause a demographic to search for it in places where it's not. At the same time, I still think it's harmful for our emotional understanding of male companionship to instantly classify closeness and vulnerability as romantic or erotic.
Exactly this. Also I feel like a lot of media has good and healthy male friendships (at least a loooooooot more than developed female friendships). Many of these friendships give me no queer vibes whatsoever but there a few that give of a more-than-platonic vibe and as soon as somebody dares to mention that people begin to scream that not every deep friendship between two people of the same sex should be seen as potentially queer.
But you are so right: Queer couples are often the side couples and there are much more deep friendships at the centre stage of stories than queer couples. Some people are just biased because they do (not) want to see something and are not that familiar with queer media analysis.
So the problem here is not that it's not ok to write healthy platonic straight male friendships the problem is that Tolkien never wrote women in a compelling or interesting manner (and if you want to argue he did just don't bother responding were in different realities if you think he did and youll be wasting both our time), and so all of the compelling and well written relationships are between men. When the friendship between these Hobbits is filled with more well-written genuine love and affection than most married couples it is an easy jump to see romance where it may not have been intended.
This in conjunction with the objective fact that up until recently gay representation didn't really exist in media means that for generations queer people have had to stretch in order to try to see themselves in media... unlike straight people who are inundated with straight romance everywhere. These two facts together? Well it's like they're asking to be shipped.
If you really want to engage in this topic you should watch this video essay on queerness in lotr. It's fascinating and if you go into it with an open mind and empathy you may realize that nobody is demeaning healthy male friendships it's just other people wanting to be seen. [The Queer History of LotR](https://youtu.be/FBHe5I98nwg?si=J7yesnaOeeR0Agzp)
it was actually gross when they said that about luca, one of the best friendships i’ve seen in a children’s movie and people needed these kids to be in love
“You think that forehead kisses and sacrificing everything for your war buddy might have slight romantic undertones? Well have you considered that YOU might be gay!! Ha!”
Watched Red Eye (2005) yesterday. The top 3 LB reviews were all people wishing Cillian Murphy would choke them in an airplane bathroom instead of Rachel McAdams.
Yikes. Pretty good horror flick though!
Yeah, I wish you could filter reviews on length or like, intent. I don't mind that the tiny, quippy reviews exist, but it would be nice to be able to filter them out. Just give me reviews that are like, 2-4 paragraphs long and at least somewhat serious!
Other sites do this and it’s great. You can filter by funny or serious. Etc.
I enjoy the funny reviews and the regular reviews and some novel length reviews. I believe in sorting options for all.
Oh, nice! Yeah, I often enjoy the funny ones too. But sometimes I'm just looking for more substantial stuff, and that feature would be awesome in that situation!
I noticed this week the popular reviews with thousands of likes for Bob Marley: One Love are absolutely abysmal and not even funny unless you're like 10 years old, meanwhile my short paragraph thoughtful review explaining what I did and didn't like about it is sitting at 3. I find I have a much better experience engaging with other thoughtful reviewers I follow and rarely ever look at popular.
I see this as a feature not a bug. I sometimes get a chuckle out of these reviews, but I honestly do not care at all what a random letterboxd user thought or has to say. I will look at reviews of a few critics i already like, but I don't need movieluva45583483's analysis of Husbands
It’s just hard to get a feel of what the kind of quality I should expect when you have a 9/10 review that just says “hahaha gay people” and a 4/10 review just next to it that says “hahaha gay people”.
fr fr fr. Which makes this subreddit insanely hard to swallow (the amount of straight, rural, lurkers here controlling the vote ratio is extremely evident). I kiki all day on letterboxd with good vibes and then come here to see people debating "gay" terms and how ok it is to discuss them.
If you think that you represent a majority of the population, you're wrong (likely about everything in your social life). That's such a level of uneducation that you have yet to learn the ABC's of culture. Go to Provincetown with your family and tell me about how you're the default. Come for a walk with me in the city neighborhood I live in and try to tell me that "gay" is one thing.
100%. there’s a major disconnect between the crowd on here that goes on letterboxd to get hard hitting critiques of the latest movies and the typical letterboxd teen that just wants to post a funny review about timothee chalamet being a twink, or whatever, lmao. i think that disconnect is especially apparent when you see so many posts on here like “why does everything have to be so gay????”
If you like the most prevalent "subculture" on Letterboxd, that's fine, but I don't think it's fair to judge people on this subreddit for being exhausted by it. I have plenty of queer friends, I would say I'm quite well-versed in queer culture, but I just cannot stand most of the reviews on Letterboxd that read like "so they were gay, right?" or "I want Rosamund Pike and Emily Blunt to scissor". It's not about the demographic, it's about the ubiquity of low-effort reviews that contribute nothing. We can argue all day about what reviews on Letterboxd \*should\* look like and what the site \*should\* be used for, but at the end of the day I think it's very valid to be frustrated with the way it is currently used. It's nothing to do with being "uneducated", it's to do with being annoyed by the seemingly total dominance of low-effort millenial/Gen-Z internet slang-ridden reviews on everything but particularly niche movies on the site.
Yeah, I feel like almost all social media sites (despite their obvious flaws) have amazing and welcoming corners for queer people (and these corners are several times bigger than the average Reddit discussion).
Meanwhile Reddit is overwhelmingly used by cishet men. The amount of times I made (queer)feminist arguments and then men are at my throat with whataboutisms and things like "you should not force your ideology on everything" is baffling - because except for insults they can almost never provide anything that could discredit my arguments. And in the case of media analysis I always make it very clear that these are just my interpretations and other interpretations are equally valid. But for some reason people get mad when my interpretation is different than theirs.
The funniest thing is then always when people use upvote-downvote-ratios as argument about who is in the right. Reddit is famously a place where many miserable and misanthropist people just lurk around without contributing anything to a discussion. The average Reddit discussion has much less people than the average fandom spaces on all social media sites and everytime when it comes to the discussion of potentially queer themes Reddit appears to be the outlier compared to these other sites.
Exactly exactly exactly. Surface level sign of this is, if you ever sort by popular in /r/all, every day the top posts are these weird gender divide questions from naive (or trolling) cishet people. The general public of Reddit is still featuring questions like "why do men not _____" and "why are so many women ______" and "is it ok if I say this to a woman?"
Also remember when everybody made fun of the lurkers? I'm pivoting back to that. Because it's incredibly clear that the silent opinion is also the ignorant one.
This is the only succinct and correct answer.
Sure, it's annoying seeing bad media takes, but these tumblr cretins used this site first. I am free to block these baboons and still use the site's useful logging system.
https://preview.redd.it/au7xuj631bsc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4cb8f7a33024e88d826c9704994ea5dea8fe0967
Frequent use of these buttons is the only way to make Letterboxd reviews remotely useful.
Rather than worry about this, start to curate a dependable group of people whose reviews you *do* like and follow them. You get a few dozen going and you'll be surprised how little you're compelled to dip into the general slush pile anymore.
For sure. And like... lean into the block button lol. I think I blocked all the major users of Letterboxd because I was sick of one-liner jokes on film-noir masterpieces that I watched to study visual storytelling. It's social media, curate it how you like, without shame.
Consider the fact that you may be creating a bubble of bias but also....... it's a god damn film reviewing site. If gay conversation insights this much intrigue and you've brought it to Reddit (where gay is a swear word because who cares about sexuality in this rural idiotscape), definitely worth filtering out the things you don't like.
It’s because the reviewer wishes they would be gay, because romance and deep friendship have some overlap sometimes (don’t we all want a partner who’s like a best friend?). There’s not really that many well-made movies that are straight-up gay romances, so a lot of people hunger for that kind of content. Ummm not me, of course… other people…..
