2020 was a complete mess. We’re not even a month into 2021 and it doesn’t look any better. But before we throw up our hands in resignation and descend into Adam Curtis-styled Oh Dear-ism, we can hopefully find small nuggets of enlightenment to illuminate a possible path before us.
As dramatic as all that sounds, it took my watching Arthur Jones’ debut feature, Feels Good Man, to really open my eyes about both the invisible and visible world around me in these United States. It’s a documentary film that perfectly achieves the goal so many other docs fail at: simultaneously making you realize you may be completely in the dark about something so incredibly influential to your life, and then teaching you all about that very thing — all without making you feel bad for being ignorant in the first place.
Premiering at Sundance in 2020 and winning a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker, Feels Good Man is a feature length documentary about the online meme that is Pepe the Frog.
To be completely fair, the idea of an entire film centered around a meme exists on the razor’s edge between utterly brilliant and completely idiotic. Thankfully the filmmakers did such a brilliant job of not only discussing the history of Pepe the Frog’s evolution from friendly online stoner comic to alt-right crypto-Nazi dog-whistle, and back, but also how it is a perfect example of online culture finally beginning to permeate and affect real life.
Feels Good Man is more than just a documentary about a cartoon frog. It’s a film that explores how fringe right-wing political extremism incubates in the strange and dark corners of the internet before slowly seeping into our flesh and blood physical spaces. How URL becomes IRL.
So while the film centers around Pepe’s original creator, cartoonist Matt Furie, it also involves a cast of characters including a known 4chan troll, one of Donald Trump’s campaign advisors, an expert in “meme magic,” and even noted anti-gay frog media personality Alex Jones. Balancing investigative journalism with essay-style documentary filmmaking — all aided with some utterly beautiful and seriously fun animation — Feels Good Man is easily the most insanely interesting documentary of 2020. And it is the one that is probably the most important to help contextualize the rise of ultra-fringe right-wing U.S. politics that we’ve already seen climb out of the internet, over the wall, into the doors of our Capitol Building.
I sat down for a long conversation with director/producer Arthur Jones and producer Giorgio Angelini to talk about what drew them to Pepe. Throughout the talk we ventured into the strange worlds of 4chan and QAnon, how they ended up with video of Alex Jones’ legal deposition, why they decided not to reach out to anyone on the alt-right to discuss Pepe on-camera, how they went about DIY-ing this entire feature themselves. And, of course, why the Proud Boys are absolutely not punk rock.
Film Cred: But I guess I’ll start pretty simply and ask — what was the initial impetus that drew you this story and want to talk about Pepe the Frog?
Arthur Jones: [laughs] Well, I loved Pepe. I had bought Matt’s comics back in the mid to late 2000s. I had bought Boy’s Club at independent bookstores and they were funny, so when Pepe started showing up on the internet and in the news I always feels that maybe I knew, or understood, the story in a different way because I had been a fan of Pepe — or maybe I was missing a part of it because I had been a fan of Pepe. Either way, I felt Pepe was just kinda lost. And so after picking up the comics I had become friends with Matt Furie through some mutual friends. We met on a hike. We spent the day hiking and camped at a hot springs and hiked back the next day, and through that experience we became friends.
So as things started to get weird for Pepe in 2015 I started to see the effect it was having on Matt — some of the psychic toll. There was this moment in 2015 where Pepe was used by what was believed to be a school shooter announcing they were going to commit a mass shooting. This person had posted on 4chan with an image of Pepe holding a gun, something that Matt had not drawn or had any connection to, and then two weeks later then presidential candidate Donald Trump retweeted an image of himself drawn as Pepe. Again, something Matt had nothing to do with. And in a previous time period you would think that this would’ve been the moment Trump dropped out of the race, because using this image that was just used by a mass shooter would normally have been career suicide for somebody. But instead people didn’t seem to pick up on it, or maybe it even kind of emboldened him, and was just like, “Wow. What is going on here?”
