When King Charles released an Apple Music playlist last week, I found it embarrassing. Whether it’s him, or Barack Obama, this kind of content curation now seems to be the last refuge of the ageing and increasingly irrelevant public figure, peddling cultural influence as a way to compensate for the loss of real power. How sad, I thought...
...But I changed my mind about all that yesterday when I heard some incredibly exciting news: thee Jeremy Corbyn is now on Letterboxd! 😃
Having recently joined the platform, Corbyn – now an independent MP – has been reviewing up a storm. He logged six films in the space of a day and awarded each one of them five stars, giving him the kind of ratings curve you only see with the most kind-hearted of souls. These days it has become fashionable to disdain the five-star curve as naive and undiscerning, but really, if your ratings are heavily weighted towards the negative then that is your own fault for choosing to watch bad films or misunderstanding your own taste.
Corbyn, by contrast, knows exactly what he likes: he has mostly been watching socially conscious cinema about injustice, including three films by his friend Ken Loach. In a review of Loach’s 2016 unemployment drama I, Daniel Blake, he wrote, “Government ministers should watch this film to understand the human cost of welfare cuts. Well done Ken for this moving masterpiece.” He also raved about Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a historical epic about the Irish Civil War, and The Old Oak, a drama about Syrian refugees arriving at a town in the North-East. He recalled seeing the latter film at the cinema when it was first released: “[it] gave us a sense of empowerment and hope in a kinder world.”
Pride – a comedy-drama about LGBT activists and striking miners working together in the 1980s – shows “solidarity at its best”, he wrote, while a 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby exposes “the barrenness of greed and wealth”. In a characteristically thoughtful touch, he added a spoiler warning to his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is one of the most famous films of all time and has been available to watch for over half a century. In it, he mused that the film “Opens up questions about the human existence and the dangerous power of uncontrolled computers. Spoiler – humans beat the computer. Today AI would win!”
Here at Dazed we would like to see Corbyn’s take on Red, White and Royal Blue (as a lifelong critic of the monarchy, would he dismiss it as propaganda or find his heart being slowly melted by the enemies-to-lovers romance between Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine?), Anora (does the film ferment class consciousness or merely revel in the suffering of its working-class protagonist?), and Wicked (what does the film’s visual ugliness tell us about the political economy of Hollywood under neoliberalism?).
But at the same time, I hope he realises he doesn’t always have to be making a political point, that he allows himself the occasional night off from advancing the cause of socialism. Come over to my place, Mr Corbyn: let’s crack upon a bottle of sauvignon blanc and have a bloody good laugh at a Melissa McCarthy flick.