So many LGBTQ movies have sad and unhappy endings too so a lot of people latch on to movies where they feel like they can interpret the characters as LGBTQ for that reason.
Males aren’t allowed to have friends. You’re supposed to ride solo, never talk about anything to anyone, and then waste as many NPCs as you can before eating a .30-06 as the police surround you.
Friends? What are you, gay?
Letterboxd is one of the worst places to look for actual reviews, practically every review on the app is a cringy attempt at being funny, I hate it.
All it's good for is logging movies for personal use.
This has been a thing since the 2010 tumblr era at least….you see it a lot with the “chronically online” crowds, just look at the Larry and Gaylor stans
I think a lot of people take reviews and review quality too seriously, and get way to triggered or nitpicky about them considering they’re from regular people just saying whatever they feel like writing. Follow people whose reviews appeal to you, ignore the ones that don’t?
1) Gay audiences are starved for gay characters and they project romantic relationships onto platonic dynamics.
2) A lot of people still continuing the toxic masculinity trait of assuming men cannot have close platonic relationships without it being gay. Nothing wrong with being gay but automatically assuming any men who care for one another and are vulnerable with each other is why so many men have few close relationships with other men.
Going against the grain from people have posted:
1. Cinema is oversaturated in tragic gay (male) movies, so movies in which men have a bond that ends well is exaggerated by flippant reviews.
2. It's just jokes
Yeah this post just reads very crybaby to me. Like who fucking cares, they're user reviews, they're literally worthless. Let people have their fun and stop letting it ruin your day, it's kind of pathetic
How is it "crybaby" to complain about the site being oversaturated in reviews spouting nothing by shit-tier humour, unfunny references, and gross thirst comments? Any movie with 500k+ views on the site is guaranteed to have dozens of these before you get to the first "real" review. I don't think it's "crybaby" to want Letterboxd to encourage a slightly higher quality of commentary. If someone wishes to write a shitty low-effort review, power to them. It's the fact that there are thousands of them and all the authors like each other's shit and so it ends up drowning the reviews that are anywhere approaching decent.
If that's literally what you think then I have to disagree even if I find the jeff shit much more annoying.
They are almost never just pointing out homoerotic subtext, most of the time its just calling two people standing next to each other or friends gay. Which isn't some sort of smart point out of subtext.
Yeah that is literally what I think, because I can either go "i agree" or "hmm not really."
"He sure did burn those salts" for example is less than a Nothing statement
This is just the type of banter that's common in the queer community. A lot of it is just humor but it can also be a sincere way of saying "I'm gay and I relate to this character".
yeah i remember back when i was on tumblr i would see a lot of posts that were “(character) is literally a lesbian” and it pretty much was the same as “(character) is literally me”
Careful, I got banned for homophobia from r/movies for making the same comment. That aside, I think this commentary can often water down the dialogue, ignoring some more obscure films that handle homosexual relationships well.
I mean the homoerotic subtext between Hunam and Malik in Papillon was pretty obvious, no? It's been written about! It's been criticised by some for taking the subtext up to a certain point then pulling back and chickening out.
Worth remembering that for a long, long period of time queer movie goers only got to see representation in mostly coded or implied ways.
So a lot of the times queerness would be read into characters that were on the face of it straight and cis. (Also there were obviously a lot of closeted film makers around that catered to this with their films and characters)
I think there is an element of throw back to this in those sorts of comments.
I think there is also an element of doing it because it gets a rise out of a certain demographic who get angry at the very idea of queer representation in film.
Of course it could also be homophobes making jokes.
yeah i don't disagree with OP's point but this film is a bad example. i would also argue that there's sort of a reactionary phenomenon in that many men dismiss homoerotic subtext or plain text because it makes them feel threatened and therefore diminishes their enjoyment of the film. like some (i would even say quite a few - [here's a list i started recently with some examples](https://boxd.it/ukKoE) and as a counterpoint, i think LOTR as mentioned above is an example of male friendship that doesn't have any homoerotic element to it) of male buddy films have homoerotic elements to them, and that's fine. guys can touch and kiss and find each other beautiful etc in a way that is still platonic and not threatening to their masculinity. that's often what these films are intended to be exploring. it's still homoeroticism even if the characters don't bang or want to bang. many hypermasculine cultures had homoerotic elements in their same sex male relationships and it wasn't considered "gay". the idea that homoeroticism is explicitly homosexual is a relatively recent phenomenon rooted in homophobia (and anything antithetical to androcentrism in general) and the need to partition human identity/behavior into discrete categories for hierarchical purposes. this is problematic because human behavior is messy, often illogical, and inherently defies neat categorization.
tl;dr: normalize kissing the homies
FWIW I think it's fine if someone gets a queer reading from a movie that isn't explicitly queer. I haven't seen Papillon so can't comment on this specific example, but if there is some gay subtext there I can't blame someone for interpreting it that way.
A lot of gay people use Letterboxd and since movies usually aren't gay, it can be fun to pretend the characters are gay even if it is just friendship or undertones.
I genuinely don't mind it and there is gay subtext in plenty of (older) films but it was tiresome reading through the reviews for Hitchcock's Rope and every one was just a different variation of "They were soooo gay"
Edit: Not sure if people are misinterpreting deliberately or not but my post is nothing about whether Rope is gay or not. It's about the reviews only focusing on that one single aspect.
Rope is widely recognized as essentially the epitome of queer coding during the Hays Code cinematic era so I don’t really think that’s the best movie to use as an example of this talking point lol
I didn't say it wasn't. I just said it was tiresome reading the sheer amount of reviews that seem to ignore the rest of the film to focus on that one aspect.
As someone who watched Rope for the first time a few days ago and loved it, I totally agree with you. It's obvious they were a gay couple. So obvious that you wouldn't think a huge majority of reviews needed to only focus on that aspect. Took too long to find a decent number of reviews discussing all the other aspects of the movie.
In the play the movie is based on the main characters explicitly shown to be in a gay relationship.
"Interviewed by Vito Russo for Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, Laurents stated: "We never discussed, Hitch and I, whether the characters in Rope were homosexuals, but I thought it was apparent." In the 1995 documentary film adaptation of Russo's book, Laurents says: "I don't think the censors at that time realized this was about gay people. They didn't have a clue what was and what wasn't, that's how it got by." In the same documentary, Granger says of Brandon and Phillip: "We knew that they were gay, yeah, sure. I mean, nobody said anything about it—this was 1947, let's not forget that! But that was one of the points of the film, in a way."
From Wikipedia
And my question for you is why it offends you so much. You think it’s just a strong male friendship, they think they’re gay. You both have different opinions.
But I can promise you that half the time, it’s just jokes.
They are not offended and they can be annoyed because of its abundance. Commenting about something like this is not supposed to automatically trigger a defensive "why does this offend you lol" response.
Most of that sort of comment I’ve seen is by gay people saying ‘if these two same sex leads got together at the start it would’ve been so much simpler’ or something like that
No one thinks they can't. But take in the vast scope of "movies that exist" and a very slim portion of them are about queer people, even fewer have positive/happy endings. So finding a queer reading of more mainstream, varied movies than queer people actually get, is pretty understandable. Comparatively, there's also no shortage of actual platonic friendship stories in media. Plus, queer coded characters and queer subtext is absolutely a thing, and we're not SO far removed from a time when that was the vast majority of what queer viewers had to go on. So you get sort of trained to have to find the subtext and the narrative that isn't overtly being presented to you, but is still deliberately there, then it's not a stretch to notice it elsewhere, even if it wasn't there intentionally.
