Watched this for the first time during a watch together on Twitch, there was also a Q&A with the creator afterwards as well.

I’ve always seen the memes about the character but never understood it’s meaning and it’s history. This documentary was very informative and kept me interested Watched this for the first time during a watch together on Twitch, there was also a Q&A with the creator afterwards as well.

I’ve always seen the memes about the character but never understood it’s meaning and it’s history. This documentary was very informative and kept me interested throughout. The pacing was great and I didn’t feel that anything was dragged out too long. One of my favourite parts was the great animations throughout the doc, especially that last one.

I highly recommend giving this a watch. … Expand

Источник

Feels Good Man Meme

Popular:

Feels Good Man

About

Feels Good Man is a catchphrase and exploitable from a comic strip authored by artist Matt Furie. The phrase is in reference to the emotions one of the characters in the strip feels when he goes to the bathroom standing up, with his pants all the way down.

Origin

«Feels Good Man» comes from a comic series titled Boy’s Club by San Francisco based artist Matt Furie, and has been published by Buenaventura Press since 2006. [1] The comic stars four monsters, Pepe the frog, Brett, Andy, and Landwolf; mostly in situations where they are expelling bodily fluids and using popular 90’s catchphrases like «Got Milk?» and «As if!»

Furie first posted his comics to his MySpace [3] blog in a long series of posts surrounding the Boy’s Club characters. However, Furie’s MySpace account is no longer accessible as it has been voluntarily deleted. Furie has stated in an interview with Know Your Meme that he remembers uploading the comics in late 2005.

In early 2008, a user on 4Chan’s /b/ board decided to upload a scan of one page from the comic, involving Pepe pulling his pants all the way down to his ankles to urinate, leaving his buttocks exposed.

Furie recollects the story behind this specific comic:

My cousin, when we were kids we went to elementary school together and we would go into the public restroom and he would pull his pants all the way down to go pee and I thought it was hilarious. Then he did it in public but you know we were little kids. So then I just thought it would be funny… I don’t even know what age the comic book characters are but they’re anywhere between teenager and twenty-something I guess.

Spread

On February 4th, 2008, Something Awful [2] contributor Jon Hendren (a.k.a. @fart) posted the «Feels Good Man» comic to the site.

That year, users started to photoshop Pepe’s face from the final frame of the comic to create an exploitable image macro. It is very common to see Feels Good Man in combination with Pokemon characters. The catchphrase itself has also taken a life of its own, used sometimes in message boards as a simple response to explain one’s actions or behavior.

In 2009, an edited version featuring a distraught-looking Pepe with the caption «Feels bad man» began circulating as a reaction image on 4chan and the Body Building Forums.

As part of a Halloween event in 2009, Gaia Online used the catchphrase in their series of storyline manga. [4] Gaia character The Overseer, whom is in the form of a clam, takes possession over another character. The unfortunate victim just happens to be naked at the time. When The Overseer is asked about his persisting nudity and refusal to wear clothes he replies, «Feels good man» (shown below).

Interview

Furie stated that his favorite iteration of Feels Good Man are the ones featuring John Goodman (shown below). He said, «I have, a friend of mine sent me a page that had a bunch of them. There was like a dog hanging out the window and says ‘feels good man,’ and another had John Goodman and said ‘eels good man.’ That was my favorite one I think.»

Boy’s Club from now on will be exclusively in print, estimated at one new issue a year. It is unlikely that new strips will be released digitally but is not completely out of the question.

Documentary Film

Feels Good Man (2020 Film) is a documentary directed by Arthur Jones on the life cycle of Pepe the Frog and creator Matt Furie’s attempt to reclaim his character after it became a political symbol for far-right groups. The film was widely praised upon release, winning the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival.

Источник

Feels good man

В сети появился официальный трейлер документального фильма о феномене одного из самых известных интернет-мемов — лягушонка Пепе. Картина «Ништяк, браток» (Feels Good Man) выйдет в прокат 4 сентября 2020 года.

Художник Мэтт Фьюри придумал Пепе в 2005 году — тогда довольный антропоморфный лягушонок впервые появился в его безобидном стрипе. Со временем, появились новые версии Пепе, персонаж «ушел в народ», стал интернет-мемом и начал эволюционировать в неожиданном направлении без участия своего создателя.

К 2016 году изображение Пепе было присвоено спорным движением альтернативных правых как свой символ. Антидиффамационная лига внесла некоторые изображения с лягушонком Пепе в свою базу символов ненависти в 2016 году, отметив при этом, что не все мемы с Пепе имеют расистскую направленность. После этого создатель Пепе высказывал неприятие использования Пепе в качестве символа ненависти.

Оригинальный мем со временем развился в несколько вариантов, например, Sad Frog (с англ. — «печальная лягушка»), Smug Frog (с англ. — «самодовольная лягушка»), Feels Frog (с англ. — «чувствительная лягушка»), лягушка «You will never…»

Источник

User Reviews

This is a really good documentary, only let down slightly by a part near the end regarding the ‘rare Pepe’s’- they didn’t explain it very well and I was super confused. It also wasn’t very relevant to everything else, which makes me wonder whether it was added to get the overall film over 90 minutes.

That being said, everything else was really strong. The presentation is unique, I liked the use of animation, and the music was surprisingly good too. It tells a fascinating story about a meme that got out of the control of its creator, and while I was familiar with Pepe to some extent, I definitely didn’t know the whole story, which made this really engaging.

For me, it started to get really interesting when they began to cover the meme’s relation to the 2016 US Election- that was genuinely fascinating.

If you’re interested in meme culture, politics, or just want a good documentary, I can highly recommend this one.

This documentary has two focuses; the story of Pepe being adopted and appropriated by the internet, and the story of a cartoonist losing his creation. It is in the telling of the former story where the film excels. It follows Pepe from when it first becomes popular on bodybuilding forums to becoming the most popular meme on 4chan to eventually becoming a symbol of the alt-right in the 2016 U.S. election. The movie frames this entire story in the emotions of the people posting the meme. It is not so much about the meme itself as it is about what it means to them, and Pepe meant a lot.

The presentation of the documentary is creative and well paced, mixing animation, interviews, television footage, and screen grabs to keep from ever becoming monotonous. The result is an exiting presentation that emphasizes the empathy for the people being talked about. When the movie gets to the point where Pepe is becoming the symbol of a political movement and Trump is posting himself as Pepe, it is exhilarating. I remember this happening in real life and despising these people, yet despite myself I was getting caught up in the excitement of it all.

There is a sobering transition of tone when, after this section, the camera is back on Matt Furie, his life made so difficult by what was done with his creation. He was naive and maybe wilfully ignorant of what was happening, but he did what we wish more artists would do today, letting people be creative with their characters rather than sending cease and desists. By the time he tries to recover Pepe it is too late and he finally kills the character as 4chan rejoices that Pepe is officially theirs. It is terribly sad.

I thought about downgrading my rating to a 9 because the ending is optimistic in a way that i didn’t quite buy, but I’ve decided to forgive it. The story of this movie is an unprecedented catastrophe that no one could have predicted. Maybe its foolish to assume I can predict where the story is going.

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!

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.

Feels Good Man, the directorial debut of Arthur Jones, centers around the cultural transformation and appropriation of an innocent cartoon character: Pepe the Frog. The film follows Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, as he tries to comes to terms with all that is happening to his creation and eventually fights back to regain control of what was once his; meanwhile, we are also treated to a full unravelling of how Pepe was meme’d into internet infamy among fringe, alt-right groups, discovering just how powerful a tool the Internet can be and how hard it can be to turn back what’s been done. The film’s pacing is very good, the story is captivating, and the people brought in to break it all down are very interesting; however, while being well worth the watch, I think it falls short in its overall takeaway and message.

The film should also be given enormous credit for its efforts in trying to trace the origins and gradual transformation of Pepe. I think we all know how difficult it can be to find any «starting points» or sources of actual truth online, but the crew seem to have done very well in their research; likely helped, and perhaps influenced, by their interviews with members of these Internet hordes. Another short note is that the animation throughout is very solid and felt like a strong tool to complement the film’s narrative. It wasn’t overdone and tied nicely to the scenes where it was used.

As someone who experienced almost all the events presented, this was just a huge trip down memory lane. so i was just constanly pointing and saying «aah i remember that». so i enjoyed a lot of those moments. though im kinda let down on the fact that the story focuses on one side of the story. the whole alt right thing isnt the place where pepe currently resides. so in summary, i really liked it because it is a story close to home, but there were some things that i dissagreed on from a narrative standpoint.

8/10: really enjoyed it, but has some flaws

As Pepe becomes a meme, he becomes more than what his creator intended him for. To some, he’s an icon of the far right and white supremacists. Why would they start using a cartoon frog? Who can say? In 2016, the Anti-Defamation League listed Pepe in its hate symbol database and that’s when Furie started suing people who used his creation against the spirit he was created in.

Pepe was also used by protesters in the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, a stance that its creator can agree with.

I know that we’ve forgotten so much about the last five or six years, but it was a big deal when white supremacist Richard B. Spencer got punched in the face. Remember that? He was trying to explain his Pepe pin when that happened.

Источник

Feels Good Man

“…the movie is a vertiginous, head-slapping examination of the tangible, unpredictable consequences of making art.”

— Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times

“You’ve just got to see it. It is chilling, hopeful, terrible, and wonderful—and made with care, gorgeous animation, and perfect pacing.”

— Allen Salkin, Los Angeles Magazine

“Jones’ approach is nothing less than heroic…

a beacon of internet literacy about a whole new language—that memes are flexible, omnipotent, and pieces of a phenomenon more powerful than their creators.”

— Nick Allen, RogerEbert.com

“Many documentaries become less interesting the more you already know about the subject. But FEELS GOOD MAN presents a heavily covered story in a thoughtful and vivid way.”

“FEELS GOOD MAN a fascinating doc about the rise and fall and rise of the internet meme. Wonderful portrait of brilliant artist.”

— Darren Aronofsky, Director of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler & Black Swan.

“…Feels Good Man plays like a horror story, a Dante-esque descent through the increasingly toxic internet of the mid-00s.”

— Joshua Rivera, Vanity Fair

“We’re left in awe at everything the story of Pepe encompasses…FEELS GOOD MAN proves Pepe can still be a force for good — among other things by helping us, through stories like these, to better understand the world we live in.”

— Angie Han, Mashable

“A strange and terrifying odyssey that says much about intellectual property, fringe groups and the power of online imagery — and culture — to alter the national landscape.”

— Nick Schager, Variety

“FEELS GOOD MAN above the pack…it’s probably one of the better documentary films ever made about the Internet era.”

— Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch

“An expansive forensic look at the life cycle of an idea, a warp-speed analysis of internet sociology, and a harrowingly modern fable about innocence lost.“

— David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“It sure makes for a chillingly effective internet-era cautionary tale” 3/4 Stars

— Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press

perfect documentary of multidisciplinary value…

this first-rate film should be in every media studies course, as Jones marvelously synthesizes many threads with the breadth and depth of sociological perspective that deepens the significance of films like these.”

Источник

Feels good man

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Feels Good Man

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Now I know that a cartoon frog has more political power than I’ll ever have.

Now I know that a cartoon frog has more political power than I’ll ever have.

A very tough film to locate, but well worth it, ‘Feels Good Man’ details the origin of the internet meme Pepe the Frog mostly through the eyes of its creator, Matt Furie. Arthur Jones has put together a very detailed debut documentary covered just about every aspect of Pepe and Matt and the shifts in both. The quest is to turn Pepe back into the character he was intended to be and not a symbol of hate. Speaking of hate the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t come across as tolerant, accepting, or willing to change. The more you know! If you have a library card check this out on Kanopy. Final Score: 8/10

A very tough film to locate, but well worth it, ‘Feels Good Man’ details the origin of the internet meme Pepe the Frog mostly through the eyes of its creator, Matt Furie. Arthur Jones has put together a very detailed debut documentary covered just about every aspect of Pepe and Matt and the shifts in both. The quest is to turn Pepe back into the character he was intended to be and not a symbol of hate. Speaking of hate the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t come across as tolerant, accepting, or willing to change. The more you know! If you have a library card check this out on Kanopy. Final Score: 8/10

A worth watch with great art details

A worth watch with great art details

Documentário sobre a história de um meme que era pra ser um símbolo divertido e acabou virando um símbolo da extrema direita.

Documentário sobre a história de um meme que era pra ser um símbolo divertido e acabou virando um símbolo da extrema direita.

I just finished a screening of this film by one of my favorite YouTube channels. Matt and the director were there after for a interview. This really is a fantastic movie. Way better than I imagined. If anyone wants to understand meme culture in the future this movie should be the first thing people view. Easily a 5 star documentary. It was oddly emotional too. More emotional than you would imagine a documentary about a internet meme would be. It really does have you cheering for the original creator. Pepe is now a world wide symbol meaning almost anything you could imagine. A symbol for everyone from white nationalists, anti-fascists, free loving individuals, to Hong Kong pro democracy protestors. Amazing documentary. This was also self released so please buy it if you can. Good stuff.

