Poster forFeels Good Man (2020), dir. Arthur Jones (all images courtesy Cinetic Media)

Feels Good Man is a rare film that manages to be harrowing on multiple, completely different wavelengths. For normies (to use the lingo of the kind of people profiled by the documentary), theres the horror of seeing the machinations of the internets far right in action, and being introduced to its utterly absurd vagaries and subcultures. Youre entering the land of 4chan, bizarre racist symbolism, and most pertinently, Pepe the Frog. For a certain subset of very onlineviewers (such as your humble critic), theres the added mortification of already knowing how all this works. Watching this movie with such context evokes the same feeling as having to sit down and explain Gamergate to someone not in the know. God, why am I already familiar with all this? What am I doing with my life? And thats all before they get to the Pepe cryptocurrency.

Cartoonist Matt Furie seems a pleasant fellow, so its deeply unfortunate that one of his creations became a preeminent symbol of modern fascism through the (only partly explicable) alchemy of the internet. He inventedPepe in 2005 for his zine Boys Club, a comic about anthropomorphic creatures living in slackersqualor. In his debut, the character urinates by pulling his pants all the way down, explaining that it feels good man. This apparently is what endeared him to the users of 4chan, which started Pepe along the road to becoming one of the notorious forums most ubiquitous memes, and eventually led to him being used in all manner of awful imagery by members of the so-called alt-right.

Feels Good Manchronicles this upsetting series of developments from Furies point of view, along with his various futile attempts to reclaim his creation for the forces of goodness and decency. Many a Frankenstein comparison has been made to this predicament, butthey feel lacking; its more like ifbelovedPogocreator Walt Kelly accidentally created a virus.(A deeply weird and stupid virus.) Furie is almost comically out of his depth in trying to save his frog child, having seemingly never heard of the Streisand effect. Killing Pepe in a comic did nothing to slow online fascists, and we see how a subsequent resurrection and attempt to save Pepe by encouraging people to draw positive representations of the character further backfired. These well-intentioned but inept responses provide an instructive microcosm of how progressive liberals have tried and failed to control social narratives during the Trump years. They dont understand that one cannot combat stochastic, organic phenomena with engineered movements.

One also cant fight Nazis with kindness, so Furie fortunately wises up on that front and takes to the courts to fight the misuse of Pepe where he can. Still, the soul of his character is something now forever beyond his control. Such is the nature of memes. The movie artfully illustrates this with animated sequences depicting Pepe on a sort of surreal quest, going through his own heros journey that parallels the conflicts over him in the real world. Its touches like that which help make a strange, sometimes even esoteric subject comprehensible for the lay viewer.

If theres a weakness toFeels Good Man, its that it might not understand its own lessons. Late in 2019, Pepe began cropping up in the Hong Kong protests. The film includes an obviously rushed coda about this development to give itself an upbeat ending, but I wouldntsayyou can reduce this issue to a good meme canceling out a bad meme. For one thing, its still not clear just how Pepe cross-pollinated to Hong Kong. Pro-Trump elements within the protests may well be the source, and if thats the case then I dont know if I would call this a win, even if Pepe is not invoked there the way he is in the US and Europe. After 90 minutes of demonstrating how terrifying the unpredictability of the internet can be, pulling out one example of how it can create a friendlier result doesnt really mitigate things.

Feels Good Man is now playing in virtual cinemas, and premieres on Independent Lens on October 19.

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An Artist Tries to Save Pepe the Frog From Fascists - Hyperallergic