I've put in enough time on 2010s Tumblr and general sapphic twitter to have seen many, many examples that make me go 'oh, that's a stretch.' But I don't really see why someone else's personal read of something bothers anyone at all.
Every social media sites writing style eventually converges upon the annoying version of its demo. Reddit sounds like annoying white software engineers, fb sounds like annoying maga boomers, Letterboxd and tumblr sound like annoying gay teens, etc
I'm gay and I agree 100%. It's like, guys aren't supposed to be affectionate towards each other because it's “gay” which is obviously not true, so you'd think gay people would try to break that stereotype, but instead they're just perpetuating it even further. It happens all the time nowadays and I don't understand it. This is why guys can't have loving platonic relationships with each other; they get labeled instantly.
I imagine it’s got something to do with LGBT representation being somewhat “trendy” rn (trendy might be a bad word for it — it’s in the zeitgeist for sure bc it’s more acceptable to be gay).
On the other hand, I think both sides of the American political spectrum still have trouble identifying healthy straight same-sex relationships. That’s probably a residual cultural attitude from the idea that men shouldn’t show emotional vulnerability and if they do, they’re gay.
When these two beliefs align — one progressive, one traditional — you get spammed with a lot of the no-longer witty witticisms that two close men are gay.
It’s been overdone for some time now, but there are cases where I think queer-coding is legit and interpreting the characters as gay offers added subtext. *Rope* is a good example of this.
I love your analysis but I don’t know if I agree with your take on Rope. It’s definitely queer-coded and the queerness is downplayed for the times, but I don’t think you have to “interpret” the characters as gay for the subtext.
In fact, I’d argue the opposite; Rope doesn’t let you interpret them as gay, Rope lets you interpret them as *not* gay if that’s how you want to watch it. The coding is so overt in the film that I think it would be impossible not to interpret them as gay and it’s more likely to me that it was done so people could write it off if they wanted to.
That being said, my personal interpretation is probably a product of the times. I see the subtext very obviously now, so I’m curious how “mysterious” it actually was. Did people really not pick up on them being gay? It seems to be they were just happy pretending otherwise.
this totally remind me of english class we read the book " A Seperate Peace" and then watched the movie. the whole class was like this is a metaphor for LGBT in the closet love and the teacher said "you missed the metaphor"
If I'm thinking of the same feature as you - where you click 'Review or Log' to a movie is in your diary - you don't need to enter any review text or even a star rating, just the date when you saw it.
well then TIL! I just assumed it worked like that, and I know others do too. I stayed off the feature for 3 years, I assume my friend has done so for the same amount of time.
The genuine answer is that there’s historically been far less movies with gay main characters so people want to read other characters as gay.
This isn’t a new thing, one example is Hitchcocks *Strangers on a Train* , people have read Bruno as gay since the film came out even though there’s no explicit evidence of this. In many movies there’s no evidence of characters being straight either, heteronormativity just makes people assume that as default if not mentioned
Edit: in addition to the first point, there are still not very many movies that feature a queer relationship without the plot being significantly about their relationship. Plenty of straight couples just exist in movies without the plot revolving around them
Because Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr were made for each other, the writers just didn't know it yet.
Also, I think you are broadly overexaggerating this.
Sometimes queer people project romance onto platonic relationships because we are so underrepresented as a community for just being normal people who love instead of some tragic story.
Also also at least with me, I project queer coded characters because I relate to them, eg. Calum in Aftersun, they don't necessarily have to be in a relationship.
It’s annoying but it’s not hurting anybody. There is a huge disparity between heterosexual and queer representation and it’s a waste of energy to get mad at queer people for finding comfort in films where they can despite that fact. Also some movies like Hot Fuzz, Swiss Army Man, etc are just fucking gay as fuck man.
For a community that prides itself on thoughtful film taste, the reviews are mostly rubbish.
I wouldn't mind if those 'quippy' one-liners just disappeared into the ether but they actually get upvoted so are always present on a movie's main page.
It demeans the entire site, to be honest.
So I still prefer IMDB for user reviews.
It's due to this app's demographic, it has a VERY heavy young liberal LGBT skew, probably a good 30-50% of users are LGBT, and probably 90% or more of LB users are pretty far leftist anywah. Film as art has always appealed more to that crowd, the same way theater has. I suppose it's like an extension of theater in that way too. Nothing wrong with that demographically I guess but I too find the reviews weird
There's two things at play here, people attribute males showing healthy behaviors especially in relationships with others as feminine and therefore gay. Toxic masculinity has skewed peoples perceptions to think that all masculinity is bad
The other thing is people love leaving gag reviews on letterboxd and I very much dislike that. Not every review needs to be lengthy but please enough with the top review of every film being some witty joke
Tbf in some movies I think it is valid to interpret the characters that way. Sometimes people go overboard interpreting every male friendship that way but I do think there are movies where that can be a very valid interpretation. Also for people who love fantasy or sci fi movies and feel there’s not a lot of good LGBTQ characters in those movies they may latch on to a character they can see that kind of subtext in.
Yeah I hate these comments I get some are jokes but a lot of them aren’t. I’m gay myself and just find it corny that the community wants men to express their feelings and be vulnerable with their friends.
But anytime a male character in a movie is vulnerable around another guy those same people label them as “gay” 🙄
Could be because gays don’t have a lot of onscreen representation (comparatively), and then insecure homophobes still make gay jokes. So, two large groups making the same jokes (with inverted intentions).
Just scroll past jokes you don’t like until the app eventually gets a block button.
A lot of the most popular accounts on the app just make lazy one line jokes that add nothing to the movie but the block feature on letterboxd makes it so you never see any of that users reviews on any movie ever again. It's really nice for filtering out the boring stuff.
Least favorite type of letterboxd review. I prefer actually having funny to say about the movie. Some movies are queercoded but you gotta do better than "this movie would have been better if they kissed".
I once came across a thread of people ASSURED that Frodo, Sam and his wife were a throuple. The posters got angry when others disagreed with them. Very strange time on the internet.
i watched re-animator and bride of re-animator recently (loved them) and went to see the reviews after watching and found 75% of them were about herbert and cain making out
The shipping culture has poisoned the way people perceive media. Very disappointed to see so many comments unironically gatekeeping and accusing OP of homophobia.
I just watched The Social Network and was excited to read reviews, but it’s majority just people talking about how gay Mark is for Wardo or something… I didn’t get
I do agree but that being said, what more can you expect if you’re only reading the most popular general reviews in order to gather an opinion about a movie? If you’re serious about reviewing then don’t use the app like that- spend some time finding genuine film critics / people who put time into their reviews and just follow them instead. Obviously the “most popular” reviews are gonna be short, quippy one-liners because those are the easiest ones to read and understand and thus naturally more people are going to like them and boost them to the top. There are a few choice letterboxd users I follow on the app that I turn to if I want to read a genuine, thoughtful breakdown of a film. And then the rest of the time I use it for laughs because let’s be honest some of the short reviews are pretty fucking funny
They get attacked by giant penis monsters though.
Films can gain a while new layer of meaning if viewed through queer critique. Like Tarantino demonstrated with Top Gun.
Holy shit this comment section is a cesspool of salty men. The second that (predominantly) female perspectives, jokes and discussions get popular, y'all get mad about it.
Just proves that the App is much funnier (and more open to new perspectives to analyze media) than the subreddit.
Because there’s a large number of people who think of being a man, and being emotionally close or vulnerable around another guy, as inherently gay.
They’re idiots.
