"Feels Good Man" -- Movie Review

 

This week at The MoMA Film Virtual Cinema, I streamed the documentary, “Feels Good Man”. 

Synopsis

How did a lovable cartoon frog become a symbol of white supremacists and the alt-right?

Story

Matt Furie is a San Francisco based cartoonist.  Back in the day when My Space was a thing, he would make drawings of a frog he named Pepe, scan them, then post the drawings on his My Space page.  The character of Pepe was that of a laid-back, fun-loving frog – but he was a bit of a slacker.  Not ambitious by any stretch of the imagination, he is basically a construct of its creator’s own id; Pepe is proudly an under-achiever who appears to have essentially dropped out of society in pursuit of his own simplistic pleasurable experiences.  But he was social, not a sociopath. 

Pepe’s catchphrase was “Feels good man”.  Soon, this caught on – not only in other ranges of My Space, but also throughout the internet as a whole.  One of those areas was 4chan, a message board where Pepe was quite popular and “Feels good man” thrived; this was a place where the concept of the Meme was born and Pepe with his “Feels good man” attitude was turned into a Meme.  What could not have been predicted, however, is that darker corners of 4chan would hijack Pepe and transform what some saw as a smug countenance as a way of conveying racial superiority – and eventually, as a means by which to elect Donald Trump president in 2016. 

Once Pepe was picked up by the Trump movement, Furie found himself engaged in an intellectual property lawsuit with of all people Alex Jones of InfoWars.  Jones chose to integrate Furie’s Pepe character into his own show as a way of displaying support for Trump.  Furie objected to this not only because he opposed the views set forth by both Jones and Trump, but also because he owned the character of Pepe was the image was being used without his consent and without financially remunerating Furie.  Could Furie’s lawyers force Jones to stop using Pepe and pay Furie damages?

Review

The story about how Pepe The Frog went from an innocent character for children to a horrifyingly transgressive symbol of bigotry is truly complicated and multilayered.  However, “Feels Good Man” does an excellent job of explaining this complicated tale.  Despite the fact that it is a documentary, the film manages to have a three-act structure with a deeply satisfying – not to mention quite surprising – ending.  As the cartoonist who created Pepe, Matt Furie comes across not only as the victimized hero but also as the simplistic idealist who allowed a system to take advantage of him and his creation.

From a technical perspective, one of the wisest decisions in “Feels Good Man” was to animate many of the still cartoon images of Pepe.  This adds a deeper layer of understanding to the story but also makes the documentary more filmic.  Had the filmmakers not chosen to do that, then the movie is simply talking heads and views of static drawings, which can prove to be boring even in a short film.  The use of the animation is judicious because it engenders a variety of emotional responses at different points in the story and truly winds up bringing the character of Pepe to life.     

Following the screening, there was a stream of an interview with the filmmakers, director Arthur Jones and producer Giorgio Angelini.  They discussed the use of animation in their movie; Angelini said that they hired animators in order to provide a new context and a new canon for the character of Pepe.  Jones added that they wanted to bring the character to life because fans of Pepe tend to have an emotional response to Pepe and he saw an opportunity to do this in film.  In a documentary, Angelini says that while it needs to contain information, it also needs to entertain simply by virtue of the medium being used.