The question of what it means to create something has never been more complicated than now. We’re several decades deep into the Information Age, witnessing evolution as the first generation to grow up on the internet, and we’re simultaneously more informed and more ignorant than we’ve ever been. We are frighteningly unaware of where our work, or even our most private secrets, might end up. To create something in the internet era is to court fame and danger, releasing the fruits of our labor into a voidless space full of anonymous people eager to claim those creations as their own. For a long time, a naivete to how depraved the internet could be seemed like a blessing to Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie, who chuckled along as his harmless comic character was turned into a message board icon. Before long, his blissful ignorance became a curse.
Furie and his equally beloved and reviled frog are the subjects of Arthur Jones’ riveting documentary Feels Good Man, which tracks Pepe’s evolution from a sweet doof in Furie’s comic Boy’s Club to an icon of the alt-right and a rallying cry for the internet’s most virulent racists, fascists, and incels. The once chilled out frog went from expressing the simple carnal pleasures of going to the bathroom with your pants down to depicted as committing terrorist attacks and spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric. Jones attempts to navigate Furie’s personal journey to reclaim his creation through the context of a deep dive into what makes the Internet tick; particularly how the spread of Pepe coincided with the internet’s uncomfortable rise as a haven for lifestyles and opinions once considered unsavory. The breadth of internet cultural history here is dizzying: topics range from Richard Dawkins’ first coinage of the word “meme” to the birth of 4chan and the many subcultures it inspired. Jones is trying to paint a portrait of how the creation of a mild-mannered artist’s acceleration into a hate symbol is a uniquely digital phenomenon.
The results are incendiary, vital, and sometimes frustrating. Feels Good Man is an immensely stuffed documentary, veering wildly from one strand of information to the next in an effort to understand Pepe’s forced evolution. There’s so much to unpack here that Jones’ description of editing the film as “having a small panic attack” feels increasingly apt. One moment he’s speaking to an occultist who believes Pepe is a magical source of power, the next he’s talking to crypto junkies who trade “rare Pepes” as a source of currency. It’s all enough to make you start to feel like you’re losing your mind, but it works largely because it’s positioned through the eyes of Furie, who is just as (or perhaps even more) baffled as others that his character has grown into something beyond his control. He’s an enigmatic, unclassifiable subject that Jones views with both warmth and skepticism. His zen, almost child-like nature and empathetic art makes the cruelty of Pepe’s transformation all the more agonizing; but his largely unengaged persona speaks to the consequences of political disengagement in the current cultural landscape. Furie’s ignorance of what it means for the Internet to get its claws in something paints him as an inadvertently guilty artist, one whose general unbotheredness put not only his creation but himself at risk. In one shocking moment, Furie shares a meme of him being murdered by Pepe to a packed auditorium. As they stare in shocked silence, he shrugs and says “it is what it is.”
The drive for Feels Good Man is Furie’s quest to reclaim Pepe. His potent use is not only as a cultural symbol but also a political one, as Pepe’s links with Donald Trump and of those of his political ilk mirror the emergence of Trump’s seemingly fringe ideology into the mainstream. There is an urgency to the documentary and Furie’s mission because the violent discrimination behind Pepe’s metamorphsis has gone from lurking on easily dismissed message boards to working as an actionable political tool. As Pepe is retweeted by the President, deemed a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League, and worn as a pin by prominent Neo-Nazis, Furie begins to realize the depths to which his little frog has plummeted. The fact that Jones managed to capture it all marks the documentary an invaluable document about the now unavoidable intersection of the digital and political spheres; and how Pepe is doomed to be a test case in internet depravity, if we don’t learn our lessons from his appropriation.
For an exceedingly grim documentary that can be cynical about the state of how we treat one another, Jones does a remarkable job of making the documentary feel hopeful. Through some eye-popping animation and a focus on Furie’s own hopes for Pepe’s return to his sweeter roots, Feels Good Man manages to do the very thing Furie is trying to achieve: reshaping the frog that defines him into his own definition of what the character is meant to be. That accomplishment is a mammoth testament to not only the documentary’s importance, but to the vitality of art itself in these trying times. By taking a stand against those who seek to corrupt symbols of the easiness and joy of empathy, we protect not only our art but the very reason it exists: to illuminate, to comfort, and most importantly, to unite us.