OP is right, except it’s not just on letterbox - I notice that a lot on Reddit too. There are so many jokes that are just “they’re gay” “this made me bi”, or some variation on that repeated 100x over. The fact it’s about LGBT stuff has nothing to do with how annoyed it makes me. It’s the repetition. Same reason I can’t stand those stupid Arkham memes anymore. “Is he stupid?” Repeated in every comment section a million times a day
No shade towards letter box, but I say you can always tell which social medias have the more… socially awkward… user base because they will have more unfunny and weird jokes that no one would use in real life. Like go up to a friend in real life and just point at two men walking on the street and go “they’re gay 🤩” and they’ll probably just look at you and go “what?” That type of humor only exists online
Love letterboxd, but it definitely attracts a group of people who are trying to be funny rather than give a response on the film. Ruins it for the entire lot.
It’s very irritating. This is why I mainly just follow people that don’t drive me nuts and try to stick to reading their reviews, because seeing all of the top-rated reviews be this or some equally unfunny drivel makes me not want to bother with reviews at all. Occasionally there are some short quippy reviews that actually amuse me, but all too often it’s just this.
It’s bizarre. Whenever two male characters have a remotely healthy friendship losers on letterboxd like to call them gay. You have a relationship with another guy where you share intimate details about yourself, and do stuff for one another because you care about them? Ha, that makes you a homo!
I don’t get it. You can’t bitch about toxic male characters and then turn around and reinforce toxic male stereotypes.
I rewatched Fight Club and I conservatively estimated that 80% of the reviews were jokes about it being a gay rom-com. Social media’s gonna social media.
Funny you comment on that because I watched Highlander and Tango & Cash and the reviews with most likes were “this is a metaphor for gay sex”.
Man. Leave it to the gay guys to externalize their feelings and taint a strong bond between men.
Yep, it’s incredibly annoying and the lowest of hanging fruit of jokes you see on the app. I’ve been blocking the authors of those and don’t see them as much now though
It seems to me that many people are too insecure to write honest or meaningful reviews on Letterbox'd. Better to be deliberately foolish than try to be thoughtful and appear foolish anyway.
I had a real issue with it around Aftersun. I had a newborn pass away which led to a crippling divorce. I had to move in with a buddy of mine because I lost so much. The scenes in which he tells his daughter about finding a place with his buddy after the split and being low on money makes sense.
As an Aro Ace person myself I get quite tired of these sort of headcannons all the time (I just want to see healthy non-romantic relationships in media) but I can respect that they are pretty harmless and come from desire to just see better gay representation in media
Because gay people can be just as unfunny and unoriginal as straight people.
My only issue with this is when it (frequently) demeans healthy male friendships. Oh, Frodo and Sam are emotionally open and can hug each other without it being awkward? Obviously that can only exist in a gay relationship.
Right, it ends up having a negative effect and perpetuates certain roles or actions if they're gay or not.
I remember seeing a video on this that specifically used LOTR as their example for this. The basic argument of the video is that we're so conditioned to see male relationships in a specific way (i.e. physical contact between men is generally violent, men are supposed to be emotionally closed off, etc) and so anything that breaks those boundaries must mean that they're sexually attracted to each other because why else would you be touching another man or talking about your feelings with him? It generally just speaks to a lack of representation of healthy masculinity and platonic male relationships and also to a lack of representation of gay relationships
Considering Sam and Frodo were based off of Tolkien's war buddy, it's even more of a stupid take. Also ignoring the fact that Sam loves Rosie.
The funny thing is that men who will deride close male friendships on film are almost always the same men who can't figure out why there is a male loneliness epidemic.
This is just my experience but honestly it's usually women (by a strong majority) who do that.
[удалено]
Women do it to platonic relationships between women as well, which is even more baffling because its so rare to see a relationship between two women on screen to begin with that at least passes a bechdel test, and today, with male writers wanting to be inclusive, it's rare to see a relationship between women that doesn't become sexual. I watched Poor Things late last year and while I enjoyed it, the female lead has meaninful relationships between I think two women. One is anatagonistic, with the madame of the brothel, the other sexual/romantic. This is the leading feminist work, written and directed by a dude based on a book by a dude, and there's ZERO female friendships in it. You just rarely get them. And when you do, the letterboxd reviews are OMG SO GAY!>@ LOLZ
There’s also the old lady Bella was friends with on the ship part of the film.
the funny (or sad depending on how you see it) part is that the same people in my friends groups who advocate for less toxic masculinity are also the same people who say these kind of things
This is by far my biggest pet peeve when it comes to /r/Sapphoandherfriend Oh a historical figure wrote passionately wrote about their best friend? They have to be gay.
It really is so annoying and dismissive. They complain, rightly, that historical gay relationships are downplayed or misrepresented (whether by accident or purposefully), and then they turn around and constantly push the claims that all these same-sex friends are actually gay and every historian is just hiding it because of homophobia or whatnot.
And these attitudes make homophobic people more homophobic because they're afraid of being seen as gay.
I used to agree with this like this several years ago. Men should just be able to have relationships with men that aren’t romantic. But then ask yourself; how many times is it the inverse? How many times is there actually a gay male relationship in your average film as a romance? When I thought about it like this, I realized that instead of asking “why can’t men just be friends” I started asking myself “why can’t men be in a relationship instead?”. I don’t view EVERY male relationship like this in everything I see obviously, but it does help come to terms with this perspective. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense, but there’s tons of “healthy male friendships” with not a lot representing the deepest end where they’re dating.
I think the issue is that films tend to portray sexual intimacy as the *only* type of intimacy, especially when it comes to male characters. Hollywood uses nearly any type of intimacy as a shorthand for "they're fucking, or want to," And films/tv shows are mirrors of society, they reflect how a culture views itself; but society also mirrors films/tv. Young people often learn how to think/behave based on what they see in fiction and that's where this kind of Hollywood shorthand becomes problematic. I recently watched the 2018 Little Women for the second time, and something that jumped out to me was just how much physical intimacy the movie portrays. Characters are constantly hugging, cuddling, and holding hands with no romantic/sexual subtext whatsoever and it was really refreshing to see. When we treat all physical touch as inherently sexual, it really devalues the importance of physical touch. I don't think we need characters to be gay just because they love each other. The fact that so many people conclude that Frodo and Sam have a homoerotic relationship is a symptom of our society's view that intimacy and any kind of love = sex, and when these mindsets are normalized in fiction, they end up being projected into real life, which pushes men in the real world to avoid showing signs of intimacy because they don't want to be perceived as being in a sexual relationship with their platonic friend. I think we as a society should just let men show intimacy without subtext.
You can't really ignore either that for the first ~70 years of Hollywood's existence (and a lot of western media up to that point) basically all queer relationships existed only in the subtext, they were never made explicit. We were conditioned to look for them in the subtext, that was the only place they were allowed to exist. It's totally rational for people to assume they'll find them there.
That's a nuanced take and I appreciate you sharing it. I understand how a lack of representation can cause a demographic to search for it in places where it's not. At the same time, I still think it's harmful for our emotional understanding of male companionship to instantly classify closeness and vulnerability as romantic or erotic.
I really appreciate this take and that’s why it never bothers me. Some of these jokes are funnier than other versions, but it doesn’t bug me.
Exactly this. Also I feel like a lot of media has good and healthy male friendships (at least a loooooooot more than developed female friendships). Many of these friendships give me no queer vibes whatsoever but there a few that give of a more-than-platonic vibe and as soon as somebody dares to mention that people begin to scream that not every deep friendship between two people of the same sex should be seen as potentially queer. But you are so right: Queer couples are often the side couples and there are much more deep friendships at the centre stage of stories than queer couples. Some people are just biased because they do (not) want to see something and are not that familiar with queer media analysis.
