I Love You, PEPE: FEELS GOOD MAN Liberates Our Favorite Frog

Rating: 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

Every year, I return to my college town and attend the True/False Film Festival, a weekend where filmmakers and college students and the general populous gather to watch and celebrate documentaries. Topics vary wildly, but themes tend to emerge. Amazingly, this year, I left with a renewed sense of hope for our society, thanks largely in part to director Arthur Jones’s Feels Good Man. 

What I knew going in: this was a documentary about Pepe the Frog, who originated as a character in Matt Furie’s comic “Boy’s Club”; that the documentary would detail the road to its unlikely status as an alt-right symbol; that the story would likely be depressing as it unveiled the disturbing crevices of the internet. Those things were all true, but the film also offered so much more. The film is much like the internet itself; between the disturbing memes and unsettling screenshots from 4chan, there were moments of humanity with artist Matt Furie, and animations of Pepe and the other “Boy’s Club” characters, and interviews with fascinating subjects like occult expert John Michael Greer. The tight runtime (92 minutes) and variety in content keeps the film at a pleasant pace, and the subject matter is so incredibly relevant and fascinating that I didn’t want it to be over. 

The film illustrates a concept I studied back in college: that now, instead of oral storytelling or folk songs, our folklore exists in digital media. Creating a meme or a TikTok dance or a “challenge” is akin to the proverbs of our ancestors, the difference being that we have the capacity to make and distribute at a much quicker speed. When you share a meme, you’re passing on a story; when you change the text over a picture, you’re making the same kind of adjustment that your ancestor made when they changed a lyric of a song. We use these artifacts to make each other laugh, to build camaraderie, and to spread ideas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but what’s different now is the degree to which a creator can lose control of the thing they started. 

I don’t want to say too much about the details of the film, because despite the hard truths it lays out, it really is a joy to watch. Jones finds a way to tell all sides of this story, including the moments of fear or danger, in a way that also includes beauty and hope and humor. After my screening at True/False, he participated in a Q&A that was almost as exciting as the film itself. He described the “thin green line” that he and the other filmmakers walked in deciding what—and who—to spotlight, and explained his personal connection to the film (which, by the way, is his first foray into filmmaking, which makes the work all the more impressive). The most important thing that he said, though, is what I want to share with you now: this is a film about, above all else, media literacy. It is so crucial now, especially in an election year and amidst all of the social turmoil, to use scrutiny in our consumption, whether it’s an official news source or a crudely drawn meme. We all have the power to bring positivity and empathy into our corners of the internet and life itself. Go see this film, then do something nice for someone. 

Feels Good Man will be screening in Austin at the Violet Crown Cinema on March 14 at 7:10 PM and on March 17 at 1:30 PM. Go see it (after washing your hands, of course)!