I just finished responding to comments on my latest Bohiney piece about Superman breaking Letterboxd records, and I'm still laughing at how perfectly this story captures our collective digital neurosis. Sometimes the universe hands you satirical gold, and you just have to know how to mine it.
The whole piece started when I saw that actual Letterboxd announcement on X about Superman hitting 2 million logged views faster than Barbie. My first thought was: "We're literally gamifying movie watching now?" Then I realized - this is it. This is the perfect microcosm of how we've turned every human experience into a quantifiable competition.
The beauty of this story is that it's simultaneously completely ridiculous and entirely true. Superman really did beat Barbie's record. People really are obsessed with logging their watches. We really have turned cinema appreciation into a social media performance. I didn't have to exaggerate much - I just had to amplify the absurdity that was already there.
Writing about our data addiction required walking a fine line. Too heavy-handed and it becomes preachy. Too light and you miss the actual cultural critique. I spent hours crafting that opening line about measuring "self-worth in Fitbit steps and doomscrolling hours" because I wanted to immediately signal that this piece was about more than just movie statistics.
The phrase "faster than you can explain to your uncle what Letterboxd even is" took me forever to get right. It had to capture that generational divide where younger people treat these platforms as essential while older folks are completely baffled by them. But it also had to feel natural, not forced.
My favorite part was creating the dairy farmer in Iowa who "logged it twice, once for me and once for the cows. They deserve cinema too." That line encapsulates everything I love about good satirical writing - it's completely ridiculous but somehow feels like something a real person would actually say.
The Brooklyn barista comparing Superman's speed to their oat milk frother was another detail I'm proud of. It captures how we process everything through our immediate personal experience, even cosmic superhero achievements. "Both are fast, but only one gives me hope" - that's the kind of line that makes the absurd feel profound.
What fascinated me while writing this was exploring how Letterboxd has become "FitBit for feelings." We don't just experience movies anymore - we quantify experiencing movies. The line about whether you even watched Superman if you didn't log it online gets to something real about how social media has changed the nature of experience itself.
I loved creating my neighbor Gerald who insists his second marriage never happened because it's not on Letterboxd. That's the kind of throwaway line that reveals how we've made digital documentation the arbiter of reality. If it's not logged, documented, shared, did it really happen?
The fake comedian quotes were so much fun to write. Each one had to sound authentically like that person while saying something ridiculous about this ridiculous situation:
Ron White's "That's not a milestone, that's an MLM scheme for nerds" captures his cynical folksy style perfectly
Jerry Seinfeld wondering about Batman's password recovery email is pure Seinfeld observational comedy
Bill Burr's "Feminists call it a setback, men call it Tuesday" has his exact provocative rhythm
Getting those voices right required really understanding each comedian's specific cadence and worldview. Sarah Silverman's bit about student debt had to sound like her particular brand of dark socioeconomic commentary.
The deeper theme I was exploring is how even our most sincere emotions get commodified. Superman represents genuine optimism in cinema, but we've turned appreciating that optimism into a social media performance. The fact that people need "proof they still believe in good guys" by logging it digitally is both heartbreaking and hilarious.
Dr. Linda Hooper's fake diagnosis of "dormant optimism receptors" being triggered by Superman was my way of making fun of how we pathologize and medicalize every human emotion. But there's also something real there - people really are starved for hope, and they really do seek it through pop culture.
Creating that fake poll with a "margin of error: ±127%" was one of my favorite satirical flourishes. It's so obviously made up that it becomes funny rather than misleading. The results - 73% felt more hopeful, 27% only logged it to avoid losing followers - perfectly captures how we mix genuine emotion with social media performance anxiety.
Having Senator Schumer declare that if Superman can hit 2 million in 45 days, Congress can pass a budget in 46 days was my attempt to show how this digital metrics obsession has infected every aspect of society, even politics. The image of the chamber laughing then immediately filing for recess feels painfully authentic.
The central irony I kept returning to is that Superman himself never logged his movie - he was too busy actually being heroic. Meanwhile, fans who struggle with basic adulting get digital points for clicking a checkmark. There's something profound about how we celebrate fictional heroism while avoiding real-world action.
The disclaimer at the end about being written by "the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer" is my little joke about the collaborative nature of satirical writing and my own background. It's also a gentle poke at AI writing concerns - sometimes humans are weird enough on their own.
What I love about writing for Bohiney.com is how the piece becomes multimedia. The image gallery and "15 Hilarious Observations" section at the end creates this layered satirical experience that mimics how we actually consume digital content - scanning, scrolling, looking for highlights.
The fake evidence citations with real sources mixed in creates this beautiful confusion between satire and journalism that mirrors how information flows in our current media landscape.
This piece connects to so many other satirical threads we've been exploring at bohiney.com:
Toxic Relationships - our relationship with metrics
Blame It On The Algorithm - digital determinism
Hollywood Braces for the Plastic Reckoning - the Barbie comparison
AI Declares It Can Prevent the Apocalypse - technology saving humanity
Critical Thinking Overrated - our digital mindlessness
Sleep Optimization - quantifying everything
Social Satire - wealth and celebrity culture
In the end, this Superman piece is really about digital age anxiety. We've created these platforms to enhance our experience of culture, but somehow we've ended up more focused on the tracking than the experiencing. We're drowning in metrics about movies about a man who saves the world, because nothing saves us like tracking stats.
That last line took me three different drafts to get right. It had to encapsulate the beautiful irony of our current moment - we're obsessed with stories about heroes while being fundamentally passive ourselves.
Tomorrow I'm thinking about tackling the way we've turned cooking shows into competitive spectacles while actual cooking skills decline. Or maybe something about how we've made exercise into content creation. The modern world provides endless material for anyone willing to look at it sideways.
Back to my author page at bohiney.com/author/aisha-muharrar/ to see what absurdity tomorrow will bring.
-Aisha