I just finished a screening of this film by one of my favorite YouTube channels. Matt and the director were there after for a interview. This really is a fantastic movie. Way better than I imagined. If anyone wants to understand meme culture in the future this movie should be the first thing people view. Easily a 5 star documentary. It was oddly emotional too. More emotional than you would imagine a documentary about a internet meme would be. It really does have you cheering for the original creator. Pepe is now a world wide symbol meaning almost anything you could imagine. A symbol for everyone from white nationalists, anti-fascists, free loving individuals, to Hong Kong pro democracy protestors. Amazing documentary. This was also self released so please buy it if you can. Good stuff.

Источник

Feels Good

Feels Good – мем из категории Computer Reaction Faces, на котором изображен лысый мужчина, трогающий себя за лицо.

Происхождение

Мем срисован со стоковой фотографии чернокожего мужчины. В оригинале у него есть волосы на голове, но он так же трогает свое лицо ладонями, закрыв глаза от удовольствия. Снимок использовался как сопровождение к рекламе средств по уходу за лицом. В 2011 году пользователи 4chan превратили это изображение в шаблон для мемов.

Мем Feels Good часто совмещают с другим фейсом – That feel (мем I know that feel bro или “Я знаю это чувство, бро”).

Также популярна вариация картинки, в которой на лысого мужчину сверху течет вода, а вытекает изо рта.

Значение

Мем Feels Good означает положительную реакцию пользователя на пост или опубликованную картинку. Его используют для выражения удовольствия, полученного после прочтения или просмотра чего-либо.

Кроме того, мем Feels Good используют как шаблон для создания других картинок и комиксов. Персонаж на картинке сохраняет свой жест – ладони у лица. Но может быть изображен в любом образе. При этом на фоне помещают разные действия или атрибуты, от которых этот персонаж чувствует удовлетворение.

Галерея

Если вы нашли ошибку, пожалуйста, выделите фрагмент текста и нажмите Ctrl+Enter.

Источник

‘Feels Good Man’ tells the story of how Pepe The Frog went from meme to alt-right icon

Email Twitter icon A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting.

Snapchat Fliboard icon A stylized letter F.

Flipboard Pinterest icon The letter «P» styled to look like a thumbtack pin.

Pinterest Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url.

In 2020, it’s become clear that memes can have a tangible impact on political discourse. Russian intelligence agencies have used divisive memes to influence American elections, according to Congressional reports, and Donald Trump Jr. has used social media and memes to build an unexpected political following. Even if some social media companies have recently cracked down on bigoted content, censoring memes is like a game of a Whac-a-mole.

Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, has firsthand experience with the chaos of troll culture. In their new documentary, «Feels Good Man,» Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini tell the story of how Pepe went from a stoner cartoon to an alt-right icon that’s condemned by the Anti-Defamation League, and show Furie’s Herculean effort to reclaim his creation.

‘Feels Good Man’ explores the chaos of political memes.

Jones, a cartoonist, first encountered Pepe the Frog in the mid-to-late 2000s, back when he was merely an anthropomorphic amphibian whose most egregious offense was goofy bathroom humor. He bought Furie’s comic book Boy’s Club and became a fan of his irreverent style, later befriending him on a hike with mutual friends. Over time, Pepe became an internet sensation and was a calling card of certain meme-heavy spaces on the internet. Celebrities even referenced Pepe, including Katy Perry in 2014.

In 2015, Jones was shocked to learn that Pepe had transformed and come to signify something totally different: within a couple of weeks, it was reported that an Oregon high school shooter had included an image of Pepe in an ominous post on the fringe message board 4chan, and Trump retweeted a meme of Pepe sporting his iconic, slicked back blonde hairdo. He recalled his bewilderment on a Zoom call with Insider,»I felt like the zeitgeist was on fire. I was just like, ‘what the f-ck is going on? And what does this have to do with my friend’s cartoon character?'»

In fall 2016, shortly after Hillary Clinton’s campaign denounced the cartoon as a hate symbol, Furie teamed up with the ADL for a social media campaign called #SavePepe. Jones was one of the cartoonists who Furie asked to draw a more optimistic version of Pepe as a way of forming a counternarrative to the Neo-Nazi imagery stewing on 4chan and Reddit. «Feels Good Man» traces how this seemingly silly character transformed into an internet meme, and then an international symbol for ethno-nationalist hatred.

A post shared by Secret Headquarters (@theshq) on Oct 27, 2016 at 2:40pm PDT Oct 27, 2016 at 2:40pm PDT

Furie posted his Boy’s Club comics on Myspace and then soon after, «Feels good man,» Pepe’s nonchalant catchphrase, began appearing on bodybuilding message boards. From there, the cartoon gradually evolved into a meme, spreading to YouTube and unregulated corners of the internet that have fostered bigotry and trolls. Pepe was quickly co-opted for political purposes, and overtime became synonymous with the far-right politics of many internet trolls. By the time the ADL added it to their hate symbol database and the Clinton campaign published their Pepe explainer, the cat was out of the bag. During the 2016 presidential race, the Trump camp frequently used Pepe as a nod to the conservative memosphere, such as when Donald Trump Junior posted a Trumpified version of Pepe alongside Roger Stone, Milo Yiannopoulos, and other mainstream and fringe conservative figures.

Jones initially conceived of making a documentary about Furie in early 2017, during the aftermath of the 2016 election, and began production later that year. The film details how with legal help, Furie gained control of the narrative through stopping the sale of a racist children’s book and successfully suing Infowars’ Alex Jones, a right wing conspiracy theorist, for selling a t-shirt that featured Pepe.

In their film, Jones and Angelini unpack what drives people to online radicalization.

«Feels Good Man» explores what drives the fringe online communities that radicalized Pepe. The filmmakers navigated the subject with nuance, striking a careful balance of not endorsing the trollish posts’ hateful messages while also acknowledging the potential power of online camaraderie.

«We wanted to interrogate the systems behind radicalization and the kind of polarization that’s happening online and the systems behind what keeps kids in the basement rather than actually giving a platform to hateful people because ultimately, those messages are not actually what anyone needs to hear. But what we need to understand is really what’s what’s behind all that garbage,» Angelini told Insider.

The documentary offers a holistic perspective on how Pepe the Frog became a 4chan phenomenon, featuring an interview with Mills, a prominent poster and meme maker, who describes the experience of interacting with other users on forums as «group therapy,» even if the political context of that therapy is abhorrent to many. The dynamic of 4chan as an underground space encouraged users to post racist and antisemitic content. By taking Pepe to deplorable extremes, posters tried to repel «normies» from their world and content.

«Pepe is so popular on that platform because people are anonymous and their faces aren’t on there so they use Pepe as a way to communicate their emotion. This story was going to really be about how emotion is leveraged online to build coalitions between people who live very far away, but have a shared grievance,» Jones said. He wants viewers to leave with a better grasp of the «emotional core» of 4chan.

«We want to make a film that Mills could look back on and have some self-reflection. [We didn’t want to] make a preachy kind of film about behaviors online, but really speak honestly and with nuance about these problems,» Angelini added.

Though Furie is depicted as feeling tormented with what his creation had become, the film ends on a semi-optimistic note. In 2019, Pepe became a symbol in the Hong Kong protests, highlighting that a meme can be revitalized in a radically different context.

The filmmakers say that Pepe the Frog is an example of the tangible potential of memes.

Jones believes that the themes of «Feels Good Man» go beyond Pepe, citing how in the 2020 Democratic Party primaries, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg invested in a meme campaign and political newcomer Andrew Yang made it onto the debate stage largely due to his online fandom. Recently, it was reported that Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17 year old suspected of fatally shooting two people at an anti-police brutality protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had a social media presence filled with Blue Lives Matter-related content. «Feels Good Man» illustrates how the line between online and reality isn’t as sharp as some would like to believe.

«As your real self becomes permanently enmeshed with your online self, those feelings become very visceral and very real and they spill over into real life and in really dangerous ways. That’s really a conversation that I hope this film really starts to interrogate in a meaningful way,» Angelini told Insider.

While the documentary doesn’t instill a heavy handed sense of technophobia, it does offer a granular window into the way irreverent online actions can potentially take an emotional toll on a total stranger. Jones views Furie as an «analog figure in a digital world» who unknowingly got pulled into a cyber nightmare and hopes that viewers come away with an understanding that what they do on the internet can «have some sort of connection to reality.»

Meme experts told Insider that the Pepe the Frog story shows that censoring memes is a difficult task.

Towards the end of the film, Furie meets with a team of iDrama Lab researchers who present him with data indicating how widespread and uncontrollable his cartoon had become. Jeremy Blackburn, a computer scientist, concludes that the prospect of successfully reclaiming Pepe would be difficult, telling the artist that it was a «tough genie to put back in the bottle.»

Insider reached out to experts in the field of alt-right memes who echoed this skepticism. Brendan Karet, a researcher for Media Matters for America, said that social media companies can only do so much to stop the proliferation of hate speech memes. «Even if you attempt to preemptively ban memes, extremists on the internet will find other ways to adopt or create a symbol to identify with. The best you can do is identify prominent accounts promoting racism or violence, see what memes, slogans or hashtags they’re using to promote a bigoted ideology, and document their currently preferred methods of disseminating hate speech,» he wrote in an email.

Dr. Heather Suzanne Woods, a researcher of digital rhetoric who co-authored the book Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the alt-right, told Insider that a crucial part to preventing the spread of hateful memes is «media literacy» education. «All citizens need to be able to spot disinformation campaigns and understand that propaganda can look like silly, irreverent memes. We need greater communication competencies from all parties — for instance, fact checking is important but insufficient. We need to look deeper into the political, social, and economic divides that make disinformation seem reasonable,» she wrote to Insider.

The filmmakers and Furie hope that eventually, Pepe the Frog will no longer be classified as a hate symbol.

Jones says that Furie is «excited about the film but in a very reserved way.» The filmmakers believe that the documentary can be a significant step towards the artist’s goal of getting his once whimsical, quirky cartoon removed from the ADL’s database of hate symbols. «We do hope that at a certain moment in time, people will have enough awareness to really understand Matt’s true intentions for the character,» Jones said.

The film won an award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was named a Festival Favorite at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. It will be available for digital renting on AppleTV, Vimeo, and FandangoNOW, and in select theaters September 4th.

Источник

Letterboxd — Your life in film

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Feels Good Man

Synopsis

When indie comic character Pepe the Frog becomes an unwitting icon of hate, his creator, artist Matt Furie, fights to bring Pepe back from the darkness and navigate America’s cultural divide.

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Alternative Titles

Pepe the Frog: alt-rightrörelsens stulna groda, フィールズ・グッド・マン, Ништяк, браток, Ніштяк, чуваче, Zaorane, Smutna żaba, 밈 전쟁: 개구리 페페 구하기

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94 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

I think after watching this and Crumb, I’ve decided documentaries about comic artists are just gonna be my thing.

every time I see the video of richard spencer getting punched it feels like the first time

(september 2020 edit: someone made a comment a while ago saying like, “oh so violence is ok if its people you don’t like?” and I deleted it bc i didn’t want to deal with that, but I would like to clarify: yes violence against nazis is fine)


(Another edit, November 2020: the comments section of this review turned into a nightmare, which I should have expected, and it was definitely a mistake for me to not nip it in the bud. I want to bring the focus back to the movie: this is a very important doc for our time, and I think interactions like that thread are a good example of why.)

The most uncomfortable and uplifting viewing experience of 2020. An absolutely gut-wrenching account of the ongoing battle against hatred and the horror of seeing your creation spiral out of control and become unrecognizable. Gonna be thinking about this one for a long time.

They should add the clip of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face to the criterion collection.

Nobody owns anything on the internet — not really. Just because you create something doesn’t mean that it belongs to you. And while that sort of digital socialism might read like a sad reflection on the impropriety of the information age, the truth is that ideas have been open-source since the dawn of time. Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 as a way to distinguish the growth of thought from the evolution of genes, and defined it as nothing more than a unit of cultural information spread by imitation. Architecture is a meme. Fashion is a meme. A chair is a meme. The only difference these days is the near-instantaneous speed at which that happens.

Dawkins himself has…

this poor sad hot man.

Maybe it’s just that I watched this on Election Day, and I’m filled with the anxiety and apprehension of everyone who has lived these last four years as a waking nightmare, but I think this might be the best film about the Trump years that we’ve gotten so far.

The film, obviously, is not about Trump himself. It is about Pepe the Frog, a creation of the artist and cartoonist Matt Furie that took on a life and meaning of its own in the early years of social media. That meaning turned sinister when, on 4Chan and other similar forums, Pepe was ironically paired with the most evil and transgressive ideas that exist in our society: racism, anti-Semitism, Nazism, etc.…

the story of matt furie is really interesting, this is actually a really good watch, and a kind of sad story.

i don’t really know how to rate documentaries so im not gonna

Unironically the best movie of the year so far. and one of the most aesthetically energetic and creative documentaries I’ve ever seen, period. It’s always so difficult to meaningfully document internet culture in a different medium, because a) it’s hard to visualize digital trends and cultures that are largely abstract/conceptual, and b) the forms of those trends are continually changing with every whim. This doc, though, manages to tackle a startling evolution of one meme overtime in a way that is incredibly easy to follow and visually encapsulating through and through. It feels like the filmmakers were genuinely interested in understanding the bizarre, ironic and sometimes sinister idiosyncrasies of the internet without writing it all off as silly and meaningless. This…

Please, please, PLEASE give me more internet history documentaries.

