The Obnoxious Myopia of John Cleese

As part of his aggressive and extremely successful ongoing campaign for complete and total cultural irrelevance, John Cleese recently took to Twitter to pose a pointed, pathetic question.

“I wonder if the herd of marketing people and bureaucrats who now run TV have finally noticed that having former players commenting on the sports in which they excelled has improved sports coverage immensely” he began crankily before concluding, with a painful thud, “Could the same principle now be applied to the Arts? Instead of having ‘critics’ who can’t themselves direct, write, act, sing, dance or claim any other kind of expertise, would we not get superior commentary from people who can? Why should artistic criticism from untalented people be preferred to that of outstandingly talented ones?” 

This whiny outburst from a precious snowflake who thinks TV should be a safe space where rich, famous men of achievement like himself never have to worry about being criticized by their cultural inferiors clearly came from a deeply personal place.

Cleese’s rant is less about improving arts criticism than punishing lowly critics for having the audacity to criticize despite being unproven, resentful, unqualified losers in his unkind estimation.

People have gently and not so gently challenged Cleese on his assertions and he has only doubled down. Like so many celebrities raging impotently at a world they no longer understand, Cleese has reached the point in his intellectual development where he has stopped developing; the mere idea that there are things he could and should learn if he’d only open his mind a little represents a grievous insult to his enormous, brittle ego. 

Cleese frames a lot of his social media fumbling as provocative, necessary questions, but he only seems interested in answers that back up his pre-existing prejudices and preconceptions.

The older Cleese gets, the thinner his skin becomes and the quicker he is to lash out in anger. Yet I am going to pretend that Cleese is acting in good faith and answer a question I feel uniquely qualified to address. 

In Cleese’s tweets, he asks, “Why should artistic criticism from untalented people be preferred to that of outstandingly talented ones?” 

The most obvious answer is that making movies and critiquing them are two very different skill sets and art-forms. Assuming that being an “outstandingly talented” movie director or dancer or screenwriter would by definition also make someone an incisive and trenchant critic in those fields is insane.

Also, why does Cleese assume that “outstandingly talented” writers and dancers and poets and directors and comedians are chomping at the bit to go on television to discuss the merits of the new Trolls sequel? Is that a gig they really want? Are Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese DYING to do a movie review show together but they can’t because those all-powerful film critics are greedily hogging all the plum, ultra-powerful positions that rightfully belong to artists who have proven their worth as winners and doers by actually making movies instead of just whining about them?

I was a professional full time film critic for eighteen years. So I speak with some authority when I say that sure, there are film critics who are jealous of the people they write about and would love to work in film instead of writing about it. But the vast majority of critics who choose a low-paying, uncertain and oft-mocked and maligned professional existence that consists almost entirely of watching and writing about movies do so because they really fucking love watching and writing about movies, not because they’re so jealous of Ben Affleck that they feel a need to tear him down with their words. 

Call me crazy, but I think film critic positions should be in the hands of people who want to review movies for a living. Film criticism should remain the realm of people who feel a passion for it and consequently develop a talent for it rooted inextricably in decades upon decades of honing their craft. Despite Cleese’s curious assertions, film criticism should not belong to angry weirdoes who would seemingly want the job only in a theoretical sense, as a way of taking away the incredible honor of getting to talk about the new Rambo sequel on local news from a mere “critic” who has done nothing to earn such an incredible privilege that could otherwise belong to Jim Jarmusch or Christopher Nolan or Guy Maddin. 

Moviegoers AND creators alike are better off with artistic criticism from professional reviewers who have proven their talent for film criticism than folks who may be outstandingly talented at directing, writing, acting, singing and/or dancing but have illustrated zero talent for criticism.

If Cleese really thinks that talented, important, artistic winners like himself should critique entertainment instead of unqualified cretins I invite him to put his money where his mouth is and become a film critic. He’ll make about thirty thousand dollars a year and have no job security or stability but, in a curious twist, rich, famous millionaire celebrities will envy his fake power. 

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