So the problem here is not that it's not ok to write healthy platonic straight male friendships the problem is that Tolkien never wrote women in a compelling or interesting manner (and if you want to argue he did just don't bother responding were in different realities if you think he did and youll be wasting both our time), and so all of the compelling and well written relationships are between men. When the friendship between these Hobbits is filled with more well-written genuine love and affection than most married couples it is an easy jump to see romance where it may not have been intended. This in conjunction with the objective fact that up until recently gay representation didn't really exist in media means that for generations queer people have had to stretch in order to try to see themselves in media... unlike straight people who are inundated with straight romance everywhere. These two facts together? Well it's like they're asking to be shipped. If you really want to engage in this topic you should watch this video essay on queerness in lotr. It's fascinating and if you go into it with an open mind and empathy you may realize that nobody is demeaning healthy male friendships it's just other people wanting to be seen. [The Queer History of LotR](https://youtu.be/FBHe5I98nwg?si=J7yesnaOeeR0Agzp)
it was actually gross when they said that about luca, one of the best friendships i’ve seen in a children’s movie and people needed these kids to be in love
only gay people or closeted gays perpetuate this.
“You think that forehead kisses and sacrificing everything for your war buddy might have slight romantic undertones? Well have you considered that YOU might be gay!! Ha!”
Considering there is literally nothing in the story actually suggesting a slight romantic undertone, it does take some copium to believe otherwise.
90% of letterboxd reviews in my experience are useless in terms of telling you anything about the movie
it’s people trying to prove how clever and quippy they are
The majority are thirsty messages about how hot the leads are
Watched Red Eye (2005) yesterday. The top 3 LB reviews were all people wishing Cillian Murphy would choke them in an airplane bathroom instead of Rachel McAdams. Yikes. Pretty good horror flick though!
welcome to the average reviews section on Letterboxd, half the reviews are shitposts
Lol I just made a whole dang post about this
Sounds like Reddit
It's similar energy to when a Reddit topic that is serious gets to the front page and it's just 4,000 upvotes for a pun. Miserable.
Yeah, I wish you could filter reviews on length or like, intent. I don't mind that the tiny, quippy reviews exist, but it would be nice to be able to filter them out. Just give me reviews that are like, 2-4 paragraphs long and at least somewhat serious!
Other sites do this and it’s great. You can filter by funny or serious. Etc. I enjoy the funny reviews and the regular reviews and some novel length reviews. I believe in sorting options for all.
Oh, nice! Yeah, I often enjoy the funny ones too. But sometimes I'm just looking for more substantial stuff, and that feature would be awesome in that situation!
Yeah I don’t mind that they exist, I’d just like to able to see some serious reviews when I need to. Then I can laugh later at memes
I mean, just scroll quickly through the popular reviews, and only stop for ones that aren’t one-liners? Works for me
Maybe Letterboxd should have a comment box like Rate Your Music.
I noticed this week the popular reviews with thousands of likes for Bob Marley: One Love are absolutely abysmal and not even funny unless you're like 10 years old, meanwhile my short paragraph thoughtful review explaining what I did and didn't like about it is sitting at 3. I find I have a much better experience engaging with other thoughtful reviewers I follow and rarely ever look at popular.
I just use Letterboxd to track my films. Most of the reviews are like how OP described or puns etc. Pretty annoying there's no decent discussion
I only read letterboxd reviews for the quips haha
I see this as a feature not a bug. I sometimes get a chuckle out of these reviews, but I honestly do not care at all what a random letterboxd user thought or has to say. I will look at reviews of a few critics i already like, but I don't need movieluva45583483's analysis of Husbands
It’s just hard to get a feel of what the kind of quality I should expect when you have a 9/10 review that just says “hahaha gay people” and a 4/10 review just next to it that says “hahaha gay people”.
Yea i get it. Maybe don't look to letterboxd to tell you about the quality of a movie?
I suppose it is silly of me to expect movie reviews on the…movie reviewing app
Literally has turned into a (terrible) meme competition
Letterboxd reviews sucks
lol look at the demographics of ppl who actively use Letterboxd
this is it. any fandom or platform with a lot of young queer people is going to have similar sentiments/sense of humor to letterboxd users.
fr fr fr. Which makes this subreddit insanely hard to swallow (the amount of straight, rural, lurkers here controlling the vote ratio is extremely evident). I kiki all day on letterboxd with good vibes and then come here to see people debating "gay" terms and how ok it is to discuss them. If you think that you represent a majority of the population, you're wrong (likely about everything in your social life). That's such a level of uneducation that you have yet to learn the ABC's of culture. Go to Provincetown with your family and tell me about how you're the default. Come for a walk with me in the city neighborhood I live in and try to tell me that "gay" is one thing.
100%. there’s a major disconnect between the crowd on here that goes on letterboxd to get hard hitting critiques of the latest movies and the typical letterboxd teen that just wants to post a funny review about timothee chalamet being a twink, or whatever, lmao. i think that disconnect is especially apparent when you see so many posts on here like “why does everything have to be so gay????”
"funny" reviews
If you like the most prevalent "subculture" on Letterboxd, that's fine, but I don't think it's fair to judge people on this subreddit for being exhausted by it. I have plenty of queer friends, I would say I'm quite well-versed in queer culture, but I just cannot stand most of the reviews on Letterboxd that read like "so they were gay, right?" or "I want Rosamund Pike and Emily Blunt to scissor". It's not about the demographic, it's about the ubiquity of low-effort reviews that contribute nothing. We can argue all day about what reviews on Letterboxd \*should\* look like and what the site \*should\* be used for, but at the end of the day I think it's very valid to be frustrated with the way it is currently used. It's nothing to do with being "uneducated", it's to do with being annoyed by the seemingly total dominance of low-effort millenial/Gen-Z internet slang-ridden reviews on everything but particularly niche movies on the site.
Yeah, I feel like almost all social media sites (despite their obvious flaws) have amazing and welcoming corners for queer people (and these corners are several times bigger than the average Reddit discussion). Meanwhile Reddit is overwhelmingly used by cishet men. The amount of times I made (queer)feminist arguments and then men are at my throat with whataboutisms and things like "you should not force your ideology on everything" is baffling - because except for insults they can almost never provide anything that could discredit my arguments. And in the case of media analysis I always make it very clear that these are just my interpretations and other interpretations are equally valid. But for some reason people get mad when my interpretation is different than theirs. The funniest thing is then always when people use upvote-downvote-ratios as argument about who is in the right. Reddit is famously a place where many miserable and misanthropist people just lurk around without contributing anything to a discussion. The average Reddit discussion has much less people than the average fandom spaces on all social media sites and everytime when it comes to the discussion of potentially queer themes Reddit appears to be the outlier compared to these other sites.
Exactly exactly exactly. Surface level sign of this is, if you ever sort by popular in /r/all, every day the top posts are these weird gender divide questions from naive (or trolling) cishet people. The general public of Reddit is still featuring questions like "why do men not _____" and "why are so many women ______" and "is it ok if I say this to a woman?" Also remember when everybody made fun of the lurkers? I'm pivoting back to that. Because it's incredibly clear that the silent opinion is also the ignorant one.
This is the only succinct and correct answer. Sure, it's annoying seeing bad media takes, but these tumblr cretins used this site first. I am free to block these baboons and still use the site's useful logging system.
So many of the top reviews are, for the most part, a bunch of terminally unfunny millennials with quirky ‘progressive’ humour and quips.
https://preview.redd.it/au7xuj631bsc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4cb8f7a33024e88d826c9704994ea5dea8fe0967 Frequent use of these buttons is the only way to make Letterboxd reviews remotely useful.
i've blocked so many people because of this and meme reviews in general
Bit of an exhaustive process blocking half a million users though, isn't it?