One of the best films I’ve seen all year. Brilliantly presented, culturally relevant and surprisingly really bittersweet.

Easy to recommend to anyone who uses the internet. Even my mom knows who Pepe is.

need a full movie about the guy who is an expert on «meme magic»

It’s 2020 and I got emotional during a documentary about Pepe the Frog.

Источник

Feels Good Man Meme

Popular:

Feels Good Man

About

Feels Good Man is a catchphrase and exploitable from a comic strip authored by artist Matt Furie. The phrase is in reference to the emotions one of the characters in the strip feels when he goes to the bathroom standing up, with his pants all the way down.

Origin

«Feels Good Man» comes from a comic series titled Boy’s Club by San Francisco based artist Matt Furie, and has been published by Buenaventura Press since 2006. [1] The comic stars four monsters, Pepe the frog, Brett, Andy, and Landwolf; mostly in situations where they are expelling bodily fluids and using popular 90’s catchphrases like «Got Milk?» and «As if!»

Furie first posted his comics to his MySpace [3] blog in a long series of posts surrounding the Boy’s Club characters. However, Furie’s MySpace account is no longer accessible as it has been voluntarily deleted. Furie has stated in an interview with Know Your Meme that he remembers uploading the comics in late 2005.

In early 2008, a user on 4Chan’s /b/ board decided to upload a scan of one page from the comic, involving Pepe pulling his pants all the way down to his ankles to urinate, leaving his buttocks exposed.

Furie recollects the story behind this specific comic:

My cousin, when we were kids we went to elementary school together and we would go into the public restroom and he would pull his pants all the way down to go pee and I thought it was hilarious. Then he did it in public but you know we were little kids. So then I just thought it would be funny… I don’t even know what age the comic book characters are but they’re anywhere between teenager and twenty-something I guess.

Spread

On February 4th, 2008, Something Awful [2] contributor Jon Hendren (a.k.a. @fart) posted the «Feels Good Man» comic to the site.

That year, users started to photoshop Pepe’s face from the final frame of the comic to create an exploitable image macro. It is very common to see Feels Good Man in combination with Pokemon characters. The catchphrase itself has also taken a life of its own, used sometimes in message boards as a simple response to explain one’s actions or behavior.

In 2009, an edited version featuring a distraught-looking Pepe with the caption «Feels bad man» began circulating as a reaction image on 4chan and the Body Building Forums.

As part of a Halloween event in 2009, Gaia Online used the catchphrase in their series of storyline manga. [4] Gaia character The Overseer, whom is in the form of a clam, takes possession over another character. The unfortunate victim just happens to be naked at the time. When The Overseer is asked about his persisting nudity and refusal to wear clothes he replies, «Feels good man» (shown below).

Interview

Furie stated that his favorite iteration of Feels Good Man are the ones featuring John Goodman (shown below). He said, «I have, a friend of mine sent me a page that had a bunch of them. There was like a dog hanging out the window and says ‘feels good man,’ and another had John Goodman and said ‘eels good man.’ That was my favorite one I think.»

Boy’s Club from now on will be exclusively in print, estimated at one new issue a year. It is unlikely that new strips will be released digitally but is not completely out of the question.

Documentary Film

Feels Good Man (2020 Film) is a documentary directed by Arthur Jones on the life cycle of Pepe the Frog and creator Matt Furie’s attempt to reclaim his character after it became a political symbol for far-right groups. The film was widely praised upon release, winning the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Feels good man

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Feels Good Man

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Now I know that a cartoon frog has more political power than I’ll ever have.

Now I know that a cartoon frog has more political power than I’ll ever have.

A very tough film to locate, but well worth it, ‘Feels Good Man’ details the origin of the internet meme Pepe the Frog mostly through the eyes of its creator, Matt Furie. Arthur Jones has put together a very detailed debut documentary covered just about every aspect of Pepe and Matt and the shifts in both. The quest is to turn Pepe back into the character he was intended to be and not a symbol of hate. Speaking of hate the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t come across as tolerant, accepting, or willing to change. The more you know! If you have a library card check this out on Kanopy. Final Score: 8/10

A very tough film to locate, but well worth it, ‘Feels Good Man’ details the origin of the internet meme Pepe the Frog mostly through the eyes of its creator, Matt Furie. Arthur Jones has put together a very detailed debut documentary covered just about every aspect of Pepe and Matt and the shifts in both. The quest is to turn Pepe back into the character he was intended to be and not a symbol of hate. Speaking of hate the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t come across as tolerant, accepting, or willing to change. The more you know! If you have a library card check this out on Kanopy. Final Score: 8/10

A worth watch with great art details

A worth watch with great art details

Documentário sobre a história de um meme que era pra ser um símbolo divertido e acabou virando um símbolo da extrema direita.

Documentário sobre a história de um meme que era pra ser um símbolo divertido e acabou virando um símbolo da extrema direita.

I just finished a screening of this film by one of my favorite YouTube channels. Matt and the director were there after for a interview. This really is a fantastic movie. Way better than I imagined. If anyone wants to understand meme culture in the future this movie should be the first thing people view. Easily a 5 star documentary. It was oddly emotional too. More emotional than you would imagine a documentary about a internet meme would be. It really does have you cheering for the original creator. Pepe is now a world wide symbol meaning almost anything you could imagine. A symbol for everyone from white nationalists, anti-fascists, free loving individuals, to Hong Kong pro democracy protestors. Amazing documentary. This was also self released so please buy it if you can. Good stuff.

I just finished a screening of this film by one of my favorite YouTube channels. Matt and the director were there after for a interview. This really is a fantastic movie. Way better than I imagined. If anyone wants to understand meme culture in the future this movie should be the first thing people view. Easily a 5 star documentary. It was oddly emotional too. More emotional than you would imagine a documentary about a internet meme would be. It really does have you cheering for the original creator. Pepe is now a world wide symbol meaning almost anything you could imagine. A symbol for everyone from white nationalists, anti-fascists, free loving individuals, to Hong Kong pro democracy protestors. Amazing documentary. This was also self released so please buy it if you can. Good stuff.

Источник

Feels Good Man Meme Generator

The Fastest Meme Generator on the Planet. Easily add text to images or memes.

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It’s a free online image maker that lets you add custom resizable text, images, and much more to templates. People often use the generator to customize established memes, such as those found in Imgflip’s collection of Meme Templates. However, you can also upload your own templates or start from scratch with empty templates.

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Yes! The Meme Generator is a flexible tool for many purposes. By uploading custom images and using all the customizations, you can design many creative works including posters, banners, advertisements, and other custom graphics.

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Источник

Feels Good Man: the disturbing story behind the rise of Pepe the Frog

Pepe the Frog in Feels Good Man. Photograph: Kurt Keppeler

Pepe the Frog in Feels Good Man. Photograph: Kurt Keppeler

A new documentary traces the hand-drawn figure from its pacifist creator to the insidious white supremacists who used him as a mascot

He’s green. He’s cute. He feels good, man. And he’s an internationally recognized icon of hatred and bigotry.

He’s Pepe the Frog, and he’s the subject of a new documentary tracking his unlikely journey from humble comic-book beginnings to a controversy involving death threats, lawsuits and scores upon scores of online neo-Nazis. Arthur Jones’s debut feature Feels Good Man – so titled for an oft-reposted image in which Pepe uses the phrase to explain why he urinates with his shorts around his ankles – examines how this strange bit of pop-culture ephemera took on a life of its own, far beyond what its creator had ever envisioned for it. The film also peers into the life of the artist Matt Furie, a mild-mannered slacker wholly unprepared for the task of regaining control over his digital Frankenstein’s monster. Between this odd little symbol and his conflicted father figure, a disturbing yet absurd picture of the great beast Internet starts to emerge, both as a haven of connectivity and a cesspool of intolerance.

“Websites like 4chan create a surrogate family, same way you can form one at a bar,” Jones tells the Guardian via Zoom from his home quarantine. “You sit around, break each other’s balls, talk some shit, have fun and feel like you belong. And if someone tries to change the TV from the Giants game to RuPaul’s Drag Race, they’re going to get yelled at – all the cultural implications of those two choices intended.”

The beady-eyed, smiley-faced amphibian Pepe originated as one of the main characters from Furie’s comic Boy’s Club, a minor underground sensation about four anthropomorphized pals who mostly chill out and get loaded. A knowingly, congenially stoopid quality had been built into the concept; Furie landed on the name “Pepe” because it reminded him of the term “pee-pee”, a resemblance he found funny. That’s indicative of the artist’s sense of humor and general outlook on life as something not to be taken too seriously. He’s the type of person who’d be perfectly content to spend his days drawing cartoons and hanging with his family, someone hilariously incompatible with the occasional malevolence of the virtual world. Speaking about his resentment for those perverting Pepe’s original message of kindness, the harshest thing Furie can say is: “That really twists my noodles.”

“Matt radiates a sense of sweetness,” Jones explains. “He’s a very sensitive guy with a funny partier streak. We were into a lot of the same stuff, so we got along right away – comics, music, movies, an instant shorthand from stuff we were passionate about. There’s a moment in the film when one of Matt’s friends says that this could only happen to Matt. There’s something cosmic about something so surreal and evil falling into the lap of someone so kind and innocent. Matt is genuinely a pacifist.”

Already a fan of Boy’s Club, Jones met Furie for the first time on a hike in 2010, where the two men struck up a fast friendship. It wasn’t until seven years later, however, that Jones first saw the potential for a grander statement about our hectic, internet-besotted era in his pal’s predicament.

“We did our first interview about a year after the ADL declared Pepe an official hate symbol, at a time when Matt was in the middle of locking down the copyright,” Jones says. “They were trying to navigate the process of taking ownership of this character, reclaiming it from people like Richard Spencer and Alex Jones … I didn’t necessarily think I was ever going to make a film. The idea came out of my relationship with Matt, and observing how all the stuff that was happening in the culture was affecting him and his family.”

Pepe had been busy over the course of the 2010s. Users of forum sites like Reddit and 4chan, complex social networks offering a sense of kinship to many IRL loners, turned the “feels good man” panel into a meme with constantly shifting meaning. At first, Furie was tickled to see fellow weirdos using his doodles as a visual shorthand for pleasure and happiness, but the file’s free-use versatility turned out to be a double-edged sword. Pepe could be made to say, for instance, that the Holocaust felt good, man. Suddenly, the friendly frog was being given Hitler moustaches and Trumpian combovers by fringe extremists pairing the reluctant mascot with racist, homophobic and antisemitic invective. The alt-right wingnut Alex Jones and slickly coiffured white nationalist Richard Spencer glommed on to Pepe as a shared shibboleth between them and their followers on the 4chan politics board known as “/pol”. His crudely sketched smile, once a beatific expression of inner peace, had been twisted into a troll’s smirk of smug satisfaction.

Matt Furie in Feels Good Man. Photograph: Giorgio Angelini

He reached out to users who could shed some light on the pathologies animating this pocket of online activity, particularly its nastier corners. These correspondences often ended with “confrontational back-and-forths”, Jones’s first true taste of the antagonism-as-sport that is these sites’ lingua franca. One of the film’s more colorful characters goes by “Mills”, a longtime 4channer well-versed in the craft and language of posting. He served as the production’s troll whisperer, connecting the on-and off-screen dimensions for a presumed audience of laypeople.

“4chan is an anonymous platform, and a lot of users take that anonymity as a point of pride,” Jones says. “Mills is someone whose face was on 4chan already. Most of them don’t publicize their identity; it’s kind of like breaking omertà. I found a YouTube channel with lots of his blogs, and there was one with only a handful of hits, labeled with the date it was made. From the page of all the videos, I randomly clicked on that one, and it was the one of him in bed with the phone held up, saying, ‘What does Pepe mean to me?’ I got goosebumps. I was like, ‘This guy’s in the movie.’”

Jones had a handful of those road-to-Damascus epiphanies while gathering personalities for the talking-head interviews that clarify this milieu. A memorably chilling moment comes courtesy of the former Trump campaign strategist Matt Braynard, who explains the genius of Pepe as the ultimate dogwhistle, meaningless to everyone except those tuned to his unsavory frequency. “There was a Politico article about him, standing in his office in front of a photo of a young Anne Coulter looking very much like Farrah Fawcett,” Jones says. “I had that feeling again. I started to pump my fist in the air and march around the room.”

A scene from Feels Good Man. Photograph: Guy Mossman

And then there’s the self-styled playboy known as PepeCash Millionaire, a cryptocurrency trader living on a yacht he purchased using a Pepe-themed variant of Bitcoin. Jones laughs as he recalls his editor’s mother first learning of the eccentric commodity player, whose seeming guilelessness unlocked a key aspect of this mindset for Jones.

