Ratcatcher or Beatnik? Seven Kinds of Movie-Watcher

Which one are you?

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

1. The Populist

You saw Dune: Part Two seven times in cinemas and believe Pulp Fiction is the greatest film of all time. Publicly, you praise PTA’s craft, but secretly, you find his latest films a little slow. You will always show up on the opening day for the latest Nolan picture and think Scorsese lost his touch after Wolf of Wall Street.

You are very active on Letterboxd, where you’ve logged 937 films, though you can’t remember most of these since you were simultaneously browsing Instagram Reels. You are extremely excited because your local IMAX is screening a 70MM print of The Dark Knight Rises next week. You’re not sure what 70MM is, but think it may have something to do with the screen size.

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2. The Ratcatcher

You hunt for the dankest, dirtiest, grimiest shit you can and revel in its filthy embrace.

Your hunting grounds are niche streaming platforms like Shudder (although you did emerge from your digital cave for a midnight screening of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future). You often fall asleep bathed in your laptop's sickly glow, playing a film called something like “Abattoir of Excess” at 480p.

No one has heard of any of the films in your top ten, and frankly, that’s for the best. The last person you recommended a horror flick to is still in therapy.

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3. The Beatnik

Obscure 1960s Western on terrestrial TV? Yes please! Niche erotic thriller Bare Witness? Count you in! Random German silent film thrown your way by YouTube’s algorithm? LFG!

Free love, baby. You don’t waste your time with best-of lists, and you couldn’t give a rat’s arse about ‘the canon.’ Genres, awards, and critics are all symptoms of a society structured around telling you what to think. Fuck them. You go with the flow and let Mother Nature do the work.

Since stumbling across John Carpenter’s They Live, you’re convinced it’s one of the most prescient films of the 20th century.

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4. The Acolyte

You are but a humble student of the greats. Kurosawa, Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Kubrick, Ozu—you ruthlessly devote yourself to their canon. You insist on viewing their films in chronological order, meaning you haven’t yet reached Fellini's late-career works, as they’re not available on 4K Blu-ray.

You take great pride in having conquered Scorsese’s ‘39 Foreign Films’ list.

You are the chairman and sole member of your town’s Hal Ashby Appreciation Society. You believe modern cinema is a dumpster fire, and anyone who sees a Marvel film is part of the problem.

You find a way to crowbar auteur theory into every conversation and are horrified by the idea of a ‘writer’s room.’

In your free time, you mainline James Gray interviews.

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5. The Connoisseur

A close cousin of the Acolyte, you devote yourself not to Great Men but to Great Eras.

You cut your teeth on the New Hollywood and removed the training wheels with the French New Wave. Flush with confidence, you began racking up the miles; crisply preserved DVDs, Blu-rays, and now 4K steelbooks of classics from New German Cinema, Italian Neorealism, and Danish Dogme sit proudly on your bookshelf (sorted by geographical era, then director, then chronological release date).

You consider yourself more of a cultural historian than a cinephile. After all, no one can seriously appreciate the films of Truffaut without understanding the role of Gaullism in French postwar politics.

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6. Moneyball

You tame the tumultuous chaos of the cinesphere with the iron yoke of metrics. Every film you watch is meticulously calculated and weighed against its alternatives.

You may start with every Oscar winner of the past 30 years or films that have grossed more than $50m domestically. Or perhaps you optimise for critical consensus, restricting yourself to movies boasting an 85+ Metacritic score.

You rarely waste your time with film criticism unless it comes quantified by a star rating or distilled into a best-of list.

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7. The Contrarian

Villeneuve was your guy until Dune was released, and now you think he’s a corporate hack. You hated the Transformers films at the time, but now tell everyone who listens that Michael Bay is the last great action filmmaker.

You love international movies, but not the ones that your friends have heard of. Parasite was by far Bong’s worst film (and most people misunderstood its real message anyway).

Movie date nights seem to have lost their appeal to your partner, possibly because you spent your last one lecturing them on Oppenheimer’s pseudo-intellectualism.

Every now and then, you’ll enthusiastically support a major release just to demonstrate your magnanimity. Recently, you’ve taken great pleasure in interrupting conversations at dinner parties to say, “Well, of course, Top Gun Maverick was marvelous entertainment — utterly brainless, but you can’t fault its ability to get the emotions pumping,” and then triumphantly leaning back to receive the hushed adulation of your peers.

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