Giorgio was making a film called Owned: A Tale of Two Americas and I was the animator on that. So we started to talk about the story of Feels Good Man and I asked him to help make the film, and we started on making it in 2017.
FC: So it came from the place of knowing Matt Furie. Interesting. How familiar were you with 4chan, or chan culture, before making this?
AJ: [laughs] I did not know much about chan culture at all. In fact the only time I had heard about 4chan was because my friend Woody had spent a lot of time on both the drug board and the music board where he would make these psychotropic video loops with a kind of ominous binaural beats that he said if watched for more than an hour would give you kind of a drug experience. And he would sell those on 4chan actually. He would post about them and sell them. This would have been about 2006 or 2007.
FC: Oh weird.
AJ: He didn’t make a lot of money doing this.
FC: I can’t imagine he would.
AJ: But that was the first time I heard about 4chan. So I hadn’t really been on it much at all, outside of it occasionally appearing on the news, and I’d go on and be confused when I’d see it. It’s a message board that’s kind of hard to understand initially because you’d go on there and it feels like a message board from the ‘90s. It’s got that aesthetic where it’s ugly. It’s got its own format where if you don’t spend a little bit of time on it you won’t understand what’s going on. So I spent a couple months on 4chan researching before we started shooting.
FC: What would researching on 4chan entail? Was it just lurking, basically?
AJ: [laughs] It was lurking. I didn’t post. Initially I thought, “Oh maybe I’ll take on a persona and post,” and then I realized that wasn’t super compelling to me. But what was compelling to me was figuring out what 4chan meant to the community. You realize that when you’re in a thread on 4chan that is really alive, where there’s a lot of people contributing to it, you can really see how long people spend on the board and how this community has really evolved into this kind of family to the people who spend a lot of time on it.
If you look at the stats on 4chan you see that people spend 8 or 10 hours on it at a time on the message board. It’s kind of an addictive format for the people that are on it. So that was the thing that fascinated us most about it, and what we were trying to communicate in Feels Good Man — what this board emotionally meant to the people that found themselves on it.
Giorgio Angelini: There’s its own legend behind it, so you have to lurk long enough to understand its own mythology and its own language set as best as you can [laughs], because it’s always developing and changing anyway. Because with any documentary you want to feel that when you’re talking to the subjects about it you have some passable knowledge, especially with groups of people, like on 4chan. There you get judged pretty harshly based on your [laughs] normie-ness levels, I guess.
FC: Right! I wouldn’t say I frequented 4chan a lot, but as a writer and researcher for culture writing I’m always kind of keeping up on right wing, far-right culture. Especially fringe cultural, because you see that permeating into meme culture, and perhaps other fringes. I grew up in a punk rock background, and you see that kind of stuff seeping. It’s a fringe culture that tries to weasel its way into other subcultures, a lot.
GA: Totally.
FC: So, I guess for lack of better terms, would check in on / pol / every now and again just to see where things were. So I kind of got to see the evolution, and use, of Pepe the Frog happen in real time because of that.
AJ: There is a really big punk overlap. In the same way that early punk saw their movement co-opted by normies of that time, seeing the punk streetwear being sold in whatever the department stores were of that era, the response from punk people was to make things more and more extreme and try to push away the mainstream culture from their own culture. It has a very similar trajectory in that sense.
FC: There was somebody in the film who made a reference to making Pepe as offensive as possible as being punk, and I found that kind of offensive as someone who was in punk culture because I think that chan culture removes any kind of social aspect to these things. It makes these symbols flat and it becomes shock for the sake of shock and there is no nuance to it whatsoever.
AJ: Totally.
FC: It’s like the whole Proud Boys thing where, “We’re so punk because we’re so far to the right.”
GA: Right. It’s like the establishment now is “PC culture” and “wokeness,” so they’re responding to that. But of course it’s a very deliberate misreading, bad faith reading of what punk really stands for and what “anti-establishment” really means. It’s about attacking hierarchies and of course they’re very much in support of maintaining those hierarchies. So it couldn’t be any less fucking punk at all. Sorry guys.