“He was a really interesting person to film with, very generous about letting us into his world,” Jones says. “Through the whole experience, I think there was a wink-wink quality to it. I had a very revealing conversation with him while driving from one location to another: his family is from eastern Europe, came to North America from a formerly Soviet country, which gives you a very particular perspective. Once we stripped away the edifice of bullshit and general trolly-ness, he exposed a really important truth, which I hadn’t grasped before. There’s an innocence to all this. He really saw Trump authentically representing his interest in draining the swamp. He didn’t see Trump as a con artist.”

The film ends with a pair of victories. Furie takes Alex Jones to court and wins, barring him from peddling merchandise bearing Pepe’s likeness and forcing him to cough up a handsome settlement. But the second triumph gives that first one a pyrrhic tang; Trump’s ascent and amassing of power hangs over the final act, with Pepe’s appropriation a mere symptom of a larger and more sinister ideology engendered by the current president. Furie may have gotten his life back, but his most famed creation remains the first casualty of the flame wars that have come to define the Trump era.

Midway through the chat on Zoom, Jones checks his buzzing phone. He makes a sound equal parts chuckle and moan of despair. “Even right now, my dad is compulsively sending me rightwing memes about the election,” he says. “The same way my dad spends six hours a day listening to conservative talk radio, we’ve now got kids spending six hours a day on /pol.”

Feels Good Man is available to rent digitally in the US on 4 September with a UK date to be announced

Источник

Feels Good Man

2020 · M · Art & Design

Artist Matt Furie, creator of the comic character Pepe the Frog, begins an uphill battle to take back his iconic cartoon image from those who used it for their own purposes.

Directed by: Arthur Jones

Featuring: Arthur Jones, Stephen Colbert, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Nicki Minaj, Rachel Maddow, Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Matt Furie, Aiyana Udesen, Chris Sullivan, Johnny Ryan, Lisa Hanawalt, Emily Heller, Susan Blackmore, Dale Beran, Mills, Peder Riis, Aleks Krotoski, Brian McMullen, Joel Finkelstein, Aaron Sankin, Matt Braynard, John Michael Greer, Skinner, Adam Serwer, Rachael Finley, Hampton Boyer, Kevin Sukho Lee, Peter Kell, Jeremy Blackburn, Louis Tompros, Stephanie Lin, Oren Segal, Alex Jones, Samantha Bee, Robert Barnes, Ursala Furie, Nicolette Gray, Mike Majlak, Phil McGraw, Kiah Morris, Logan Paul, Katy Perry, Christopher Poole, Marc Randazza, Joy Reid, Toby Reynolds, Elliot Rodger & Richard Spencer

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Источник

Pepe the Frog — история известного и противоречивого мема

Материал подготовлен на основе источника:

Это непрофессиональный перевод с адаптацией и вольностями. Если какой-то блок текста можно перевести лучше, то предлагайте в комментариях, я поправлю. Надеюсь на понимание.

Новый документальный фильм «Feels Good Man» рассказывает зрителю об эволюции лягушонка из персонажа инди-комикса в один из самых популярных и резонирующих мемов современности.

В начале фильма мультипликатор Мэтт Фьюри склоняется к болоту, чтобы взять из него маленькую лягушку размером не крупнее его большого пальца.

Фьюри улыбается, когда лягушка остаётся на его руке. На мгновение она замирает и словно позирует, напоминая миниатюрную садовую статую. Затем она скачет по руке Мэтта, уходя из-под его нежного контроля, а он же никак не реагирует.

Вряд ли это первый лягушонок, который ускользнул от него.

Когда Фьюри впервые нарисовал лягушонка Пепе, который стал одним из самых узнаваемых и противоречивых мемов в мире, это был всего лишь «один из» — очередной рисунок в длинной череде аналогичных ему изображений антропоморфной амфибии.

«Это была всего лишь медленная капель из лягушек длинною во всю мою жизнь».

В 2005 Пепе стал частью комиксов «Furie Boy’s Club». Сериала о глупой и неряшливой группе друзей.

А к 2016 году лягушонок стал интернет-символов ненависти, национализма, кошмарным существом, любимым среди белых интернет-расистов.

Ключевая фраза персонажа Пепе «Feels Good Man» тоже претерпела немалые изменения в своём значении. Строчка, написанная Фьюри, как реакция чудака-лягушонка, когда его застали писающим со спущенными штанами, значила теперь: «Убивай евреев, чувак, я просто зритель».

Фильм обращает внимание на ярых сетевых реакционеров, которые превратили Пепе из глупого лягушонка в символ фашизма, но в основном эта картина показывает интимный и некомфортный портрет наивного карикатуриста, которые пытается забрать JPEG обратно из пасти самых уродливых и мерзких уголков 4chan.

Потому что он прав.

И потому что это его JPEG.

Он автор детской книги и вряд ли претендует на роль гладиатора. Но к 2020 году борьба авторов за право собственности на свои произведения, используемые во всемирной паутине, стала огромной проблемой.

Рассказывая историю Фьюри, фильм «Feels Good Man» обнажает хореографию и истинные и смешанные эмоции этой борьбы. Лягушонок Пепе это больше не лягушка, а некий загадочный приз в противоборстве. И как победить в нём — пока что не разобрался никто.

Если и критиковать «Feels Good Man», премьера которого состоится на фестивале «Sundance Film Festival, то, наверное, за документальную перегруженность.

У Мэтта Фьюри, возможно, и есть вразумительная сюжетная арка, ведущая его от апатии до огорчения и псевдо-триумфа, но сам Пепе?

Одна из причин, по которой Пепе удалось так легко использовать — люди не знали, откуда он взялся. С самого начала я хотел, чтобы комиксы Мэтта Фьюри ожили.

В промежутках между монологами «Feels Good Man» — это кислотный трип в стиле анимаций Фьюри, оригинальные рисунки Пепе, не имеющие ничего общего с «Boy’s Club», топики на 4chan, видео с девочками подростками, разукрашивающими своё лицо так, чтобы быть похожими на Пепе. Джонс потратил месяцы, чтобы собрать всё это с 4chan и показать нам.

«Feels Good Man» в лучшем случае — это возможность понаблюдать за эмоциональным путешествием Фьюри, тонким и щадящим, что выглядит вполне правдиво. Мэтт не выражает эмоции и фильм не пытается заставить его сделать это, но вы можете увидеть всю полноту его ощущений всего в нескольких цитатах. Это почти, как в трёх-блочном комиксе. Сначала он самый спокойный в мире панк, который говорит: «Я художник, я не люблю судиться с другими артистами». Постепенно он разочаровывается.

Мэтт паренёк, чья работа стала вирусной, но когда он встречается с фанатами, то те говорят: «Должно быть фигово, когда твою работу угоняют».

«Это определённо отстой, но ничто не вечно», — говорит он.

И затем уже тише и неуверенно: «Верно же? Хех. ».

Последнее рассказывается даже не самим Фьюри, а его коллегой художницей Айаной Удесен:

«Он думал так: «Я всю жизнь работал художником и теперь всё это скатилось в свастику?». Ему потребуется много времени, чтобы осознать, что его творение просто стало мёдом для фанатичных пчёл, но ещё дольше ему пришлось решать — делать ли что-либо с этим или нет».

В конечном итоге он действительно делает и действует.

Отправляются авторские иски, а также создаётся движение #SavePepе, в котором лягушонок делает что-то хорошее.

«Feels Good Man» показывает Фьюри победителем над воровской галереей с плохим Пепе, в том числе над Алексом Джонсом и белым националистом Ричардом Спенсером. Фильм также подводит к тому, что эта победа и отстаивание собственности далеко не просты, особенно после того, как Фьюри расправляется с Пепе в своих коммиксах.

Борьба Фьюри мучительна, а его победы в итоге ни к чему не привели. Чтобы убедиться в этом, достаточно погуглить о его попытке убрать персонажа из базы данных ADL (Антидиффамационная лига — американская еврейская неправительственная правозащитная общественно-политическая организация, противостоящая антисемитизму и другим формам нетерпимости по отношению к евреям), где он значится, как символ ненависти.

В итоге Фьюри не удаётся забрать Пепе обратно. И сфера его деятельности выходит далеко за рамки обычного мема. Например, браться Фьюри в итоге разбогатели на криптовалюте PepeCash, а протестующие в Гонконге использовали его, как талисман.

По какой-то причине этот грустный лягушёнок привлекает людей. Это определённая ностальгия, как с Маппетами, но им пришёл конец. Это знакомая и странная жутковатость с эдакой гравитацией, которая и утянула Пепе у Фьюри в тёмные и грязные места, но также и вернула Пепе к свету, правда уже на другом конце мира.

Осознание и наблюдение того, как ваше творение становится массовым и вирусным является величайшей радостью и болью художника. И лишь немногие из художников, если таковые вообще найдутся, осознали это так, как Мэтт Фьюри.

Пепе был просто дурацким персонажем, нарисованным в основном для близкого круга друзей; затем он стал злом.

Лягушонок становился символом ненависти, был инфоповодом национального масштаба и превратился в показательный образ того, как публичное искусство может быть невежественным или пропагандистским.

Между тем, Фьюри до сих пор сомневается, что верно произносит слово «мем». Да уж, только представьте, как пытаетесь расставить по полочкам всё это в голове.

Документальный фильм позволяет заглянуть в его разреженный мир. И как бы уважаемо и обоснованно не выглядел Фьюри, на самом деле можно сказать только одно:

Ага, я понял, не зря я скипнул всю статью.

А к 2016 году лягушонок стал интернет-символов ненависти, национализма, кошмарным существом, любимым среди белых интернет-расистов.

Чекни свои привелегии, на сайте, пожалуйста.

Если что это перевод статьи с конкретного сайта, который сделал обзор на фильм про мем, созданный в соавторстве с создателем мема. Ну т.е. на всякий случай — ты споришь не со мной, я просто донёс материал, ты споришь с автором мема по сути своей.

Пепе такой же символ ненависти, как жест «окей», это два.

Западная пресса омерзительна и некомпетентна во всем, касающимся интернет культуры, и если хотелось рассказать о Пепе, лучше бы перевести Драматику или knowyourmeme накрайняк, это три.

Так что аргументированный минус. Хотя, может я просмотрю на муки и страдания глуповатого художника, которого пресса убеждает что он виноват в создании символа ненависти, хотя эта посылка абсолютно ложна. А потом делает из него мученика от поп-культуры.

Хм. Западная пресса некомпетентна в вопросе интернет культуры? Какая же пресса компетентна, интересно узнать?

Ну и рассуждения о том, что моя правда лучше твоей в абсолюте была бы уместна в споре (плохом, но споре), но как я и писал выше – если и собираешься спорить, то не со мной, это перевод материала, который мне захотелось сделать. И связан он с выходом документалки. Есть что-то лучше или хуже по твоему мнению – садись и делай.

Ну и тебе из другого культурного слоя, конечно, виднее, надуманное оно или нет, захайпили ли вину художника или это действительно так и было. Я вот почему-то не могу быть уверенным ни в первом, ни во втором, но тебе «виднее» 🙂

Ещё есть такое понятие, как причинно-следственная связь. Это, например, когда автор создал произведение, которое затем стало мемом. Не будет здесь понятия «автор мема», кроме автора произведения, потому произведение стало мемом, а не наоборот.

Но у всего есть своя история, арка, которая имеет начало, исток. Я скорее об этом. Чистого хаоса не существует. Я уж молчу, что любое интернет-сообщество вполне структурированно и шаблонно.

Здесь полностью согласен. Цитата крайне хорошо подходит не только на этот случай при этом.

Мне виднее, потому что я в этом учавствую, а не сторонний наблюдатель.

Ну т.е. ты в интернет-среде общаясь с совершенно незнакомыми людьми сразу уже думаешь, что только ТЫ в этом участвуешь, а твой оппонент в дискуссии нет? Или ты не предполагаешь, что есть другое мнение на этот счёт?

Я просто пока не совсем адаптировался к местной иронии и юмору, сегодня только зарегался. Спасибо за уточнение на самом деле 🙂

За историю пожалуйста, хоть перевод и кривоват, а некоторые моменты вовсе опущены в силу незнания контекста.

И он стал таковым только потому что его Трамп использовал, до этого всем было на него насрать, интересно а если бы Трамп использовал изображение Иисуса и цитировал библию

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‘Feels Good Man’ Review: The Evolution of a Poisonous Frog

A new documentary looks at how the cartoonist Matt Furie’s creation Pepe the Frog became a symbol of hate.

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As the documentary “Feels Good Man” tells it, when the cartoonist Matt Furie learned that his comic character Pepe the Frog had become an internet meme, he decided not to enforce his copyright. “I’m like an artist, so I don’t like suing other artists,” he explains. Initially, the meme seemed harmless, but Pepe evolved into symbol of white nationalism, anti-Semitism and violence. When Jeremy Blackburn, a computer scientist, shows Furie data that suggest that Pepe has become an “entry point to radicalization,” he asks Furie if he feels “any personal responsibility.”

The co-opting of Pepe is not easy to trace, and “Feels Good Man” plunges into that ribbit hole with clarity, humor (when called for) and outright horror (frequently). The director, Arthur Jones, is also an animator, and vibrant cartoon sequences give the movie a refreshing rhythm and visual texture.