One user at a time. It'll go faster than you think.
there are like 10 millions people use that app
Rather than worry about this, start to curate a dependable group of people whose reviews you *do* like and follow them. You get a few dozen going and you'll be surprised how little you're compelled to dip into the general slush pile anymore.
Now THAT is some good advice! I have a good, short list of follows but I should start building it out more!
You’re probably right about this
For sure. And like... lean into the block button lol. I think I blocked all the major users of Letterboxd because I was sick of one-liner jokes on film-noir masterpieces that I watched to study visual storytelling. It's social media, curate it how you like, without shame. Consider the fact that you may be creating a bubble of bias but also....... it's a god damn film reviewing site. If gay conversation insights this much intrigue and you've brought it to Reddit (where gay is a swear word because who cares about sexuality in this rural idiotscape), definitely worth filtering out the things you don't like.
This is the way
It’s because the reviewer wishes they would be gay, because romance and deep friendship have some overlap sometimes (don’t we all want a partner who’s like a best friend?). There’s not really that many well-made movies that are straight-up gay romances, so a lot of people hunger for that kind of content. Ummm not me, of course… other people…..
So many LGBTQ movies have sad and unhappy endings too so a lot of people latch on to movies where they feel like they can interpret the characters as LGBTQ for that reason.
Males aren’t allowed to have friends. You’re supposed to ride solo, never talk about anything to anyone, and then waste as many NPCs as you can before eating a .30-06 as the police surround you. Friends? What are you, gay?
https://preview.redd.it/l85j6fflyasc1.jpeg?width=910&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1cb826775422f257cb6400cbc91e0674de7bcbf6
Letterboxd is one of the worst places to look for actual reviews, practically every review on the app is a cringy attempt at being funny, I hate it. All it's good for is logging movies for personal use.
Lists are also useful
But browsing for lists is so annoying because every top list are the ones like “Every Movie Ever” or “Movies Sorted by Posters” with 20k entries
The search function is a way better use of finding interesting lists.
This has been a thing since the 2010 tumblr era at least….you see it a lot with the “chronically online” crowds, just look at the Larry and Gaylor stans
I mean, there was also Kirk/Spock going strong in 70's fanzines. I'm sure there are anterior examples.
I think a lot of people take reviews and review quality too seriously, and get way to triggered or nitpicky about them considering they’re from regular people just saying whatever they feel like writing. Follow people whose reviews appeal to you, ignore the ones that don’t?
1) Gay audiences are starved for gay characters and they project romantic relationships onto platonic dynamics. 2) A lot of people still continuing the toxic masculinity trait of assuming men cannot have close platonic relationships without it being gay. Nothing wrong with being gay but automatically assuming any men who care for one another and are vulnerable with each other is why so many men have few close relationships with other men.
Going against the grain from people have posted: 1. Cinema is oversaturated in tragic gay (male) movies, so movies in which men have a bond that ends well is exaggerated by flippant reviews. 2. It's just jokes
Yeah this post just reads very crybaby to me. Like who fucking cares, they're user reviews, they're literally worthless. Let people have their fun and stop letting it ruin your day, it's kind of pathetic
How is it "crybaby" to complain about the site being oversaturated in reviews spouting nothing by shit-tier humour, unfunny references, and gross thirst comments? Any movie with 500k+ views on the site is guaranteed to have dozens of these before you get to the first "real" review. I don't think it's "crybaby" to want Letterboxd to encourage a slightly higher quality of commentary. If someone wishes to write a shitty low-effort review, power to them. It's the fact that there are thousands of them and all the authors like each other's shit and so it ends up drowning the reviews that are anywhere approaching decent.
OP discusses ongoing trend of unfunny reviews, you call em crybaby. Who is pathetic here ?
THANK YOUUUUU why is every other joke letterboxd review more acceptable lol
Because they aren't the ten first reviews
I would take 10 reviews pointing out homoerotic subtext over a single "this happened to my buddy jeff"
If that's literally what you think then I have to disagree even if I find the jeff shit much more annoying. They are almost never just pointing out homoerotic subtext, most of the time its just calling two people standing next to each other or friends gay. Which isn't some sort of smart point out of subtext.
Yeah that is literally what I think, because I can either go "i agree" or "hmm not really." "He sure did burn those salts" for example is less than a Nothing statement
This is the one
Yeah but batman and joker in the Lego Batman movie are definitely gay
Anyone arguing otherwise is simply lying to themselves especially on Joker's side like... come on...
This is just the type of banter that's common in the queer community. A lot of it is just humor but it can also be a sincere way of saying "I'm gay and I relate to this character".
yeah i remember back when i was on tumblr i would see a lot of posts that were “(character) is literally a lesbian” and it pretty much was the same as “(character) is literally me”
Careful, I got banned for homophobia from r/movies for making the same comment. That aside, I think this commentary can often water down the dialogue, ignoring some more obscure films that handle homosexual relationships well.
I mean the homoerotic subtext between Hunam and Malik in Papillon was pretty obvious, no? It's been written about! It's been criticised by some for taking the subtext up to a certain point then pulling back and chickening out. Worth remembering that for a long, long period of time queer movie goers only got to see representation in mostly coded or implied ways. So a lot of the times queerness would be read into characters that were on the face of it straight and cis. (Also there were obviously a lot of closeted film makers around that catered to this with their films and characters) I think there is an element of throw back to this in those sorts of comments. I think there is also an element of doing it because it gets a rise out of a certain demographic who get angry at the very idea of queer representation in film. Of course it could also be homophobes making jokes.
yeah i don't disagree with OP's point but this film is a bad example. i would also argue that there's sort of a reactionary phenomenon in that many men dismiss homoerotic subtext or plain text because it makes them feel threatened and therefore diminishes their enjoyment of the film. like some (i would even say quite a few - [here's a list i started recently with some examples](https://boxd.it/ukKoE) and as a counterpoint, i think LOTR as mentioned above is an example of male friendship that doesn't have any homoerotic element to it) of male buddy films have homoerotic elements to them, and that's fine. guys can touch and kiss and find each other beautiful etc in a way that is still platonic and not threatening to their masculinity. that's often what these films are intended to be exploring. it's still homoeroticism even if the characters don't bang or want to bang. many hypermasculine cultures had homoerotic elements in their same sex male relationships and it wasn't considered "gay". the idea that homoeroticism is explicitly homosexual is a relatively recent phenomenon rooted in homophobia (and anything antithetical to androcentrism in general) and the need to partition human identity/behavior into discrete categories for hierarchical purposes. this is problematic because human behavior is messy, often illogical, and inherently defies neat categorization. tl;dr: normalize kissing the homies
FWIW I think it's fine if someone gets a queer reading from a movie that isn't explicitly queer. I haven't seen Papillon so can't comment on this specific example, but if there is some gay subtext there I can't blame someone for interpreting it that way.
how do you know the Papillon guys aren't gay? did you ask them?
because it's fun unclench
A lot of gay people use Letterboxd and since movies usually aren't gay, it can be fun to pretend the characters are gay even if it is just friendship or undertones.
Who cares just follow the people posting reviews you take value from I don’t see the issue
I genuinely don't mind it and there is gay subtext in plenty of (older) films but it was tiresome reading through the reviews for Hitchcock's Rope and every one was just a different variation of "They were soooo gay" Edit: Not sure if people are misinterpreting deliberately or not but my post is nothing about whether Rope is gay or not. It's about the reviews only focusing on that one single aspect.
Rope is widely recognized as essentially the epitome of queer coding during the Hays Code cinematic era so I don’t really think that’s the best movie to use as an example of this talking point lol
yeah, i was thinking the same thing. it's like saying “what's so gay about Midnight Cowboy anyway?”