FC: So from the investigative perspective of this… how did you decide who you needed to talk to in order to get the kind of background you needed to tell this story?
GA: You go through a moment where you’re kind of excited about starting the film, and you know who your key characters are, and you basically start interviewing anyone that is willing to be on camera that you think is interesting. I think that’s a natural part of the process, because you’re also trying to figure out what the hell your film is about too. Every documentary film starts out with some kind of thesis statement of some kind. Arthur wrote more of a thesis essay [laughs]… I still haven’t read that by the way…
AJ: The film started out with me kind of psyching myself up to convince myself that I could make the film, so I started talking to Dale Beran on background and we ended up filming a great interview with him that became kind of a backbone to some of the contextual narrative of Feels Good Man — the stuff on 4chan. Dale was writing a book called It Came From Something Awful at the same time we were making Feels Good Man, and he had written an article that had gone viral on Medium right after Trump had been elected. It was called “4chan: The Skeleton Key to Trump’s Election”.
So Dale was someone like us who was from a similar DIY background. He was from Baltimore and had been part of the art and music scene there. He had found 4chan when 4chan wasn’t quite the toxic place that it is now, in more of the early hacktivist era, the Occupy Wall Street era, and had observed the same stuff we have all talked about. So he was a great person to talk to in the beginning, and I felt like he could be a really unique voice in the film.
We also knew that we wanted to talk to Matt, and Matt’s family, the artistic community… Those were the first things I shot. We also knew we wanted to talk to people who spent a lot of time on 4chan so they could talk about what Pepe meant to them.
FC: How did you find that one guy you talked to the most? Where his family looked like they didn’t want to be a part of the movie because they were blurred out?
AJ: [laughs] We blurred out their faces for a couple reasons. They actually really welcomed us into their home. His name is Mills, and he’s someone who is both a participant on 4chan, specifically / r9k /, which is a message board within the larger message board of 4chan, but he’s also a meme within 4chan. If you’re on 4chan long enough you’ll start to see images of Mills pop up. So he’s someone who had broken the anonymity code of 4chan, and that’s one of the reasons he was willing to talk to us. We showed Mills’ family because we wanted people to understand that Mills had accountability in his life, that there were people who cared for him, that he had a family unit that he relied on. We did obscure their faces because they welcomed us into their home but they did have a variety of feelings about what Mills was saying on camera.
FC: I can only imagine.
AJ: We wanted to obscure their faces because it was the polite thing to do honestly.
FC: So you have the guy that was talking about meme magic, and manifesting stuff out of that — which is wild and confusing to me. But I also remember even before the whole Trump election that 4chan was starting to mess around with that in 2014 with the Ebola stuff. I remember there was Ebola-chan, and people were making shrines to try to get Ebola to spread. That didn’t work. But apparently they memed Trump into office? How did you find that guy? And was he familiar with Pepe the Frog beforehand?
GA: He definitely was. We were basically given a tip from someone who happened to listen to another interview I had done for my previous film, and at the end I mentioned that I was working on this Pepe film — we were trying to be kind of quiet about it during production — and he sent me an email saying that I definitely needed to read this guy, John Michael Greer, he talks about meme magic.
We googled him and the first image that showed up was of him when he was still a practicing arch druid… I guess he still is a druid, but at the time he had actual hierarchical advantage. And his look is incredible, but when you actually start to talk to him and read his work it’s a really compelling way to talk about this issue. Because we wanted to discuss meme magic, but it didn’t feel right to have a journalist talk about it, and to talk to a 4channer about it also seemed too indulgent and maybe wouldn’t make sense. He just really combines an incredibly effective combination of highly intelligent analysis of the history of magic and culture.
He’s basically an ethnographer, so from that perspective he really lent us an incredible portal into this thing that is actually happening, that people care a lot about, and we should be taking seriously at least as a conceit, right? Just the combination of his look and filming it in this incredible, old library in Providence, Rhode Island at night… The whole thing was so magical.