“Feels Good Man” paints Furie as a gentle California children’s book author caught off-guard by Pepe’s transmogrification. In this regard, Jones, a friend of Furie, uses kid gloves. Adam Serwer, who interviewed Furie for The Atlantic, says he found him “somewhat naïve” about the far right’s appropriation of Pepe. But you’d have to read the interview, published in 2016 two weeks before the Anti-Defamation League labeled Pepe a hate symbol, to know that even then, Furie felt that the Pepe-Nazi associations were “just a phase.” He has since fought back aggressively.

“Feels Good Man” delves into other bizarre cultural manifestations of Pepe, with commentary from an occultist, traders in a Pepe-based cryptocurrency and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong who have made the frog a positive symbol. At its best, the movie is a vertiginous, head-slapping examination of the tangible, unpredictable consequences of making art.

Feels Good Man
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.

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Feels Good Man Meme

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Feels Good Man

About

Feels Good Man is a catchphrase and exploitable from a comic strip authored by artist Matt Furie. The phrase is in reference to the emotions one of the characters in the strip feels when he goes to the bathroom standing up, with his pants all the way down.

Origin

«Feels Good Man» comes from a comic series titled Boy’s Club by San Francisco based artist Matt Furie, and has been published by Buenaventura Press since 2006. [1] The comic stars four monsters, Pepe the frog, Brett, Andy, and Landwolf; mostly in situations where they are expelling bodily fluids and using popular 90’s catchphrases like «Got Milk?» and «As if!»

Furie first posted his comics to his MySpace [3] blog in a long series of posts surrounding the Boy’s Club characters. However, Furie’s MySpace account is no longer accessible as it has been voluntarily deleted. Furie has stated in an interview with Know Your Meme that he remembers uploading the comics in late 2005.

In early 2008, a user on 4Chan’s /b/ board decided to upload a scan of one page from the comic, involving Pepe pulling his pants all the way down to his ankles to urinate, leaving his buttocks exposed.

Furie recollects the story behind this specific comic:

My cousin, when we were kids we went to elementary school together and we would go into the public restroom and he would pull his pants all the way down to go pee and I thought it was hilarious. Then he did it in public but you know we were little kids. So then I just thought it would be funny… I don’t even know what age the comic book characters are but they’re anywhere between teenager and twenty-something I guess.

Spread

On February 4th, 2008, Something Awful [2] contributor Jon Hendren (a.k.a. @fart) posted the «Feels Good Man» comic to the site.

That year, users started to photoshop Pepe’s face from the final frame of the comic to create an exploitable image macro. It is very common to see Feels Good Man in combination with Pokemon characters. The catchphrase itself has also taken a life of its own, used sometimes in message boards as a simple response to explain one’s actions or behavior.

In 2009, an edited version featuring a distraught-looking Pepe with the caption «Feels bad man» began circulating as a reaction image on 4chan and the Body Building Forums.

As part of a Halloween event in 2009, Gaia Online used the catchphrase in their series of storyline manga. [4] Gaia character The Overseer, whom is in the form of a clam, takes possession over another character. The unfortunate victim just happens to be naked at the time. When The Overseer is asked about his persisting nudity and refusal to wear clothes he replies, «Feels good man» (shown below).

Interview

Furie stated that his favorite iteration of Feels Good Man are the ones featuring John Goodman (shown below). He said, «I have, a friend of mine sent me a page that had a bunch of them. There was like a dog hanging out the window and says ‘feels good man,’ and another had John Goodman and said ‘eels good man.’ That was my favorite one I think.»

Boy’s Club from now on will be exclusively in print, estimated at one new issue a year. It is unlikely that new strips will be released digitally but is not completely out of the question.

Documentary Film

Feels Good Man (2020 Film) is a documentary directed by Arthur Jones on the life cycle of Pepe the Frog and creator Matt Furie’s attempt to reclaim his character after it became a political symbol for far-right groups. The film was widely praised upon release, winning the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Feels Good Man

It’s an awful feeling for an artist, having a beloved work be put to sinister and destructive purposes. Once a work is out in the world, the artist has no control over it: everyone who makes art understands this on an abstract level. But to actually see it happen is something else entirely.

That’s what happened to comics creator Matt Furie, the protagonist of «Feels Good Man,» a documentary directed by Furie’s close friend, artist Arthur Jones. Furie invented Pepe the Frog, a bug-eyed stoner amphibian with a vibe in the vicinity of Cheech and Chong or Jeff Lebowski. Then, over an increasingly agonizing period of years, he saw the character appropriated by other people (including celebrities), then refashioned as the mascot of the so-called alt-right, a decentralized right-wing political subculture obsessed with sowing uncertainty and chaos through trolling.

You’ve likely seen the image of Calvin from the classic comic strip «Calvin & Hobbes» peeing on a symbol of some designated enemy while staring at the viewer with a malicious expression. The image never appeared in the original strip, but over the past 25 years, it has spread all over the world, focusing on targets from Florida State University’s football team to various NASCAR drivers and, in 1996, the boss of some disaffected police officers (the officers got suspended without pay for spreading images of Calvin urinating on their hated supervisor). Bootleg t-shirts and decals from fly-by-night companies spread the micturating Calvin without authorization from comic strip creator Bill Watterson and his publisher, United Press International. The rights-holders tried to prosecute the people responsible, but had to give up because there were too many and they were too elusive.

A similar thing happened with Pepe, on a grander scale. As chronicled in «Feels Good Man,» Furie, who has been obsessed with frogs since childhood, introduced the character in 2005 in his comic series “Boy’s Club.» Pepe was appropriated in fitness videos first. Furie let it go.

Then Pepe became an emblem on 4chan message boards, where users took pride in inflicting emotional distress on strangers in such a way as to maintain deniability about what they were doing. The frog’s expression—as described by other illustrators and meme experts consulted for the film—had an ugly Mona Lisa aspect. Inscrutable yet knowing. Superficially blasé or innocent, but at the same time, conscious and responsible. Your gut told you that this frog was up to no good, but you couldn’t prove it.

«Feels Good Man» is essentially a detective story, tracking the appropriation of an artist’s work for purposes that go against everything he’s about. Not content to string together talking head interviews, the movie uses art and animation to find a cinematic equivalent for Pepe’s evolution from a quirky cartoon animal into a weapon.

One of the more fascinating substrains of the story shows how 4chan users began to act as if they, not Furie, invented and owned Pepe. Once modified/distorted Pepe images migrated off message boards and onto social media, they were put to different, often self-serving uses in the mainstream (even getting borrowed by celebrities Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj). The people who had stolen and altered Pepe went all-out to «reclaim» the character from so-called «normies»—a warped-mirror version of Furie’s legitimate quest.

Things got worse after Pepe started being presented as the Mickey Mouse or SpongeBob Squarepants of authoritarian fascist fanboys: an outwardly «harmless» or «innocent» badge for anyone who’s into right-wing disinformation, shitposting, and targeted cruelty. Right-wing hate culture had been driven mostly underground in regular life (although of course there were eruptions here and there—and since the ’90s, hateful messages had been spread daily over public airwaves via Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Alex Jones, Fox News Channel, Breitbart News, and the like). During the late aughts and early teens, this tendency moved out of the shadows and into political daylight, in response to demographic shifts in the U.S., eight years of governance by the first Black president, and a growing alarm among some white Americans that political and cultural power sharing was in their future, and would not be optional.

Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, flat-out nihilistic glee at another person’s misfortune: if that kind of sentiment found its way into a Tweet or Facebook post, there was a good chance Pepe was there with it, as an avatar or uploaded graphic. Sometimes Pepe was wearing a swastika, a Ku Klux Klan hood or a Make America Great Again cap. Other times, he was just Pepe. But he always had that unsettling expression. Maybe Pepe endorsed the message. Maybe he just spread it to upset others. It was hard to say for sure.

Once Donald Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination and based his campaign around shouting things that American reactionaries had been conditioned to whisper—or just not say—Pepe became associated with Trump supporters, then with Trump himself. Trump’s rise was perfectly aligned with a political strain that specialized in initiating or amplifying distress and disorder, getting its rocks off on the aftermath while leaving just enough of a grey area in terms of intent that the targets felt gaslit. (One source in the film describes the appropriated Pepe as an «impossible mixture of innocence and evil.»)

An image of Pepe with Trump’s angel-hair-pasta pompadour spread over the Internet. Then Trump retweeted it in October, 2015, and the association became official. A once-cartoon amphibian was linked to a gangster president who held power through chaos and fear. The most chilling moment reconstructs message board traffic during a public appearance by Trump’s Democratic opposition, Hillary Clinton. An alt-right supporter in the room yelled «Pepe!» at Clinton after being egged on to do so. «To the white supremacist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi alt right in this country, that was a moment of triumph,» MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted later.

Pepe was been turned into something he was never intended to be. His creator and steward didn’t realize what was occurring until it was too late to halt or reverse it. The film’s chronicle of Furie’s increasing despair and disillusionment syncs up with changes in the United States’ collective character and self-image. «Feels Good Man» links the hijacking of one cartoonist’s intellectual property with the hijacking of a nation’s norms, laws, and institutions: a decentralized campaign of subversion, perversion, theft, and distortion, happening mostly out of sight for a long time, then finally emerging into daylight, secure in the belief that the pivotal damage had already been done, and there was no going back to how things were.

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Мем «лягушонок Пепе» стал фильмом про символ ненависти — трейлер Feels Good Man

В сети появился трейлер документального фильма о появлении мема с «лягушонком Пепе» под названием Feels Good Man. Лента расскажет о процессе создания оригинального комикса и о том, как зеленая антропоморфная лягушка стала символом движения альтернативных правых.

В 2005 году американский художник Мэтт Фьюри (Matt Furie) придумал персонажа по имение Пепе для комикса Boy’s Club. На изображении, которое в итоге стало мемом, Пепе представлен в момент мочеиспускания с опущенными до щиколоток штанами. На вопрос, зачем он так низко снял брюки, лягушонок ответил: «так хорошо, чувак» (feels good, man). Пользователи 4chan дали лягушонку несколько версий, включая грустную, удивленную и другие.

К 2014 году мемом с Пепе стали пользоваться звезды, например певица Кэти Перри (Katy Perry). Во время президентской гонки в 2016 Дональд Трампа (Donald Trump) тоже использовал Пепе в Твиттере. Тогда же лягушку начали ассоциировать с движением альтернативных правых.

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Where to Watch ‘Feels Good Man’

@ greatbjornson Jan 22, 2021 at 5:04pm

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Feels Good Man, a new documentary from director Arthur Jones, takes on one of the most recognizable symbols of internet culture in the last five years: Pepe the Frog. The cartoon creation was originally conceived by artist Matt Furie, who never intended for the harmless frog to transform into a symbol of hate, but watched as his character spiraled into the deepest corners of the internet and out of his control.

Described as “A Frankenstein-meets-Alice in Wonderland journey of an artist battling to regain control of his creation,” Feels Good Man follows the journey of one artist to take back his work and reclaim it for himself. Furie fights to redirect Pepe back to his original intentions, steering the character away from the hate he had come to embody and back to a positive symbol.

Here’s everything you need to know to watch Feels Good Man.

IS THERE A FEELS GOOD MAN TRAILER?

Yes! If you want to check out the trailer before watching Feels Good Man, just scroll up, where you’ll find the full video at the top of this article.

IS FEELS GOOD MAN ON NETFLIX OR HULU?

Right now, you won’t find Feels Good Man on streaming platforms like Netflix or Hulu. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other options to see the award-winning doc — read on for more ways to watch Feels Good Man this weekend.

WHERE TO WATCH FEELS GOOD MAN:

You’ll find Feels Good Man across digital rental platforms, including YouTube, Vudu, Google Play, Prime Video, FandangoNow, iTunes, and the Microsoft Store.

HOW TO WATCH FEELS GOOD MAN:

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Feels Good Man, a film that truly gets how things are passed across the Internet

Exhaustively researched and reported, doc stays riveting no matter your Pepe familiarity.

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There’s no shortage of documentaries about our current political climate or the fact that the Internet might be bad, but Feels Good Man focuses on the craziest intersection of these two modern realities: Pepe, the cartoon frog.

If you’re aware of Pepe already, chances are it’s because the character has become synonymous with the alt-right, that extreme online demographic tied to modern white supremacists and Nazi movements. Or perhaps you heard of Pepe before that, during the time this frog had become the meme du jour of 4chan, the anonymous message board associated with all sorts of nefarious real-world behavior. Though Pepe’s most high-profile 15 minutes of fame were inarguably a cameo on then-candidate Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, leading to the character’s adoption by some of his most extreme supporters, like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Feels Good Man will get to all that, of course, but this documentary starts with the now-toxic toad’s tadpole days. By doing so, the film will likely show viewers something they didn’t know or hadn’t previously considered regardless of prior familiarity with Pepe and the insanity swirling around him. And through tracing Pepe’s evolution, Feels Good Man manages to remind everyone of a fundamental truth of communication, particularly in the Internet age. Once you click send on something, things like original intent and context might become as ephemeral as a single tweet.