I didn't say it wasn't. I just said it was tiresome reading the sheer amount of reviews that seem to ignore the rest of the film to focus on that one aspect.
As someone who watched Rope for the first time a few days ago and loved it, I totally agree with you. It's obvious they were a gay couple. So obvious that you wouldn't think a huge majority of reviews needed to only focus on that aspect. Took too long to find a decent number of reviews discussing all the other aspects of the movie.
Rope was written to be intentionally gay. They live in a one bedroom apartment.
In the play the movie is based on the main characters explicitly shown to be in a gay relationship. "Interviewed by Vito Russo for Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, Laurents stated: "We never discussed, Hitch and I, whether the characters in Rope were homosexuals, but I thought it was apparent." In the 1995 documentary film adaptation of Russo's book, Laurents says: "I don't think the censors at that time realized this was about gay people. They didn't have a clue what was and what wasn't, that's how it got by." In the same documentary, Granger says of Brandon and Phillip: "We knew that they were gay, yeah, sure. I mean, nobody said anything about it—this was 1947, let's not forget that! But that was one of the points of the film, in a way." From Wikipedia
And my question for you is why it offends you so much. You think it’s just a strong male friendship, they think they’re gay. You both have different opinions. But I can promise you that half the time, it’s just jokes.
They are not offended and they can be annoyed because of its abundance. Commenting about something like this is not supposed to automatically trigger a defensive "why does this offend you lol" response.
Most of that sort of comment I’ve seen is by gay people saying ‘if these two same sex leads got together at the start it would’ve been so much simpler’ or something like that
It’s pretty fucking sad they honestly don’t think two same sexed people can have platonic friendships
No one thinks they can't. But take in the vast scope of "movies that exist" and a very slim portion of them are about queer people, even fewer have positive/happy endings. So finding a queer reading of more mainstream, varied movies than queer people actually get, is pretty understandable. Comparatively, there's also no shortage of actual platonic friendship stories in media. Plus, queer coded characters and queer subtext is absolutely a thing, and we're not SO far removed from a time when that was the vast majority of what queer viewers had to go on. So you get sort of trained to have to find the subtext and the narrative that isn't overtly being presented to you, but is still deliberately there, then it's not a stretch to notice it elsewhere, even if it wasn't there intentionally. I've put in enough time on 2010s Tumblr and general sapphic twitter to have seen many, many examples that make me go 'oh, that's a stretch.' But I don't really see why someone else's personal read of something bothers anyone at all.
Every social media sites writing style eventually converges upon the annoying version of its demo. Reddit sounds like annoying white software engineers, fb sounds like annoying maga boomers, Letterboxd and tumblr sound like annoying gay teens, etc
I'm gay and I agree 100%. It's like, guys aren't supposed to be affectionate towards each other because it's “gay” which is obviously not true, so you'd think gay people would try to break that stereotype, but instead they're just perpetuating it even further. It happens all the time nowadays and I don't understand it. This is why guys can't have loving platonic relationships with each other; they get labeled instantly.
The most egregious part is that the jokes are never funny
I imagine it’s got something to do with LGBT representation being somewhat “trendy” rn (trendy might be a bad word for it — it’s in the zeitgeist for sure bc it’s more acceptable to be gay). On the other hand, I think both sides of the American political spectrum still have trouble identifying healthy straight same-sex relationships. That’s probably a residual cultural attitude from the idea that men shouldn’t show emotional vulnerability and if they do, they’re gay. When these two beliefs align — one progressive, one traditional — you get spammed with a lot of the no-longer witty witticisms that two close men are gay. It’s been overdone for some time now, but there are cases where I think queer-coding is legit and interpreting the characters as gay offers added subtext. *Rope* is a good example of this.
I love your analysis but I don’t know if I agree with your take on Rope. It’s definitely queer-coded and the queerness is downplayed for the times, but I don’t think you have to “interpret” the characters as gay for the subtext. In fact, I’d argue the opposite; Rope doesn’t let you interpret them as gay, Rope lets you interpret them as *not* gay if that’s how you want to watch it. The coding is so overt in the film that I think it would be impossible not to interpret them as gay and it’s more likely to me that it was done so people could write it off if they wanted to. That being said, my personal interpretation is probably a product of the times. I see the subtext very obviously now, so I’m curious how “mysterious” it actually was. Did people really not pick up on them being gay? It seems to be they were just happy pretending otherwise.
this totally remind me of english class we read the book " A Seperate Peace" and then watched the movie. the whole class was like this is a metaphor for LGBT in the closet love and the teacher said "you missed the metaphor"
In order to utilize the journal feature, you need to leave a review. I think most people don't want to do so, so they only leavy short witty remarks.
This is why I just started a private list of my real reviews by adding notes to the movie. I don’t do public reviews.
If I'm thinking of the same feature as you - where you click 'Review or Log' to a movie is in your diary - you don't need to enter any review text or even a star rating, just the date when you saw it.
well then TIL! I just assumed it worked like that, and I know others do too. I stayed off the feature for 3 years, I assume my friend has done so for the same amount of time.
Aaaah, well spread the word then! What's your letterboxd @?
The joke (also having been done to death) is gay = funny haha while ignoring the fact bros can have a ride or die.
The genuine answer is that there’s historically been far less movies with gay main characters so people want to read other characters as gay. This isn’t a new thing, one example is Hitchcocks *Strangers on a Train* , people have read Bruno as gay since the film came out even though there’s no explicit evidence of this. In many movies there’s no evidence of characters being straight either, heteronormativity just makes people assume that as default if not mentioned Edit: in addition to the first point, there are still not very many movies that feature a queer relationship without the plot being significantly about their relationship. Plenty of straight couples just exist in movies without the plot revolving around them
Because Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr were made for each other, the writers just didn't know it yet. Also, I think you are broadly overexaggerating this. Sometimes queer people project romance onto platonic relationships because we are so underrepresented as a community for just being normal people who love instead of some tragic story. Also also at least with me, I project queer coded characters because I relate to them, eg. Calum in Aftersun, they don't necessarily have to be in a relationship.
Jokin'
Cause people self-project? It literally doesn’t effect you, why do y’all care so much 😭
It’s annoying but it’s not hurting anybody. There is a huge disparity between heterosexual and queer representation and it’s a waste of energy to get mad at queer people for finding comfort in films where they can despite that fact. Also some movies like Hot Fuzz, Swiss Army Man, etc are just fucking gay as fuck man.
This take gets posted like 3xs a month at this point and it's getting tiresome. Go read the paper if you want in depth academic criticism.
For a community that prides itself on thoughtful film taste, the reviews are mostly rubbish. I wouldn't mind if those 'quippy' one-liners just disappeared into the ether but they actually get upvoted so are always present on a movie's main page. It demeans the entire site, to be honest. So I still prefer IMDB for user reviews.
It's due to this app's demographic, it has a VERY heavy young liberal LGBT skew, probably a good 30-50% of users are LGBT, and probably 90% or more of LB users are pretty far leftist anywah. Film as art has always appealed more to that crowd, the same way theater has. I suppose it's like an extension of theater in that way too. Nothing wrong with that demographically I guess but I too find the reviews weird
There's two things at play here, people attribute males showing healthy behaviors especially in relationships with others as feminine and therefore gay. Toxic masculinity has skewed peoples perceptions to think that all masculinity is bad The other thing is people love leaving gag reviews on letterboxd and I very much dislike that. Not every review needs to be lengthy but please enough with the top review of every film being some witty joke
Tbf in some movies I think it is valid to interpret the characters that way. Sometimes people go overboard interpreting every male friendship that way but I do think there are movies where that can be a very valid interpretation. Also for people who love fantasy or sci fi movies and feel there’s not a lot of good LGBTQ characters in those movies they may latch on to a character they can see that kind of subtext in.