AJ: He had written an article he had posted on his website called “Kekwars.” It was him sort of charting Pepe’s history on 4chan, and also the way frogs had been used both in magic and esoteric tradition. And on 4chan they had this moment where all of a sudden they connected Pepe back to this ancient Egyptian frog god that was supposedly the god of chaos.
I say “supposedly” because Kek was a pretty obscure god within the pantheon of all the different animal gods in the Egyptian mythology. It was this moment where 4chan… 4chan sort of loves making random connections — that’s why conspiracy runs so rampant on 4chan — but there was this moment where people on 4chan were like, “Pepe is ours and he is the icon of 4chan. Maybe he’s something we’re tapping into something that is age old in some way. Maybe Pepe isn’t 10 years old. Maybe Pepe is 3,000 years old. Maybe we’re a part of this chaotic tradition.”
Of course, it was a joke, but the more people invested their energy into it, making art around Pepe, making all these insane Pepe meme magic memes, it really did take on a different level of importance to the people that were using it on the board. And if people are spending 8 to 10 hours on the board it does become religious iconography at a certain point. [laughs] They’re building their own altar to the frog.
GA: But it’s also a real insight into how the internet is actually, functionally, fucking with reality. Because you have, at least at that time, you had a group of people who had kind of invented internet culture who really understood quite well how internet culture could get produced, and how you could hack the attention economy and the news media by creating fake stories. And they took great delight on 4chan anytime there was a mass shooting in trying to screw with the media, trying to pin the shooting on the wrong person, or whatever, and to great delight finding their own bullshit stories winding up on television screens. So there’s this kind of incredible moment where as we become in our lived realities more attached to virtual, internet world, and these worlds start to fold over, that the people who controlled the internet had a kind of outstripped influence on what became the zeitgeist.
FC: Right. Because I actually have written down here in my notes the question… Do you think this is the moment where the internet generation fully pulled their culture out of the internet and into real culture? Not just in a business/commerce kind of way, but in a truly cultural way?
GA: 100%. Yeah. I think the unease and general anxiety that people might have over the past several years, I think they might attribute to Trump being president, but I think more fundamentally it’s a moment that humanity is trying to confront right now — which is the cognitive dissonance between what’s happening on the internet, which people are probably less aware of in their minds, and then why things are happening in their real lives. There are these two really perverse universes colliding somehow, and we haven’t quite figured out how to render it more legible.
FC: Both of you guys are now, I guess, experts in this because of the sheer amount of time and conversations you’ve had. I want to ask, if you’re willing to put that hat on for a second… This time around with the election cycle there wasn’t that same kind of youth-driven, chan culture drive for Trump. It seems to have been supplanted fully by QAnon.
Do you think that is the next step? Do you see it as chan culture, but without a meme — without a visual? Not that Pepe the Frog is a tangible thing, but it has more of a physical symbol QAnon. QAnon is just a concept. How interconnected do you see these things?
AJ: John Michael Greer talks about Pepe as a sigil. But I do think that Q represents the sort of shattered mirror of Pepe — of all of this stuff. I think that Q also represents the kind of… As you were talking about the Pepe moment, it’s also important to realize this is also the moment that WikiLeaks is happening. In some ways WikiLeaks was sort of the promise of the internet. The internet believed they could liberate all of us through the freedom of information, and as that happened that became corrupted and messed up and even more confusing. It felt like things were beginning to fray and tear even more.
Now QAnon seems to be this sort of realization that this glut of information on the internet isn’t freeing, it’s now just creating this mass amount of confusion worldwide. It’s another moment though where you see 4chan sort of slipping out of the fingertips of youth culture. QAnon started as a joke on 4chan, people pretending to be something they weren’t, pretending to be someone of influence, pretending to be someone from the deep state, posting on the message board. But then when it all of a sudden jumped to normies again, an older generation of voters, who were feeling completely disoriented by the amount of information being thrown at them, it morphed and shifted again. So I think that misinformation now is the thing that has become the predominant narrative of 2020.