A film that truly understands Internet

While ostensibly marketed on the festival circuit as “the Pepe doc,” Feels Good Man actually has another central figure: Matt Furie, a Bay Area comics artist. Back in the days where MySpace existed, he created a Gen X-ish group of animal friends existing in perpetual post-college slackerdom for a series called Boy’s Club. Furie’s lifelong frog fandom led to an amphibian named Pepe becoming one of the comic’s lead foursome. “Feels Good Man,” the phrase, has been literally lifted from Pepe’s mundane adventures, particularly the one where he discovered how nice it felt to pee standing up with your pants removed entirely.

The documentary thoroughly and exhaustively documents things chronologically from here. You’ll see early Boy’s Club comics Furie drew in the back of a San Francisco thrift store, posts documenting how Pepe became the preferred badge of self-deprecating irony on 4chan, or a mountain of Pepe merch Furie once had produced but can’t in good conscience give away or sell these days. While walking viewers through all of that, Feels Good Man seems remarkably smart about identifying turning points for the cartoonist and the character he once controlled. It’s quite evident Director Arthur Jones deeply understands how culture can snowball in between disparate Internet communities until it becomes too big for society at large to ignore. Maybe Trump retweeting a Pepe meme is an obvious touchstone in retrospect, but this film gives equal weight to moments such as weightlifters displaying a fondness for the frog or eventual shares from celebs like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj.

“When 4chan wanted to defend its memes, they’d make them as offensive as possible so they couldn’t be co-opted, see Pepe with 9/11 or Nazi messaging for instance,” Dale Beran, an author who studied 4chan, says in the film. “Back then, it was just the most offensive thing you could do. But it now reads as a weird prologue to when the irony melted away.”

Feels Good Man stays riveting because of the variety of interviews Jones conducted. Furie participates to the fullest, as does his partner and close friends (one of whom got a Pepe tattoo back in the early days 🤦‍♀️). So do other illustrators from projects as big as BoJack Horseman to lend credence to Furie’s ability and work. But the same holistic approach gets applied to voices examining Pepe’s Internet evolution—scholars like Beran who study memes, people who go by one-name handles like Mills or Pizza during their extensive 4chan experiences, and the freakin’ director of strategy for the “Trump 2016” campaign all appear. These folks understand the Internet in ways Furie only could once it became too late.

“[We analyzed] over one billion posts across Twitter, reddit, /pol/ and 160 million images just from one year,” Jeremy Blackburn, a data scientist who looks at weird online behavior and wanted to take a “quantitative look at hate speech throughout the Web,” tells Furie in the film. “There tends to be a Pepe variance in every cluster—you pick a random meme, and Pepe has been inserted in some form. Pepe becomes an entry point to radicalization.”

Feels Good Man ultimately finds Furie at a point where enough is enough—he has finally sought out legal aid in recent years to try to fight back against some of the most egregious and offensive uses of his slacker frog. He fought Infowars and won (Alex Jones had to pay a settlement and stop selling a poster showing Pepe in an Avengers-like squad alongside figures like President Trump). Furie fought a known anti-Muslim cartoonist and won (that guy wanted to write a “children’s book” called Pepe and Pede as a trojan horse for bad ideas). The list goes on and includes reprehensible white supremacy opportunists, from The Daily Stormer to Richard Spencer. In total, Furie’s legal help at WilmerHale says it successfully enforced Pepe copyrights against nearly 100 entities “connected to images or messages of hate” at the time of this documentary.

But Furie naively still thinks his character can be salvaged in society’s eye. He seems to view one particular battle as the way to do it: in 2016, the Anti-Defamation League officially added Pepe to its list of known symbols of hate. If the frog can finally be removed, Furie appears to think, that would restore the original, wholesome idea of Pepe once and for all. Watching this unattainable goal drive Furie through all kinds of efforts (including a formal Boy’s Club funeral for the Pepe they knew), Feels Good Man plays like a post-modern horror. In real (run)time, you watch the worst impulses of the Internet rain down again and again on someone who just doesn’t comprehend what he’s up against. “I didn’t even know what a meme was,» Furie admits at one point. «I still don’t even know if I’m saying it correctly. It was through Pepe that I learned what a meme was.”

Ars at Fantasia Fest

From 10,000-feet, however, Feels Good Man has a more philosophical idea at its core. This film reminds viewers time and time again of a basic communication and rhetorical studies principle: no matter the intent of someone who puts a message into the world, once it’s out there, that idea/work/message/whatever no longer entirely belongs to the messenger. Some part of meaning always lies in reception. So in that sense, a message becomes at least partially owned by the people receiving it, who can soon change and evolve its ultimate meaning (aka how larger society understands it) through interpretation and usage.

Fan service creative works like the Snyder Cut or The Rise of Skywalker might represent notable manifestations of near-total recipient ownership, but Pepe embodies this concept at its most extreme. Furie clearly did nothing wrong when creating Pepe, seemingly a kind of amusing slacker frog borne out of the artist’s lifelong frog fandom. And never in a million years could he have imagined how his character would be received, reinterpreted, and reused after uploading a few strips to MySpace. But by not doing anything in the early days of cooption, Furie lost his creation (non-legal sense) forever. No matter what he does now, Pepe’s ultimate fate simply lies beyond Furie’s control. And though Feels Good Man attempts to leave an optimistic door open—have you seen who has become a symbol of protest in Hong Kong, for instance?—this film makes the tragedy clear to anyone. so long as you didn’t create the Internet’s most infamous frog, that is.

Feels Good Man continues to play the festival circuit (Ars caught it through Fantasia Fest this month). The film is also available through VOD platforms like Amazon Prime, Microsoft Store, Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, et al. Today—Sunday, September 27—there’s even a special online screening with a post-film Q&A hosted by This American Life‘s Ira Glass.

Источник

Feels Good Man

Feels Good Man is a 2020 American documentary film about the Internet meme Pepe the Frog. Marking the directorial debut of Arthur Jones, the film stars artist Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe. The film follows Furie as he struggles to reclaim control of Pepe from members of the alt-right who have co-opted the image for their own purposes. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. It was also nominated in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance. [1]

Contents

Pepe the Frog, a character created by Matt Furie and first featured in a comic on MySpace called Boy’s Club, is one of four twentysomething postcollegiate slacker friends who live together. [2] [3] In one installment, Pepe is caught by one of his housemates with his pants around his ankles, urinating. [2] Asked why, he replies, «Feels good man». [2] The image becomes a viral Internet meme and is co-opted by the alt-right. [2] [4]

Too late, Furie attempts to take Pepe back from the alt-right who have turned him from a cartoon character into a symbol for hate. [2] The film deals with the question of whether Pepe can be redeemed. [5] [6] [7] The coda of the film alludes to Pepe’s appropriation by pro-democracy demonstrators during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. [8]

Development

Feels Good Man is the directorial debut of Arthur Jones. [4] [8] Jones described the film as: [4]

The movie is really about him negotiating that uncomfortable reality for himself, [. ] Matt’s personal journey really makes the movie really unique that I hope a lot of people find satisfying for a lot of reasons.

Jones, who was also film editor, finished the edit two days prior to the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. [4] He described the editing process as a «slow-rolling panic attack», but said he was looking forward to showing the film at the festival. [4]

Release

As of early February 2020 the film was seeking distribution. [9] It also appeared as part of PBS’s Independent Lens . [10] In October 2020, it was broadcast by the BBC as part of its Storyville series. [11]

Critical response

The film has earned critical acclaim. [6] [7] [3]

Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote: «Jones’ movie is a beacon of internet literacy about a whole new language—that memes are flexible, omnipotent, and pieces of a phenomenon more powerful than their creators». [5]

Vox Media’s Polygon called it «the most important political film of 2020». [9]

Awards and nominations

Feels Good Man won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival. [14] [15] It was also nominated in the festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition. [16] [17]

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Feels Good Man Review

The history of the 21st century, as shaped by the internet, is almost too stupid to describe. Or it would be if it also wasn’t so terrifying. That’s the story of Feels Good Man, the documentary from director Arthur Jones, taking as its subject unassuming cartoonist Matt Furie, who happened to create the character Pepe the Frog. And who then had to watch his innocent, obscure creation become a rallying symbol for the worst people alive. Again, terrifying—and incredibly dumb.

Feels Good Man delves into this context anyway. The film colourfully explains how Pepe, one of the characters in Furie’s comic “Boy’s Club” became an infinitely mutable meme—and then transformed into an actual white supremacist hate symbol, as defined by the Anti-Defamation League. Despite beginning in a dark corner of the internet, we learn how Pepe slowly moves into popular culture, much to the delight of his deranged fans, the confusion of mainstream media, and the horror of Furie. Jones’ work here is lean, yet he gives shape to the sprawling online world of the last decade, touching on 4chan, Alex Jones, and, of course, Trump. To explain all the links herein is, in a sense, silly—especially when juxtaposed with, say, small moments of Furie interacting with friends and family—but the stakes involved become increasingly real, heavy, and dangerous. Credit to Jones for taking the subject matter seriously enough to provide a clear-eyed assessment; it takes a brave soul to face the end of culture head-on.

By the way, that’s not hyperbole. What Feels Good Man presents is a culture so warped by its medium that it ceases to have any grip on reality at all—even as, yes, its hold on the world seems to be tightening. It’s noted that Jones does document Furie’s attempts to regain control of his creation, despite how impossible the internet makes it seem. We feel sorry for him, expecting tragedy. Yet the film’s final note hits on something even stronger (and stranger) than all that: optimism.

Daniel Reynolds

Daniel is a writer and editor whose work can be found online, in comic books, and — if you ask nicely — a few screenplays. He labours as a municipal employee when not discussing, thinking, or writing about film. Just mention Star Wars or The Third Man and watch him go on and on.

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Feels Good Man, a film that truly gets how things are passed across the Internet

Exhaustively researched and reported, doc stays riveting no matter your Pepe familiarity.

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There’s no shortage of documentaries about our current political climate or the fact that the Internet might be bad, but Feels Good Man focuses on the craziest intersection of these two modern realities: Pepe, the cartoon frog.

If you’re aware of Pepe already, chances are it’s because the character has become synonymous with the alt-right, that extreme online demographic tied to modern white supremacists and Nazi movements. Or perhaps you heard of Pepe before that, during the time this frog had become the meme du jour of 4chan, the anonymous message board associated with all sorts of nefarious real-world behavior. Though Pepe’s most high-profile 15 minutes of fame were inarguably a cameo on then-candidate Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, leading to the character’s adoption by some of his most extreme supporters, like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Feels Good Man will get to all that, of course, but this documentary starts with the now-toxic toad’s tadpole days. By doing so, the film will likely show viewers something they didn’t know or hadn’t previously considered regardless of prior familiarity with Pepe and the insanity swirling around him. And through tracing Pepe’s evolution, Feels Good Man manages to remind everyone of a fundamental truth of communication, particularly in the Internet age. Once you click send on something, things like original intent and context might become as ephemeral as a single tweet.

A film that truly understands Internet

While ostensibly marketed on the festival circuit as “the Pepe doc,” Feels Good Man actually has another central figure: Matt Furie, a Bay Area comics artist. Back in the days where MySpace existed, he created a Gen X-ish group of animal friends existing in perpetual post-college slackerdom for a series called Boy’s Club. Furie’s lifelong frog fandom led to an amphibian named Pepe becoming one of the comic’s lead foursome. “Feels Good Man,” the phrase, has been literally lifted from Pepe’s mundane adventures, particularly the one where he discovered how nice it felt to pee standing up with your pants removed entirely.

The documentary thoroughly and exhaustively documents things chronologically from here. You’ll see early Boy’s Club comics Furie drew in the back of a San Francisco thrift store, posts documenting how Pepe became the preferred badge of self-deprecating irony on 4chan, or a mountain of Pepe merch Furie once had produced but can’t in good conscience give away or sell these days. While walking viewers through all of that, Feels Good Man seems remarkably smart about identifying turning points for the cartoonist and the character he once controlled. It’s quite evident Director Arthur Jones deeply understands how culture can snowball in between disparate Internet communities until it becomes too big for society at large to ignore. Maybe Trump retweeting a Pepe meme is an obvious touchstone in retrospect, but this film gives equal weight to moments such as weightlifters displaying a fondness for the frog or eventual shares from celebs like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj.

“When 4chan wanted to defend its memes, they’d make them as offensive as possible so they couldn’t be co-opted, see Pepe with 9/11 or Nazi messaging for instance,” Dale Beran, an author who studied 4chan, says in the film. “Back then, it was just the most offensive thing you could do. But it now reads as a weird prologue to when the irony melted away.”

Feels Good Man stays riveting because of the variety of interviews Jones conducted. Furie participates to the fullest, as does his partner and close friends (one of whom got a Pepe tattoo back in the early days 🤦‍♀️). So do other illustrators from projects as big as BoJack Horseman to lend credence to Furie’s ability and work. But the same holistic approach gets applied to voices examining Pepe’s Internet evolution—scholars like Beran who study memes, people who go by one-name handles like Mills or Pizza during their extensive 4chan experiences, and the freakin’ director of strategy for the “Trump 2016” campaign all appear. These folks understand the Internet in ways Furie only could once it became too late.

