Feels Good Man (2020)
dir. Arthur Jones
Rated: N/A
image: ©2020 Feels Good Man Film, LLC
It’s the ultimate hopelessness of the situation that made it hard for me to buy into the uplifting ending of the new political documentary Feels Good Man. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual nooks and crannies in the picture, and what resonated with me was the aforementioned hopelessness and an impotent rage at the callousness of other human beings. First time director Arthur Jones covers a lot of ground in Feels Good Man. He paints a personal portrait of an artist who has lost control of what his art means; he captures the zeitgeist of a singularly odious time at the intersection of American politics and culture; he provides a cogent exegesis for one small part of the 2016 presidential election. Jones’s film is an engrossing look at the power of the internet to shape the world that lies beyond the screen.
Feels Good Man tells the curious tale of cartoon character Pepe the Frog and the man who created Pepe, artist Matt Furie. A totally innocuous – if juvenile – creation, Pepe was one character in Furie’s online comic Boy’s Club, about a group of twenty-something dudes (all the characters are anthropomorphized animals) living the slacker lifestyle. One particular image of Pepe went viral in the late aughts. The comic that features the image shows one of Pepe’s roommates accidentally walking in on Pepe while he’s peeing. Pepe is standing up, but he has pulled his pants and underwear all the way down to go to the bathroom. In the last panel, as Pepe and another of his roommates play video games, the roommate asks Pepe about his unusual bathroom habit. Pepe explains simply, and with a sly smile, “Feels good man.”
The image of Pepe saying “Feels good man” was posted on the imageboard website 4chan, and that community quickly repurposed the image, creating one of the internet’s most popular memes. If you aren’t familiar with internet culture, the film provides a brief explainer of memes from British psychologist Susan Blackmore, who wrote a foundational text on the subject titled The Meme Machine.
From here, Feels Good Man delves into the nihilistic and intentionally offensive underbelly of the internet in general, and imageboards like 4chan in particular. The Alt-right and White Supremacist movements adopted Pepe as their own, creating memes of Pepe saying things like “Kill Jews man” and incorporating Pepe’s face into scenes featuring Nazi iconography. Supporters of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign morphed Pepe into a likeness of Trump, and the character became a symbol for the regressive, nationalistic, and xenophobic policies that many of Trump’s supporters hoped a Trump presidency would bring into existence.
Jones could easily have focused on any one of the half-dozen topics his film examines. He’s good enough of a filmmaker, though, and has a tight enough handle on the subject matter to seamlessly weave back and forth between them. Jones gives equal time to Furie’s quixotic mission to take his creation back from the White Supremacist movement, as well as the zero-sum internet culture that fosters an environment of saying the most offensive thing possible, making hate speech just a joke.
Feels Good Man even gives time to a cryptocurrency inspired by Furie’s character – called Pepecash – and the people obsessed with collecting rare Pepe works of art. One of these collectors – an insufferable tech-bro shithead – drives around in his Lamborghini, talking about how much money he’s made from Pepecash. As if I needed any more evidence that there is no god.
One stone that Jones does leave unturned is an interviewee who identifies with the NEET movement – which stands for “Not in Education, Employment, or Training” – and the general sense of nihilism and rage of young white guys who feel powerless and empty. This man talks about being inspired by Elliot Rodger, a self-identified incel (involuntary celibate) who became a hero and martyr for the hate-filled internet movement when he killed six people, injured fourteen others, then killed himself. This interviewee is a way for the movie to explain the odious landscape that allowed Pepe to flourish as a symbol of hate.
These interview segments are Jones’s most straightforward attempt at journalism. He finds someone who can speak to the subject matter he’s covering and lets him talk. I couldn’t help in wanting Jones to dig a little deeper with the man, though. I wanted to know if he has grown or changed at all from the 2015 version of himself that he describes to us. It would have made a nice counterpoint to Furie’s seemingly useless – but noble – mission to transform Pepe’s mutated meaning of hate into one of hope and love.
Furie’s goal of stripping the purveyors of online racist hate of their most beloved mascot is admirable. We even see him come up with some inspiring court victories – with lots of pro bono help from intellectual property rights lawyers.
Pepe might be safe for now – personally, I think it’s because internet and meme culture prize novelty above all, and the internet has moved on from Pepe in search of the next dank meme. But the fact that bad-faith actors and weaponized hate speech are both doing all they can to sow chaos kept me from being too optimistic about Furie’s wins. There seems to be no path to victory when your opponents are trolls who hide behind ironic “jokes” to both belittle your outrage and advance their nihilistic agenda. That’s the depressing, and perhaps unintentional, lesson at the heart of Feels Good Man.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Feels Good Man presents a cogent breakdown of one aspect of the 2016 presidential race, but it also provides a clear-eyed view of the power of the internet to shape reality, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. It’s a solid first effort from director Arthur Jones.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The most insightful thing Matt Furie says about American Culture and how it relates to his work is that our culture celebrates garbage and at the same time creates a lot of garbage, which…yeah.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Theaters are starting to reopen, but I won’t be rushing back into them any time soon. As much as I love movies, I’m not interested in risking my health (and possibly life) to see one. Screen Rant wrote a thoughtful piece on why they won’t be reviewing The New Mutants (which is available only in theaters), and I agree totally with their reasoning. You can read it here.