FC: So do you think that Pepe and QAnon are arguments for, or against, the cliché “the right can’t meme?”
AJ: I’ve always considered that to be the lamest retort to the film, or to Pepe in general. The aesthetics of culture jamming was something that was started by the left. Agitprop was started by the left. I think these are just the right stealing from those playbooks. I also feel that you see the rise of all of these newer factions within the progressive left, whether that’s the DSA, or the Black Lives Matter movement. Memes are a huge part of those organizations, the way in which they communicate with each other, the way they galvanize, the way they spread their ideas. I mean, “defund the police” is a meme. So I think that “the right can’t meme” is inaccurate, and kind of a lame argument.
GA: But I think there is a real fundamental difference that we should pin down here. In specific terms, when the left uses memes it is for the purpose of debasing an argument, or rendering absurd the thing which you are arguing against, and then explaining why it’s absurd and why you should take the other position.
Like, “Medicare for all.” There are a million fucking memes about how corrupt the market-based healthcare system is — but those are memes in service of an ideology. Whereas right wing memes are purely based in trolling. And if you’re a Republican congressperson, what a delightful position to be in where you are not accountable in any meaningful way to improving the material conditions of your constituents because you’ve never actually had to elucidate any kind of policy idea. Its purely, “I’m on the side of Pepe,” or, “I’m on the side of this amorphous group called QAnon, vote for me.” What an incredible job! You don’t owe your own constituents anything and the basis from which you should be judged on how to be re-elected is no longer based on your ability to deliver things to your constituents. It’s just, “Does he agree with me?”
FC: I think that in going back to specifics of the film itself there’s a scene, and it’s one of my favorite moments in the film that I think speaks to what we’re talking about, where there’s the juxtaposition of the depositions of Matt Furie and Alex Jones.
GA: Totally.
FC: You see this on a visual level where one guy is getting all dressed up to go to court, and he’s ready to go, taking it very seriously, and the other person is like, “Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t care. Whatever.” How did you get that footage? And what made you decide to put those scenes together the way that you did?
AJ: Certainly getting that deposition footage was a gift to us as documentary filmmakers. It was something that came to us later in the process, because we assumed that there was actually going to be a trial, and that is what we thought we were going to capture. Whether we were going to be able to film or have to show it through courtroom drawings, we didn’t know. But we assumed that the trial was going to be, perhaps, the end of the film. We didn’t know. And then, as we talk about the film, Alex Jones basically quit. He pulled out of the suit and settled. But then we had this amazing deposition footage which we were allowed to use by Matt Furie’s attorneys. And it was something that really allowed us to create a kind of conflict in the film that we thought would be very narratively satisfying for people. It’s like a shoot out at the OK corral moment. We could have this moment of narrative climax that not many narrative documentaries get to have. So cutting them back and forth between each other makes you understand the personality and the ethos that these two different sides have, and it’s also a great chance to see how Matt just doesn’t break. Like, there’s a part of Matt that’s troll-y too. He’s a little bit of a troll. He’s sitting there in this very serious thing, and he’s himself. He’s making jokes, he’s smiling, you can tell he’s a little nervous, but in general it’s an amazing performance. It’s a moment where I feel that you’re rooting for Matt in a way we thought would be very effective in the film.
GA: I’m glad you picked up on that, because that’s definitely what we were hoping to show in that juxtaposition. How utterly bad faith the entire Alex Jones position was. He showed up an hour late to the deposition… even though they had it at his office. Like he couldn’t be bothered to be there. Then he refers to Matt — in this David v. Goliath thing — that Alex Jones is the David character and Matt is the Goliath. It’s just absolutely absurd, this guy makes multiple millions of dollars by warping the minds of pliant consumers who are all buying his bone broth supplements, or whatever. And Matt is just this one lone cartoonist who happens to have the support of some pro-bono lawyer work. But that scene, I think, is a microcosm of what we’re all going through. You have one group of people who are operating in good faith in government and seem to continually get [laughs] kicked in the nuts by a group of people who could care less!