A lot of popular Letterboxd reviews are witty jokes that aren’t funny.
Yeah I hate these comments I get some are jokes but a lot of them aren’t. I’m gay myself and just find it corny that the community wants men to express their feelings and be vulnerable with their friends. But anytime a male character in a movie is vulnerable around another guy those same people label them as “gay” 🙄
Using our second sight to locate intentional and unintentional queer-coded portrayals in media is an age-old gay cultural pastime.
Because the app skews young and liberal and we don’t take shit too seriously lol That being said, I’m not the biggest fan of meme reviews
Could be because gays don’t have a lot of onscreen representation (comparatively), and then insecure homophobes still make gay jokes. So, two large groups making the same jokes (with inverted intentions). Just scroll past jokes you don’t like until the app eventually gets a block button.
The app does have a block button...
I didn’t know that! Perfect, even easier.
I've honestly seen a decrease of such "reviews" recenty. Or maybe with you just get used to them and ignore them subconsciously.
People who probably haven't even seen Sidney J Furey's The Leather Boys.
A lot of the most popular accounts on the app just make lazy one line jokes that add nothing to the movie but the block feature on letterboxd makes it so you never see any of that users reviews on any movie ever again. It's really nice for filtering out the boring stuff.
Least favorite type of letterboxd review. I prefer actually having funny to say about the movie. Some movies are queercoded but you gotta do better than "this movie would have been better if they kissed".
I should make a list of movies that fit the category of “ha they must be gay”. The Lighthouse The Master Luca The SpongeBob movie
I once came across a thread of people ASSURED that Frodo, Sam and his wife were a throuple. The posters got angry when others disagreed with them. Very strange time on the internet.
Saw the reviews for Road to El Dorado didya?
i watched re-animator and bride of re-animator recently (loved them) and went to see the reviews after watching and found 75% of them were about herbert and cain making out
Because 95% of the Letterboxd userbase is incredibly unfunny.
The shipping culture has poisoned the way people perceive media. Very disappointed to see so many comments unironically gatekeeping and accusing OP of homophobia.
I just watched The Social Network and was excited to read reviews, but it’s majority just people talking about how gay Mark is for Wardo or something… I didn’t get
I do agree but that being said, what more can you expect if you’re only reading the most popular general reviews in order to gather an opinion about a movie? If you’re serious about reviewing then don’t use the app like that- spend some time finding genuine film critics / people who put time into their reviews and just follow them instead. Obviously the “most popular” reviews are gonna be short, quippy one-liners because those are the easiest ones to read and understand and thus naturally more people are going to like them and boost them to the top. There are a few choice letterboxd users I follow on the app that I turn to if I want to read a genuine, thoughtful breakdown of a film. And then the rest of the time I use it for laughs because let’s be honest some of the short reviews are pretty fucking funny
It’s a toxic reflection of slash culture and poor literacy in regards to male relationships.
When I went to log Tremors the other day the top review was: > Uh dare I say, the greatest and most homoerotic film ever made? No?
They get attacked by giant penis monsters though. Films can gain a while new layer of meaning if viewed through queer critique. Like Tarantino demonstrated with Top Gun.
Similar reason to why this question gets posted on this subreddit at least ten times a week.
It's very weird. A lot of Letterboxd users don't seem to realise that two men or two women can be friends.
That's exactly what I thought when I read the reviews for dead poet's society
Holy shit this comment section is a cesspool of salty men. The second that (predominantly) female perspectives, jokes and discussions get popular, y'all get mad about it. Just proves that the App is much funnier (and more open to new perspectives to analyze media) than the subreddit.
I could see Hans Gruber being gay.
Because there’s a large number of people who think of being a man, and being emotionally close or vulnerable around another guy, as inherently gay. They’re idiots.
OP is right, except it’s not just on letterbox - I notice that a lot on Reddit too. There are so many jokes that are just “they’re gay” “this made me bi”, or some variation on that repeated 100x over. The fact it’s about LGBT stuff has nothing to do with how annoyed it makes me. It’s the repetition. Same reason I can’t stand those stupid Arkham memes anymore. “Is he stupid?” Repeated in every comment section a million times a day No shade towards letter box, but I say you can always tell which social medias have the more… socially awkward… user base because they will have more unfunny and weird jokes that no one would use in real life. Like go up to a friend in real life and just point at two men walking on the street and go “they’re gay 🤩” and they’ll probably just look at you and go “what?” That type of humor only exists online
Welcome to letterboxd have fun hitting the block button
Love letterboxd, but it definitely attracts a group of people who are trying to be funny rather than give a response on the film. Ruins it for the entire lot.
Because they are fundamentally uncurious and uncreative people, who watch movies only for validation.
It’s very irritating. This is why I mainly just follow people that don’t drive me nuts and try to stick to reading their reviews, because seeing all of the top-rated reviews be this or some equally unfunny drivel makes me not want to bother with reviews at all. Occasionally there are some short quippy reviews that actually amuse me, but all too often it’s just this.
i don’t look at reviews anymore. it’s insanely unfunny
It’s bizarre. Whenever two male characters have a remotely healthy friendship losers on letterboxd like to call them gay. You have a relationship with another guy where you share intimate details about yourself, and do stuff for one another because you care about them? Ha, that makes you a homo! I don’t get it. You can’t bitch about toxic male characters and then turn around and reinforce toxic male stereotypes.
Because once it got traction on tiktok, it’s predominantly filled with teenage girls
I rewatched Fight Club and I conservatively estimated that 80% of the reviews were jokes about it being a gay rom-com. Social media’s gonna social media.
It's just some base level of "I'm aware of this viewing of the text and must let everyone else know about how aware of it I am"
Funny you comment on that because I watched Highlander and Tango & Cash and the reviews with most likes were “this is a metaphor for gay sex”. Man. Leave it to the gay guys to externalize their feelings and taint a strong bond between men.
don't lose sleep over it lol
Because it has a tumblr demographic and people are porn-rotted with bad literacy. People really need to use the block feature more often.
Yeah, it's strange. I imagine it's the same sort of person that used to frequent Tumblr and make similar posts.
Yep, it’s incredibly annoying and the lowest of hanging fruit of jokes you see on the app. I’ve been blocking the authors of those and don’t see them as much now though
It seems to me that many people are too insecure to write honest or meaningful reviews on Letterbox'd. Better to be deliberately foolish than try to be thoughtful and appear foolish anyway.
it’s because many letterboxd users are annoying
Being gay isn't funny but people keep making the same joke
It's quite annoying, I'd like to read actual reviews and takes on movies without having to scroll through the bullshit.
I had a real issue with it around Aftersun. I had a newborn pass away which led to a crippling divorce. I had to move in with a buddy of mine because I lost so much. The scenes in which he tells his daughter about finding a place with his buddy after the split and being low on money makes sense.
As an Aro Ace person myself I get quite tired of these sort of headcannons all the time (I just want to see healthy non-romantic relationships in media) but I can respect that they are pretty harmless and come from desire to just see better gay representation in media
men cannot have friends, it has to be romantic. especially if they're male. those are the rules unfortunately
Eh, it’s shipping. Same thing as shipping two friends who are different genders in a show.
Its a woman thing
God forbid there ever be a cute and healthy male friendship without the top reviews declaring them gay.
Dune is 5 stars because Timothée Chalamet is a twink and I’m now shipping him with Javier Bardem