Feels Good Man (Fantasia Fest)
**Seen for the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
All the feels, man. And it feels good.
I didn’t expect to tear up during Arthur Jones’s documentary, but that’s the power of Pepe, and his creator, Matt Furie. This might be the best political documentary we’ve seen in a good long while, and that’s because there is not a single moment that feels less than authentic. There are highs and lows in this, and both are earned.
By the time “Feels Good Man” ended, I had two quotes from “The Dark Knight” in my head that sum up the evolution of Pepe the Frog perfectly, and both come from the same character. The first is, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”; the second is, “The night is always darkest before the dawn.” As you watch this fantastic documentary, you’ll see both of those play out as Pepe becomes, unwittingly, a meme embodying the souls using 4chan, which then finds him co-opted into a reflection of Donald Trump by the alt-right, and finally, finding his way as a symbol of rebellion as Furie tries to wrestle his creation from the grips of those who turned him into a twisted symbol of hate. This might be one of the most inspiring films of 2020.
We begin with Matt Furie and his creation of Pepe. The cartoon Pepe was a part of was called, Boys Club, and he used the character to reflect himself and the world around him in the early 2000s. Around the same time, a message board named 4chan was taking shape, and it wasn’t long before it found itself to be a breeding ground for trolls and disaffected males who felt like they didn’t have anything else better to do but spread memes across the board, the more subversive the better. Once Pepe got within their sights, they found something representative of how they felt, and he took off from there. As he became an internet sensation, Furie tried to cash in, while 4chan would not let Pepe’s popularity stand, getting more and more offensive in their memes, which eventually, found their way to being co-opted by White Power and hate groups, eventually making it towards him be an embodiment of one Donald Trump, and his “deplorables.” By the time Pepe was put on the ADL’s hate image list, was their any way for Furie to retake his creation’s image?
It’s easy to see why Furie did not expect Pepe’s rise, and fall, to occur with such a lack of control by its creator, and we see by his interviews here he is far from the ideologies Pepe cam to represent. And he even owns up to how he should have been more pro-active in controlling Pepe’s image early on, but honestly, it would have been hard for him to fight what 4chan was doing to him. The last third of the film focuses on his attempts to regain control of how Pepe is used, and what that results in may be one of the most surprising things we see in any movie in 2020. We’re left cheering for renewal to appears to have come for this frog, and his creator.
Apart from being a stealth political documentary, “Feels Good Man” also has a lot to say, I think, about a creator’s relationship with his art, how fans react to that art, and the struggle for “ownership” of what that art means. I couldn’t help but think of larger fandoms like Marvel, DC and “Star Wars,” and how each one has found itself in the middle of such complicated questions over the years. In their own ways, each of those properties are dealing with the same notions of ownership, fan entitlement and creator hatred that Furie and Pepe go through here. Taking larger issues and boiling them down into personal struggles and lives is what not just great documentaries do, but great cinema. “Feels Good Man” is a stunning example of both.