It’s like when Dianne Feinstein in the last Supreme Court nomination process was thanking the Republicans for being so wonderful. And it’s like, “What are you doing right now?!” Like, thanking Lindsey Graham afterward and hugging him, or whatever. It’s just terrifying and we have to be more aware of this moment, and that there’s a fox in the hen-house.
AJ: It also gave us a visual solution to something that was basically about removing stuff off the internet. Showing a bunch of DMCA takedowns was going to be really boring, but all of a sudden we have a lot of great footage we can use to tell the story of that conflict in such a better, funnier, weirder way. And to approach the moment, like how Giorgio was saying, as farce.
FC: Did you try to reach out directly to Alex Jones, or anyone else on the far right like Richard Spencer, to get them on camera specifically for this documentary?
AJ: We talked to Alex Jones’s attorney but we ended up not talking to that side. We had some phone conversations. But no. We decided early on that we weren’t going to talk to the provocateurs of the alt-right movement, in part because a lot of documentaries have been made where they talk to Milo [Yiannopoulos], or Richard Spencer, or Mike Cernovich, or any of these people. We felt these guys had enough ink spilled on them and we wanted to tell a story that hadn’t been told.
We wanted to show people like Mills or Pizza, people that we felt these provocateurs recognized as a potential audience for their movement. They were the people those provocateurs were seeking to exploit. We wanted to talk about the system, and not the people, that were there. Also we felt like having those guys in the film gave them a certain amount of stage presence — just by Richard Spencer being in the room he has a certain amount of stage presence. We wanted to not indulge that.
FC: That makes sense.
GA: At the end of the day us as filmmakers were far more interested in understanding the systems of radicalization online, and why someone would spend 12 hours a day online and respond positively to this antisocial messaging, as opposed to talking to the disseminators of that message, which are ultimately much less interesting. And like Arthur said, we don’t want to give a platform to those bozos.
AJ: I will say that in the movie there’s this moment where Richard Spencer is talking to a member of the Australian press on the street, and he’s talking about a lapel pin of Pepe that he’s wearing, and he gets hit by a protester. Its a famous piece of footage, a sort of, “Is it ok to punch a Nazi?” moment. And I do think that that moment when Richard Spencer gets punched is the moment he outlives his usefulness for the Republican Party, and the moment where Pepe outlives his usefulness for the alt-right. I think it was fine to leave Richard Spencer in that moment and then move on for the rest of the story.
FC: So what did Matt think of the final cut of the film?
AJ: That was the most nerve-wracking part for me taking the film to Sundance. We had shared a rough cut of film with Matt in the summer, and I think he recognized that it was well made, and was into it, but you could tell that he is someone who perhaps felt a little uncomfortable about being the subject of a feature film. So Sundance was a really complicated set of emotions for everybody.
Matt is someone who is most at home drawing in his studio. I think he’s grown to love and appreciate the film but I think that at various points some of the stuff in the film has made him feel a little uncomfortable. You know, Pepe is something that has haunted Matt for years. He’s had various moments where he’s just wanted to get rid of Pepe and forget about him and other moments where he feels a real sense of fondness for Pepe. And I think he still feels that day to day.
I think that some days he wakes up and is like, “Man, I wish that this Pepe stuff had never happened,” and then other days he’s been like, “Wow, this has been kind of a ride.” Even this week he texted me and was like, “Oh man, people are sending me Biden Pepes. I hate this. Fuck this shit.”
AJ: He’s baffled that Pepe has had any sort of political connotations at all. To him Pepe is still that stoned cartoon that he drew when he worked at the thrift shop.
GA: That said, I think he was most concerned before the film came out — just like anyone would be — how people will take to the film. He put himself out there as a character, so he’s probably the most exposed versus us the filmmakers. So I understand that perspective. But I think he’s been inundated with nothing but love and support. I think we were all pretty taken, and not surprised, but maybe pleasantly surprised that the level of trolling has been very minimal. Almost pathetic.
