Confessions of a film bro

I like movies. As such, I sometimes find film content recommended to me on social media. Recently, there has been a prevalence of content regarding the “film bro”. There is a great deal of well-written literature on this topic, including this article, this article, and this UrbanDictionary entry, but I’m going to describe a film bro as a best understand it below.

A film bro is first and foremost, a bro. This entails a generally center-right political slant, a superlative sense of entitlement, an unfounded volume of confidence, a callous disregard to anyone’s existence but their own, and an affinity for alcohol. When that is combined with an interest in film, the result is someone, usually male, who spends their time regurgitating mainstream film criticism about the same handful of movies, shot by men for men. The film bro doesn’t care if you like action movies or not; he will talk non-stop about Tarantino. He unironically identifies with Tyler Durden, Travis Bickie, Arthur Fleck, and anyone who Ryan Gosling portrays onscreen.

I wasn’t always a film bro, but one of my best friends was. I have an indelible memory of him fiercely debating the merits of The Shawshank Redemption over Rain Man, back in the sixth grade. I also remember him recommending that I watch Pulp Fiction, which I did with my family in the eighth grade, much to my mother’s chagrin. Over the years, I gradually learned not to trust his movie recommendations, which I perceived to be pedantic and pretentious. The movies were so slow! The plots didn’t make a lot of sense either.