Fear of Pretentiousness

Your taste is not a form of social capital

Pretentiousness (noun) : the quality of trying to make yourself appear or sound more important or intelligent than you are

A love of film hinges on curiosity. It depends on a desire to explore new territory, experiences, and techniques, unobstructed by a fear of discomfort or lack of understanding. It requires an engagement with the unknown. This curiosity is not mandatory -- there isn’t anything wrong with looking to film for comfort and nothing more -- but a motivation to watch films outside of your comfort zone and to explore blind spots in your viewing habits is a productive practice. So why is there a cultural instinct to shame this curiosity? 

Over the past few weeks, a number of videos have blown up on X (Twitter) and TikTok mocking filmmakers’ and actors’ red carpet interviews with Letterboxd in which they are asked to list their favorite movies. The videos mock creatives for their so-called “pretentious” taste, often targeting older foreign films. 

This tendency to mock engagement with art outside of the American mainstream is exhausting and far from new. Films (and their fans) are likely to receive an unsubstantiated accusation of “pretentiousness” if they exist outside the relatively contemporary popular Hollywood canon, despite the fact that there is nothing inherently pretentious about a film that is not a part of this group. 

Pretentiousness is predicated on an intent to appear more intelligent or knowledgable than one actually is, but this term has become all-encompassing for both art that is not directly accessible to an incurious American audience and for the viewers that choose to explore this art. 

Without maintaining a distinction between performative and genuine engagement with art, we create an assumption that people engage with art solely to wield it over others’ head as a form of social capital. This assumption fosters a sentiment that suggests all art exists as a vehicle for promoting self-image, setting a dangerous precedent for us as audiences. Our viewing habits are narrowed and we create a culture that admonishes curiosity by creating a fear of pretentiousness. 

A primary reason that many view art as a form of social capital is our intense cultural desire for all media that we engage with to be intensely relatable. This obsession propagates the idea that our ability to relate to media dictates its value, leading to a refusal to engage with films that are experientially distant in any way and giving us a pejorative perspective towards those who engage with this distance curiously. 

Our obsession with relatability stems from the fact that art has been commodified and transformed into another axis for consumption, and capitalism requires that consumption be the basis of our self-expression. The products, brands, and images that we consume have become formative to our identities. This phenomenon narrows our standards for which films can be acceptably enjoyed without appearing pretentious. 

This is not to say that pretentiousness does not exist. There are those that purposefully diverge from these standards of consumption not out of curiosity, but out of a desire to gain pseudo-intellectual authority, adopting an illusion of sophistication to reap social benefits. Those who do this lend credence to accusations of pretension, and serve, in part, to give license to others to use the term as a weapon against less mainstream media. But the truly pretentious are akin to the accusers in that they see art as a commodity that dictates self-expression, a status symbol that stratifies the intellectual from the mainstream. Both the pretentious and their accusers cultivate a culture that criticizes exploring less-accessible media and labels a curiosity in doing so as merely a way to impress others. 

Imagine how much richer our lives would be if the dominating narrative encouraged us to seek out films that reflected unfamiliar experiences. In order to change this cultural narrative, we must overcome our fear of pretentiousness by engaging with art that demands more than passive and easy consumption and by understanding that discomfort is imperative to our own growth.