Chances are high that you know of Pepe the Frog. Even if you aren’t immediately aware of it, the cartoon amphibian has become a highly visible symbol of far-right ideologies (specifically, that of the alt-right movement’s rise in the ranks of public consciousness within the last 10 years). He usually does not appear in his originally innocuous appearance but, more than likely, as some crude or offensive interpretation of it. In an act of pulling the curtain back, director Arthur Jones’ documentary Feels Good Man seeks to explore the origins of Pepe—how he came to be, how he was appropriated by hate and, most importantly, how he has been reclaimed in certain ways within the past few years.
It’s an astonishing story, beginning with innocence, twisting into tragedy and ending with a glimmer of hope for the fictional creation of cartoonist and comic artist Matt Furie, who, needless to say, never meant for any of this to happen. Those with only superficial knowledge of this story might find that surprising, particularly because Furie’s own politics became conflated with an abhorrent online movement to silence minorities of race, gender, religion, ethnic background and sexual orientation. It all began, by the way, with a single panel of Boy’s Club, the comic developed by Furie out of growing tedium with his professional and living situations in 2005.
The panel in question is a short succession of childish ideas: One of Pepe’s friends needs to use the facilities, bursts into their bathroom and finds the frog, doing some primary business with his trousers all the way down. Startled, the friend comments on the strangeness of the scene, to which Pepe utters a now-infamous exclamation: “Feels good man” (with the comma missing and everything). Those three words took a hold of Myspace, a then-popular source of early internet meme culture, though not a familiar place for an entire panel of a comic issue. The bodybuilding community first took it on as an ironic response to their exhaustive bodily strain, then it traveled to other online communities.
First, it was innocuous stuff, such as glorying in fast food excessiveness. Then came the disastrous first glimpses of hateful profiteering. Everything came to a head with two events: first, a high-profile mass shooting that was broadcast by the shooter across various social media. Self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” on 4chan (an anonymous imageboard site on which the popularity of certain posts determines how long they are visible) threw their support behind the shooter, complete with various images of a tearful Pepe sprawled across the bottom of the memorial. Spurred by widespread hatred of women and the rise of “incel” culture and “men’s rights activism,” Pepe suddenly became a symbol.
The second event was the 2016 Presidential election, in which supporters of the eventual occupant of the White House became something of a proverbial superpower for members of the GOP whose support of alt-right ideals was coming out of the shadows and into the populace. The film purports (and Furie certainly believes) that Pepe led directly to the election of Donald Trump to office, but it didn’t come without some schadenfreude from Furie, who refused to let the character be used in an official capacity. Lawsuits followed, including of popular online conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and of an alt-right spokesperson who twisted Furie’s children’s novel (about a different frog) into hateful propaganda.
In terms of its construction, there is little that is truly special about the documentary, with the exceptions of flights of fancy involving Pepe in animated form moving through the different stages of his journey. Jones tells the tale from beginning to end without any interruption of that chronology. This is both a limiting decision, because the omniscient point-of-view suggests something more impersonal than we get, and perhaps the only sensible one, as the best way to make sense of this story is to tell it in order. Feels Good man certainly nails the payoff, reaching the point of Pepe coming to represent revolution in Japan and achieving genuine emotional release. That’s a relief.
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