Feels Good Man Is Almost Too Sober for Its Own Good
A new documentary about the far right co-opting Pepe the Frog hits Video on Demand this week
The pace of our lives sped up when reality and the internet merged in ways that have become impossible to pry apart. Arthur Jones’ documentary Feels Good Man follows cartoon character Pepe the Frog from its creation by artist Matt Furie for his cheerful online comic series Boy’s Club in 2005 to its eventual role as far-right meme. The film captures the warp-speed effect of internet culture over the past decade.
Furie, who comes across as a sweet and mellow man, never could’ve imagined he was opening Pandora’s Box. Furie at one point decides to cash in on his icon’s popularity by ordering thousands of T-shirts to sell, only to be forced to leave them in his garage because Pepe has by then become an unmistakable symbol of hate.
Feels Good Man covers ground trod by books like It Came From Something Awful by Dale Beran — an interview subject in the film — and the recent documentary TFW No GF. Jones, who is an illustrator and animator, doesn’t go into his own background, but he does not come across as Extremely Online. This is an outsider’s view of how the internet became increasingly hateful and right-wing. It also shows one artist’s disgust with the reception of his own work.
Pepe initially caught on as a meme due to a Boy’s Club comic strip in which he urinates into a toilet with his pants around his ankles, later explaining that it “feels good man.” The images were fairly benign at first, but “feels good man” soon got flipped around to “feels bad man.” The ease of drawing Pepe meant he could be rebranded by people other than Furie as depressed or smug. A generation of NEET (that is, Not in Education, Employment or Training) young men took to 4chan to use Pepe to express their alienation. Furie’s humorous imagery was turned to something even darker when 4chan users’ love of shock value turned the character into a Nazi gassing a Jewish man (among countless other “ironic” Nazi memes).
By that point, Furie was a father who spent a year writing a children’s book. He was distant from the post-collegiate stoner atmosphere in which Pepe was created. The autobiographical roots of Pepe — and the other characters in Boy’s Club, one of whom was based on Furie’s then-roommate — were ripped away. Whatever Pepe meant to the artist, the frog played a role in a deliberate attempt to make “meme magic” and help get Donald Trump elected.
Feels Good Man shoots for a triumphant note. We see Furie suing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to prevent him from selling merchandise including the likeness of Pepe, and negotiating with the Anti-Defamation League to get Pepe removed from its list of hate symbols. On a more hopeful note, we also see pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong adopting the frog as a meme. But Feels Good Man is being released in a world where, for instance, QAnon devotees have incorporated furniture company Wayfair into their bizarre conspiracy theories. Meaning itself seems up for grabs.
Despite Jones’ use of animation, Feels Good Man is almost too sober for its own good, determined not to give in to the chaos that co-opted Pepe. Even the film’s expert on memes’ occult power can’t fully explain it. This year feels so hellish in part because the power of narratives and images seems both carefully constructed by malevolent actors, and ultimately out of anyone’s rational control.
Feels Good Man
NR, 92 minutes
Available Friday, Sept. 4, via Video on Demand