GA: The trolling we have experienced has really just been eye-rolling. It’s been the opposite. I think for a lot of people it’s been a reconfirmation of the reality they’ve been experiencing. When we launched our TikTok account it was just insane, we just started collecting tens of thousands of followers overnight, and there was no need to translate or couch the story and explain what this film was really about. Everyone of a younger generation knew exactly what this story was about. And that has been a really rewarding part about this thing.
FC: So who would you say this movie is for? Because I’m an elder millennial/xennial age and showed it to mom, who’s in her 60s, and my dad is 70 years old, and they were blown away. But at the same time there is a whole generation that has grown up with Pepe. So who were you shooting for?
AJ: That’s a good question. I think we were hoping to split the difference of exactly what you described. We wanted this film to communicate to people who knew nothing about this and found it entirely surprising, perhaps folks like your parents. And that’s kind of the traditional documentary audience. Most people who watch doc films, or who go to a doc film fest, are of a slightly older crowd. But we knew because this was “The Pepe the Frog Film” that we were going to have a whole youth culture audience as well.
So we wanted the film to feel authentic to people who had grown up extremely online and knew Pepe from that context. Luckily it seems like we’ve kind of threaded the needle. There was this great moment at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO, which is a documentary-specific film festival that’s in a smaller town but is really well attended. We screened the film for 1,500 people, a lot of older people in the crowd, a lot of younger people in the crowd, in a very divided part of the country… We had a big Q&A afterward that was about an hour long and it was such an amazing moment, because I felt, “We figured this out. It works.” There were a lot of conversations happening.
GA: Yeah. Because different people take different things from it, right? Like I was saying earlier, people who have felt a sense of unease or anxiety, but haven’t been able to put their finger on why exactly, I think that… A lot of response we get from older audiences when they see the film is, “Now I understand.” And not in a specific way, but an in-your-gut kind of way. Like, “Now I understand what the fuck is happening around me. Now I understand how the internet, and what I see on TV, is all intertwined.” And it makes you a more shrewd consumer of media now. Then with younger people it feels like the telling of youth culture, of their own generation.
FC: Because when I was watching it with my parents my dad was, at first, like, “What the hell is this frog movie?”
FC: But by the end of it he was upright, leaning forward like, “Oh crap. Ok. Ok.” Both my parents really enjoyed it a whole lot. And I know you were having the film shown on PBS?
AJ: We showed an 80-minute cut of the film on PBS on October 19 [2020], which I have to say was also great. Because that thing you’re talking about with your folks where they’re like, “I don’t know about this frog movie,” there’s this moment we’ve observed where people will see Pepe and be like, “I don’t know about this…” But once they watch the film they get really engaged with it. And that was something we even heard from one of the Sundance programmers. She was like, “Oh man, the Nazi frog movie? I don’t wanna watch this.”
AJ: And then she watched it and was like, “Oh, that was one of my favorite films at the festival.”
And so we put the film out ourselves theatrically because the streaming services didn’t want it. They saw it and decided to pass on it. I think in large part because they didn’t think a movie about a meme was too niche. But we always knew there was a huge audience for this film. That it would appeal to a really broad audience. So it was on PBS, which was great. It seems like over a million people saw it…
FC: Wow! Congratulations.
GA: Terrestrial TV, baby!
AJ: And I will encourage your audience to rent it. Because ultimately the people who put out the film are me and Giorgio. We’re the distributors of it.
FC: That’s great.
AJ: Which goes back to our punk rock backgrounds. Let’s just take this film out ourselves. But it was something that was a labor of love in the way that it started, and it’s a labor of love in the way that we’re taking it out. So if you BitTorrented it, you can PayPal us.
FC: Is there going to be a physical release? Because you said there was some extra footage you were sitting on.
AJ: Yeah! As soon as this interview is over we’re going to go back to making videos announcing the launch of the Blu-ray. We’re gonna have a bunch of fun stuff. We’re actually doing a silkscreen poster of that image of Pepe pulling his pants down, you get to own a physical copy of the meme that started it all. We’re doing some cool merch stuff!
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