“[We analyzed] over one billion posts across Twitter, reddit, /pol/ and 160 million images just from one year,” Jeremy Blackburn, a data scientist who looks at weird online behavior and wanted to take a “quantitative look at hate speech throughout the Web,” tells Furie in the film. “There tends to be a Pepe variance in every cluster—you pick a random meme, and Pepe has been inserted in some form. Pepe becomes an entry point to radicalization.”

Feels Good Man ultimately finds Furie at a point where enough is enough—he has finally sought out legal aid in recent years to try to fight back against some of the most egregious and offensive uses of his slacker frog. He fought Infowars and won (Alex Jones had to pay a settlement and stop selling a poster showing Pepe in an Avengers-like squad alongside figures like President Trump). Furie fought a known anti-Muslim cartoonist and won (that guy wanted to write a “children’s book” called Pepe and Pede as a trojan horse for bad ideas). The list goes on and includes reprehensible white supremacy opportunists, from The Daily Stormer to Richard Spencer. In total, Furie’s legal help at WilmerHale says it successfully enforced Pepe copyrights against nearly 100 entities “connected to images or messages of hate” at the time of this documentary.

But Furie naively still thinks his character can be salvaged in society’s eye. He seems to view one particular battle as the way to do it: in 2016, the Anti-Defamation League officially added Pepe to its list of known symbols of hate. If the frog can finally be removed, Furie appears to think, that would restore the original, wholesome idea of Pepe once and for all. Watching this unattainable goal drive Furie through all kinds of efforts (including a formal Boy’s Club funeral for the Pepe they knew), Feels Good Man plays like a post-modern horror. In real (run)time, you watch the worst impulses of the Internet rain down again and again on someone who just doesn’t comprehend what he’s up against. “I didn’t even know what a meme was,» Furie admits at one point. «I still don’t even know if I’m saying it correctly. It was through Pepe that I learned what a meme was.”

Ars at Fantasia Fest

From 10,000-feet, however, Feels Good Man has a more philosophical idea at its core. This film reminds viewers time and time again of a basic communication and rhetorical studies principle: no matter the intent of someone who puts a message into the world, once it’s out there, that idea/work/message/whatever no longer entirely belongs to the messenger. Some part of meaning always lies in reception. So in that sense, a message becomes at least partially owned by the people receiving it, who can soon change and evolve its ultimate meaning (aka how larger society understands it) through interpretation and usage.

Fan service creative works like the Snyder Cut or The Rise of Skywalker might represent notable manifestations of near-total recipient ownership, but Pepe embodies this concept at its most extreme. Furie clearly did nothing wrong when creating Pepe, seemingly a kind of amusing slacker frog borne out of the artist’s lifelong frog fandom. And never in a million years could he have imagined how his character would be received, reinterpreted, and reused after uploading a few strips to MySpace. But by not doing anything in the early days of cooption, Furie lost his creation (non-legal sense) forever. No matter what he does now, Pepe’s ultimate fate simply lies beyond Furie’s control. And though Feels Good Man attempts to leave an optimistic door open—have you seen who has become a symbol of protest in Hong Kong, for instance?—this film makes the tragedy clear to anyone. so long as you didn’t create the Internet’s most infamous frog, that is.

Feels Good Man continues to play the festival circuit (Ars caught it through Fantasia Fest this month). The film is also available through VOD platforms like Amazon Prime, Microsoft Store, Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, et al. Today—Sunday, September 27—there’s even a special online screening with a post-film Q&A hosted by This American Life‘s Ira Glass.

Источник

Feels Good Man! Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini On The Controversial Meme That Changed The World

Episode #576

FEELS GOOD MAN

ARTHUR JONES & GIORGIO ANGELINI

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In a spark of creativity, cartoonist Matt Furie created an innocent, loving frog he named Pepe. What came next is so insane, it literally bent reality.

Filmmakers Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini wanted to understand how this sweet and relatively obscure indie comic book character morphed into an infamous symbol of hate—and a meme that changed the world. The result is Feels Good Man—a filmmaking triumph and one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in years.

Premiering at last year’s Sundance, where it picked up the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker, it’s the surreal story of Pepe The Frog. How it migrated across the internet, evolving into an unwitting avatar of chaos and a lever for radicalization. It’s about its creator Matt Furie’s efforts to reclaim his creation. And Pepe’s slow transmogrification back into a hieroglyph of positivity.

But beneath the surface, Feels Good Man is about artistic agency. It’s about the journey from passivity to participation. A sociological excavation of how culture spreads from mind to mind, it’s also an archeological dig into the indelible power of an idea. How a meme adopted by a regressive internet subculture spilled into the real world, shifted the political landscape, and ultimately tipped a presidential election.

The film is an absolute must-see. I wanted to know more. So today Arthur and Giorgio take us behind the looking glass on Pepe’s Frankenstein-meets-Alice-In-Wonderland journey.

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Pepe the Frog Meme

Popular:

Pepe the Frog

About

Pepe the Frog is an anthropomorphic frog character from the comic series Boy’s Club by Matt Furie. On 4chan, various illustrations of the frog creature have been used as reaction faces, including Feels Good Man, Sad Frog, Angry Pepe, Smug Frog and Well Meme’d.

Origin

In 2005, artist Matt Furie created the comic series Boy’s Club, which stars the teenage monster characters Pepe, Brett, Andy and Landwolf. [2]

In early 2008, comic in which Pepe pulls his pants down to his ankles in order to urinate is rumored to have been popularized on 4chan’s /b/, (random) board, along with the expression «Feels good man.»

Spread

Throughout 2008, Pepe was mostly associated with the «Feels Good Man» reaction image. On February 4th, Something Awful [91] contributor Jon Hendren (a.k.a. @fart) posted the «Feels Good Man» comic to the site. In 2009, an edited version featuring a distraught-looking Pepe with the caption «Feels bad man» began circulating as a reaction image on 4chan and the Body Building Forums. On January 25th, 2011, an interview with Furie was published on Know Your Meme, in which he discussed the origins of Pepe the Frog. On June 13th, 2014, the PepeTheFrogBlog Tumblr [11] blog was launched. On July 23rd, the Pepe the Frog Instagram [14] feed was created. On October 25th, the /r/pepethefrog [13] subreddit was launched for content featuring the frog character. On December 7th, a Facebook [10] page for «Pepe the Frog» was created. On December 18th, the PepeTheFrogNet Tumblr [12] blog was launched.

Notable Usage

Katy Perry’s Tweet

On November 8th, 2014, Katy Perry tweeted a picture of Pepe crying with the caption «Australian jet lag got me like» (shown below). [46] Over the next three years, the tweet received more than 17,000 likes and 10,500 retweets.

Nicki Minaj’s Instagram Post

On December 18th, 2014, rapper Nicki Minaj posted an illustration of Pepe bent over and prominently displaying his buttocks with the caption «Me on Instagram for the next few weeks trying to get my followers back up» (shown below). [47] Over the next two years, the post received more than 281,000 likes and 13,900 comments.

Donald Trump’s Tweet

On October 13th, 2015, Donald Trump tweeted an illustration of Pepe as himself standing at a podium with the President of the United States Seal (shown below). [45] Within 16 months, the post gathered upwards of 11,000 likes and 8,100 retweets.

Wendy’s Tweet

On January 2nd, 2017, the Twitter account for the fast food chain restaurant Wendy’s responded to a user who asked “Got any memes?” with a picture of Pepe the Frog drawn in the likeness of the Wendy’s mascot. The tweet, shown below, drew criticism and was deleted, causing the account to tweet, “Our community manager was unaware of the recent evolution of the Pepe meme’s meaning and this tweet was promptly deleted.”

Russian Embassy UK’s Tweet

On January 9th, 2016, the Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom tweeted a picture of Smug Pepe in a tweet reaction to news about an upcoming meeting between British Prime Minister Theresa May and United States President-elect Donald Trump (shown below). [48] Over the next 24 hours, the tweet gained over 9,000 likes and 6,200 retweets.

In the coming days, the news sites The Daily Dot, [49] Vox [50] and IBI Times [51] published articles about the tweet, referring to the Smug Pepe illustration as a «racist meme» and «white supremacist symbol.»

Top entries this week

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Various Examples

Sad Frog

Sad Frog is an illustration of a depressed-looking Pepe, often accompanied by the text “Feels Bad Man.» It is used to denote feelings of failure or disappointment, either by posting the image or using the phrase “feelsbadman.jpg.”

Smug Frog

Smug Frog, also known as Smug Pepe, is a reaction image of a smug-looking version of Pepe (shown below).

Angry Pepe

Angry Pepe, also known as Angry Frog, is a reaction image featuring a hostile-looking variation of Pepe. The image is often accompanied by expressions of rage and intense frustration.

Poo Poo Pee Pee

Poo Poo Pee Pee is the name given to a series of images and comics that feature Smug Pepe committing various unethical acts, typically involving urine or feces. Most commonly found in 4chan’s /r9k/ (robot9000) board, the comics were created as a reaction towards the usage of Pepe’s likeness in various mainstream social media sites. The first instance of the comics can be found on a /r9k/ [7] thread posted on November 16th, 2014, featuring an image of an obese Smug Pepe with the message «Poo poo. Pee pee. Now mommy has to change me.» On November 28th, another comic was posted to r9k [8] in which Pepe excretes over character Wojak. [8] On December 24th, the Poo-Poo-Pee-Pee-Frog Tumblr [9] blog was created.

Nu Pepe

Nu Pepe is an alternate depiction of Pepe in which the frog is drawn with crossed arms and wearing a blue long sleeve shirt. On December 9th, 2014, an image of Pepe resembling the character Javert from Les Misérables was highlighted on the Finnish imageboard Ylilauta [6] (shown below, left). On January 24th, 2015, an edited version in which Pepe is wearing a Bane mask was posted on the Russian imageboard Два.ч [5] (shown bellow, middle). On March 1st, an unedited version of the image was posted on 4chan’s /qa/ (question and answer) board, [4] referring to the reaction image as «nu pepe» and nominating it as «the official meme of /qa/» (shown bellow, right). [4] The next day, the image was stickied on the [s4s] (shit 4chan says) board. [3]

«Well Meme’d»

“Well Meme’d” is an ironic expression typically accompanied an exploitable image of a character laughing and saying “Hahaha, great post!” followed by “Well meme’d, my friend!,» based on an original comic featuring Pepe wearing a sweater and tie (shown below).

Rare Pepe

On April 3rd, the Internet humor site Smosh [19] published an article about the rare Pepe images, which subsequently began to appear on other sites like Reddit [20] and Tumblr. [21] By April 9th, there were over 230 «rare Pepe» listings on eBay. [22]

Peep the Toad

On July 30th, 2016, Tumblr [62] user pornstarwars submitted an illustration of an anthropomorphic toad with the caption «when u cant afford quality name brand memes so u have to settle for / peep the toad» (shown below). Over the next eight months, the post gained over 134,000 notes.

On September 29th, Redditor GT_memes reposted the illustration to /r/dankmemes, [64] where it accumulated more than 6,500 votes (91% upvoted) within five months. On October 14th, Redditor c_dunbar submitted a screenshot of pornstarwars’ post to /r/me_irl, [63] where it garnered upwards of 5,700 votes (94% upvoted) within four months. On October 23rd, 2016, the Peep the Toad Facebook [67] page was launched, which highlights various examples of the toad character (shown below).

On February 24th, 2017, Redditor ReallyNotARabbit submitted a post proclaiming that «Peep the Toad memes» were «on the rise» to /r/memeeconomy. [65] On March 8th, Redditor MarioMann211 reposted the image to /r/memeeconomy, [66] asking for an «estimate» on its value.

Impact

Alt-Right Association

On July 22nd, 2015, Malaysian artist Maldraw posted an image on 4chan’s /pol/ board of Smug Pepe as Donald Trump overlooking a fence at the U.S.-Mexican border holding back sad Mexicans drawn as the Feels Guy. As the association of Trump and Pepe continued to gain popularity on 4chan and Reddit, on October 13th, Donald Trump retweeted an illustration of Trump Pepe.

On May 26th, 2016, The Daily Beast [31] published an article titled “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol.“ The article included an interview with Twitter user @JaredTSwift, [38] identified as an «anonymous white nationalist,» who claimed there was a «campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies» by creating anti-Semitic illustrations of the frog character.

On September 9th, 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that half Donald Trump’s supporters were in a «basket of deplorables» during a speech held at a private fundraiser. On September 10th, Donald Trump Jr. posted a photoshopped movie poster on Instagram [23] of the 2010 action film The Expendables, which features various prominent conservatives and Pepe the Frog with the title «The Deplorables» (shown below).

