Seth MacFarlane Sets the Record Straight on ‘Family Guy’s Most Famous Film Critique
Seth MacFarlane may not care for The Godfather, but he insists that he doesn’t know what the hell Peter Griffin was talking about.
On May 14, 2006, a very special Family Guy episode aired that would change the way Letterboxd users and Film Twitter power players would talk about prestige cinema for years — once New Zealand invented Letterboxd and Twitter became more than just Jack Dorsey posting into the void by himself, of course. In “The Griffin Family History,” Peter, Meg, Lois, Stewie and Brian spend what they believe to be their last moments alive before drowning in the family’s panic room arguing about Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus, the 1972 mob epic The Godfather, and, as the water rises, Peter explains his distaste for the film in the most confusing terms possible.
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Flash forward to 2025, and Family Guy star and creator MacFarlane is apparently fed up with film buffs using his line, “It insists upon itself,” as if they know what the hell the phrase actually means — because he certainly doesn’t.
Up until now, terminally online cinephiles have been constantly repeating the line “it insists upon itself” semi-ironically in countless snarky Letterboxd reviews and untold Twitter threads about classic films deemed overrated by Generation Z. As some members of the online “argue about movies without knowing anything about movies” community pointed out following MacFarlane's revelation, this “explanation” may be the Family Guy creator’s response to so many self-professed movie buffs failing to realize that Peter’s gripes with The Godfather aren’t supposed to be legitimate critiques.
“lol he saw that tweet that was like ‘‘it insists upon itself’ is actually a great criticism to use’ and he had to set the record straight,” one such Twitter user remarked of MacFarlane’s zeitgeist-shaking reveal.
Another film Twitter regular wrote, “this is like if michelangelo came back and explained the lore behind the mona lisa.”
One Family Guy fan hilariously pointed out of the announcement, “pretty funny that the creator of Family Guy had to release a public statement to remind people that Peter Griffin is an idiot.”
Nevertheless, there are, astoundingly, still many Letterboxd Leonard Maltins and Roger Tweetberts who continue to side with MacFarlane’s teacher on the confusing critique of The Sound of Music, with one writing, “'It insists upon itself’ is completely valid line of argumentation, and honestly I could not count how many films are guilty of this particular crime.”
Of course, that doesn’t explain what the cinematic “crime” actually entails, it’s just a vague condemnation that borders on becoming a tautology. One could even say that the cinephile’s defense… insists upon itself.