Feels Good Man

I'd heard a lot of good things about this film after its premiere, with the added assurance that, yes, it is a documentary about Pepe the frog and yet it's still really good, so I was expecting something interesting.

And I still finished it thinking it was so much better than a film about Pepe the frog has any right to be. It's a film about symbolism, psychology, the internet, the death of the author, meme culture, all while maintaining a sense of grim disgust but still being funny, optimistic by the end, an interesting character study about a modern day tortured artist, AND never once feels the least bit cringey even though it's about meme culture, which is an extreme rarity in a world where most films centering around the internet are produced by out of touch 60 year old boomers.

Not a word of the script feels wasted, the choice to animate Pepe in various ways illustrating the voice over was genius, and every one of the people it looks at are all really interesting.

The few things I could maybe complain about are that the soundtrack wasn't all that great to me and the last 20 minutes or so feel a bit slower than the rest of the film, and not really in a good way. However, if you have even a passing presence or space of your own on the internet, this is an absolute must-see.

Even if it is a documentary about Pepe the bloody frog.

The first 45 minutes is actually quite informative in following the 4chan adoption and evolution of the meme - the mindset of those who first adopted Pepe and the emotional bond that was made. The next 45 however is essentially the reason Trump won: the lesson the left never learned; a minimization of the bigger conversation to a hyper-focus on the alt-right. In other words, the film does a good job of documenting the battle that took place with the alt-rights use of Pepe. However it's to the exclusion of the bigger campaign of those who do not agree with the alt-right but used Pepe to express hope and belief in a Trump victory over the rise of authoritarian and global Leftism. <-- the conversation that never takes place.

Much like reading a politifact "fact" check, the documentary quickly moves from history of the origins of Pepe into a breakdown and explanation of liberal narrative. As such, it leaves the 2016 experience of an entire swath of conservative and moderate voices misrepresented and lumped into a single basket of hate and aggression.

Let be me clear... This seems to be the way that the creator experienced everything and thus as a "Furie" documentary it tells his story quite well and accurately. However, as a "Pepe" documentary it fails to tell the whole story in anything other than a two dimensional, singularly aspected fashion - white supremacists used Pepe to promote their politics. This is of course true but only a small piece of a much bigger phenomena. Netflix will eat this up however and I imagine it will be viewed by millions and seen as the whole story before it's run is over.

In summary, this was a good documentary experience and I feel better informed after watching it. I would recommend it to just about anyone with the qualifier of its political leaning. But honestly, If you're politically liberal then you already believe the narrative portrayed in the second half of the documentary. If you're politically conservative (or have been since 2016) you are already aware of the narrative bias.

Other than broadly showing the artist, Matt Furie, whose illustration became a meme, doesn't understand the internet and modern culture, and in fact doesn't understand what Richard Dawkins meant in coining the term "meme," I am not sure what the point of this film was. And if people from across the political spectrum, including despicable extreme right and despicable extreme left adopt visual art that has morphed into public domain through meme, what is the point of saying some can use it and others cannot? Modern "memehacking" is so widespread. In fact memehacking is the heir to visual satire that has been around since shortly after cave painting. The very first image of Jesus ever, he is depicted as part animal on a cross with a donkey's head (google: Alexamenos Graffito). The Uncle Sam "I want You" was altered as antiwar satire when that was the opposite of its creation purpose. The irony is that Chinese censors used the copyright issue to shut down memes during the Hong Kong protests.

It's a well made documentary with nicely animated segments. Largely following the perspective of the creator and what happened to pepe. All through an extremely narrow and biased view.

Around the 45min mark, it becomes just crystal clear how he doesn't understand his creation. How he, together with ADL, Hillary Clinton, Maddow and rest of left wing media helped enable this to become a "far right hate speech symbol". It never was that, until these people decided to make pepe into that. It seems completely out of touch with trolling and getting a rise out of people, and going against the mainstream and political correctness. The more these people wish to silence and censor people, the more crazy pepe memes they would get in response. They themselves are the enablers.

The 4chan guy they mainly choose to focus on was such a stereotype fitting 100% the narrative they attempted to persuade. While they did talk to a girl who also roamed 4chan, she was left too much out of the documentary so they could push their view on the audience.

As they show Hong Kong demonstrators towards the end who embrace Pepe, the creator and movie makers seems to not understand that them embracing pepe comes from similar reasons as why it was embraced in the US by Trump supporters. In both cases it's used as anti-leftists, anti-censorship, anti-establishment memes. If they happen to side with the Chinese government, I'm sure they would have labeled their use of it as "hate speech" also.

But all of this being said, it's not a bad documentary, as long as the biased view doesn't annoy you too much. Still a nice capsule of most of the pepe events and how the character grew beyond the grasp of it's creator.

I went into this film hoping for the vibe of the title, but it just felt really uncomfortable and honestly cringey, like the filmmakers and possibly Matt Furie himself felt they had to try to appease the Anti-Defamation League, who are a bunch of genuinely evil kunts, as the one scene with the ADL guy further shows.

There was a line by one of Matt's friends in the film that he suggested they sue the ADL for putting Pepe on the hate list, which is exactly what they should have done. Pepe is an awesome character and internet icon that has entered the public domain, and any attempt to wrangle control back of how the meme is used is an exercise in hubris and futility. Matt and his friends should have just legally destroyed the ADL for even daring to label Pepe a hate symbol.

It's sad how the ADL has zero sense of humour, even self-appointing themselves to go after cartoon characters and their creators for simply having fun. What right do they have to hold someone's creation hostage like that? They are a private organisation with no legal authority whatsoever. If I were Matt Furie, I would go ahead and sue the ADL right now. You can still do it!