The following day, NBC News [24] published an article about the photoshop, which referred to Pepe the Frog as a «popular white nationalist symbol» based on a statement made by Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich. That day, several news sites published articles referring to Pepe as a «white supremacist meme» and «white national symbol,» including The Hill, [25] Vanity Fair, [26] Talking Points Memo [27] and CNN (shown below). On September 12th, a post mocking the NBC article reached the front page of /r/KotakuInAction. [28]

The same day, the official Hillary Clinton presidential campaign blog [30] published a post titled «Donald Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists: an explainer,» which labeled Pepe the Frog as «sinister» and a «symbol associated with white supremacy.» Over the next 24 hours, posts about the Clinton campaign’s reaction reached the front page of various subreddits, including /r/cringe, [37] /r/politics, [32] [33] /r/OutOfTheLoop, [34] /r/4chan [35] and /r/The_Donald. [36] In the comments sections, many Redditors mocked the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media for failing to understand the Pepe meme. Meanwhile, The Daily Dot [29] published an article titled «Pepe the Frog is not a Nazi, no matter what the alt-right says,» stating that «Pepe lacks political affiliation.»

Artist’s Response

On October 7th, 2016, Fantagraphics, the publisher of Matt Furie’s comic book collection Boy’s Club, issued a statement [39] on behalf of Matt Furie in which they refuted Pepe’s association with the alt-right, while criticizing Donald Trump and his alt-right supporters for «myriad copyright violations» of the artist’s character.

Fantagraphics Books wants to state for the record that the one, true Pepe the frog, as created by the human being and artist Matt Furie, is a peaceful cartoon amphibian who represents love, acceptance, and fun. (And getting stoned.) Both creator and creation reject the nihilism fueling Pepe’s alt-right appropriators, and all of us at Fantagraphics encourage you to help us reclaim Pepe as a symbol of positivity and togetherness. [39]

On October 14th, the Anti-Defamation League [42] announced that it would join forces with Matt Furie on the #SavePepe hashtag campaign in an effort to reclaim Pepe the Frog from racists by creating and sharing positive images of the frog.

That same day, TIME Magazine [41] published an op-ed article by Furie in which he further rebuked the alt-right’s use of his art.

“As the creator of Pepe, I condemn the illegal and repulsive appropriations of the character by racist and fringe groups. The true nature of Pepe, as featured in my comic book, ‘Boys Club,’ celebrates peace, togetherness and fun. I aim to reclaim the rascally frog from the forces of hate and ask that you join me in making millions of new, joyful Pepe memes that share the light hearted spirit of the original chilled-out champion.”

Lawsuit Against Jessica Logsdon

In September 2017, Furie’s law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr sent artist Jessica Logsdon a cease and desist order against selling Pepe the Frog paintings on eBay (shown below). Logsdon refused to comply, claiming she was within her rights to sell the paintings.

On September 17th, a poster claiming to be Logsdon submitted a thread titled «Matt Furie is Suing Me for Painting Pepe» to the /pol/ board on 4chan. [86] In the post, Logsdon revealed, «I am planning on fighting this on many fronts, but most important among them is that I am exercising my religious freedom as a «Kekistani». On September 18th, Logsdon tweeted a picture of the notice to journalist Matthew Gault, adding «I am a painter, not the least alt-right» (shown below).

On October 3rd, Furie’s lawyers sued Logsdon in US District Court for the Western District of Missouri. On October 5th, the 118-page document [84] was posted by Motherboard [85] in an article titled «This Is the First Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against a Pepe Meme Maker.».

French National Front Association

On November 10th, 2016, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in the United States, Redditor Chepamec started a thread titled «Welcome Veterans, Let’s Start the Fire» on /r/Le_Pen, a subreddit for supporters of the French nationalist political party National Front (FN) and the 2017 presidential candidacy of its leader Marine Le Pen. Accompanied by a photoshopped WWI photograph featuring a French soldier with a Hapistes face alongside a Pepe-faced American soldier (shown below), Chepamec also offered a list of ideas for a social media campaign in support of FN, which included «Make photoshops with smug Marine, Marion or Philippot faces.» That same day, Redditor Globalism_sux submitted the earliest known illustration of Pepe Le Pen, drawn in the style of Trump Pepe, garnering more than 240 points prior to its archival (shown below).

On January 27th, 2017, Imagebooru users launched a forum titled Pepe de France as a hub for memes and satirical commentaries in support of the French nationalist leader, leading to a slew of Pepe-themed images in the likeness of Marine Le Pen (shown below).

On February 5th, Marine Le Pen officially announced her presidential campaign in the 2017 election, which was met with polarizing reaction from the French news media and on the social media, while many political experts predicted that she would emerge as a frontrunner based on her polling figures. In the following days, BuzzFeed, Politico and many other news outlets reported on the launch of an international social media campaign centered around memes in support of the National Front.

Zara Skirt Controversy

In April 2017, the Spanish clothing and accessories retailer Zara began selling a denim skirt with several frog patches on it. However, after many people claimed that the patch resembled Pepe the Frog, the retailer pulled the skirt from their website.

Several media outlets covered controversy and outrage regarding the skirt, including Teen Vogue, [68] Paper, [69] Glamour, [70] and New York Magazine. [71] Twitter published moment to document the response. [72] In previous years, Zara sold other controversial apparel, including a stripped shirt with a yellow star on it that many believed resembled what Nazis forced Jewish citizens to wear during the Holocaust. Meanwhile, other Twitter users began speculating that the frog was actually a depiction of the character Old Man Jenkins from Spongebob Squarepants (shown below).

On April 19th, The Guardian [73] published a statement from a Zara spokesperson, who revealed that there was «absolutely no link» between the artwork and Pepe the Frog and that the artist Mario de Santiago (a.k.a. Yimeisgreat) took the design from a «wall painting» he drew with friends years before.

Funeral Comic

On May 6th, 2017, comic book publisher by Fantagraphics released an issue of Worlds Greatest Cartoonists featuring a comic by Matt Furie in which Pepe is shown laying in a casket at his funeral. That day, several news sites reported that Furie had «killed» the character by publishing the comic, including CBR, [74] Mary Sue [75] and Mashable. [76]

Bluetooth AirDrop Incident

On June 14th, 2017, Twitter user @RBraceySherman [77] posted several tweets claiming that a «white supremacist» named Jacob sent her an AirDrop request over Bluetooth at the airport, which contained an image attachment featuring the Smug Frog depiction of Pepe (shown below).

Shortly after, Sherman posted a tweet [78] announcing she had discovered Jacob and posted several pictures of the alleged perpetrator (shown below). Additionally, she addressed those who know or work with Jacob, saying they should know he is a «white supremacist & digital terrorizer.»

Many responded to Sherman’s thread by praising her for confronting the man, while others accused her of overreacting to an innocuous prank. The following day, The Daily Dot [79] published an article titled «Writer says she received racist, unsolicited Pepe meme via Bluetooth» and HeatStreet [80] published an article titled «Feminist Stalks Random People at Airport Bar to Find Person Who Sent Her ‘Pepe the Frog’ Image».

«Save Pepe» Kickstarter

On June 28th, Vox [83] published an article titled «Pepe the Frog’s creator can’t save him from the alt-right, but he keeps trying anyway.» On July 2nd, YouTuber MundaneMatt uploaded a video about the crowdfunding campaign titled «Matt Furie wants to save Pepe the Frog from the Alt-Right,» which criticized the campaign as a money-making scheme (shown below). The following day, a post about the Kickstarter reached the front page of /r/KotakuInAction. [82]

Infowars Lawsuit

On May 13th, 2017, Infowars founder Alex Jones tweeted a picture of a poster sold on the Infowars website, featuring depictions of himself, Pepe the Frog, Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Diamond and Silk (shown below). [87]

On March 5th, 2018, Matt Furie filed a copyright lawsuit against Infowars for using Pepe the Frog without his permission, asking for an injunction against the media company. [88] In the lawsuit document, Furie’s representation referenced the use of Pepe by «fringe groups» and mentions the #SavePepe campaign. The following day, an article about the lawsuit was published by the entertainment news site The Hollywood Reporter. [89]

«But beginning in 2015, various fringe groups connected with the alt-right attempted to co-opt Pepe by mixing images of Pepe with images of hate, including white supremacist language and symbols, Nazi symbols, and other offensive imagery. Furie has worked hard to counteract that negative image of Pepe, including collaborating with the Anti-Defamation League on the #SavePepe campaign to restore Pepe as a character representing peace, togetherness, and fun.»

Settlement

Overwatch League Ban

On January 10th, 2018, the video game news site Kotaku [90] reported that two audience members at an Overwatch League esports event were approached by security who confiscated their sign featuring a Pepe the Frog illustration.

On March 18th, Overwatch competitor Jay Won from the team San Francisco Shock removed a Pepe tweet and subsequently posted a followup claiming that he «had to delete» the tweet (shown below). [92]

On March 20th, the esports news blog Dot Esports [91] published a statement from an Overwatch League spokesperson who confirmed that the Blizzard Entertainment was discouraging use of the meme at Overwatch competitions:

«The Overwatch League discourages the use of symbols and imagery which are associated with or used by hate groups, including Pepe the Frog. At Blizzard Arena, it’s our policy that fans comply with this policy. We likewise ask the same of Overwatch League teams and players on their social-media accounts.»

Источник

Feels Good Man

Matt Furie drew Pepe the frog, a character for his indie comic. Through weird connections and unforeseen events driven by the internet – pepe turned into a hate symbol. This doc is about how the heart of online content is governed by the memeification of our shared collective culture and the meaning of an image can change overnight.

As Furie decides to change Pepe’s symbolisation, Director Arthur Jones portrays a modern day an internet saga that needs to be seen to be believed. It is about how a character meant to spread joy morphed into something else and can perhaps – be changed again.

CATEGORY U.S. Documentary Competition

COUNTRY U.S.A.

RUN TIME 92 min

Credits

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Источник

User Reviews

This is a really good documentary, only let down slightly by a part near the end regarding the ‘rare Pepe’s’- they didn’t explain it very well and I was super confused. It also wasn’t very relevant to everything else, which makes me wonder whether it was added to get the overall film over 90 minutes.

That being said, everything else was really strong. The presentation is unique, I liked the use of animation, and the music was surprisingly good too. It tells a fascinating story about a meme that got out of the control of its creator, and while I was familiar with Pepe to some extent, I definitely didn’t know the whole story, which made this really engaging.

For me, it started to get really interesting when they began to cover the meme’s relation to the 2016 US Election- that was genuinely fascinating.

If you’re interested in meme culture, politics, or just want a good documentary, I can highly recommend this one.

This documentary has two focuses; the story of Pepe being adopted and appropriated by the internet, and the story of a cartoonist losing his creation. It is in the telling of the former story where the film excels. It follows Pepe from when it first becomes popular on bodybuilding forums to becoming the most popular meme on 4chan to eventually becoming a symbol of the alt-right in the 2016 U.S. election. The movie frames this entire story in the emotions of the people posting the meme. It is not so much about the meme itself as it is about what it means to them, and Pepe meant a lot.

The presentation of the documentary is creative and well paced, mixing animation, interviews, television footage, and screen grabs to keep from ever becoming monotonous. The result is an exiting presentation that emphasizes the empathy for the people being talked about. When the movie gets to the point where Pepe is becoming the symbol of a political movement and Trump is posting himself as Pepe, it is exhilarating. I remember this happening in real life and despising these people, yet despite myself I was getting caught up in the excitement of it all.

There is a sobering transition of tone when, after this section, the camera is back on Matt Furie, his life made so difficult by what was done with his creation. He was naive and maybe wilfully ignorant of what was happening, but he did what we wish more artists would do today, letting people be creative with their characters rather than sending cease and desists. By the time he tries to recover Pepe it is too late and he finally kills the character as 4chan rejoices that Pepe is officially theirs. It is terribly sad.

I thought about downgrading my rating to a 9 because the ending is optimistic in a way that i didn’t quite buy, but I’ve decided to forgive it. The story of this movie is an unprecedented catastrophe that no one could have predicted. Maybe its foolish to assume I can predict where the story is going.

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!

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.

Feels Good Man, the directorial debut of Arthur Jones, centers around the cultural transformation and appropriation of an innocent cartoon character: Pepe the Frog. The film follows Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, as he tries to comes to terms with all that is happening to his creation and eventually fights back to regain control of what was once his; meanwhile, we are also treated to a full unravelling of how Pepe was meme’d into internet infamy among fringe, alt-right groups, discovering just how powerful a tool the Internet can be and how hard it can be to turn back what’s been done. The film’s pacing is very good, the story is captivating, and the people brought in to break it all down are very interesting; however, while being well worth the watch, I think it falls short in its overall takeaway and message.

The film should also be given enormous credit for its efforts in trying to trace the origins and gradual transformation of Pepe. I think we all know how difficult it can be to find any «starting points» or sources of actual truth online, but the crew seem to have done very well in their research; likely helped, and perhaps influenced, by their interviews with members of these Internet hordes. Another short note is that the animation throughout is very solid and felt like a strong tool to complement the film’s narrative. It wasn’t overdone and tied nicely to the scenes where it was used.

As someone who experienced almost all the events presented, this was just a huge trip down memory lane. so i was just constanly pointing and saying «aah i remember that». so i enjoyed a lot of those moments. though im kinda let down on the fact that the story focuses on one side of the story. the whole alt right thing isnt the place where pepe currently resides. so in summary, i really liked it because it is a story close to home, but there were some things that i dissagreed on from a narrative standpoint.

8/10: really enjoyed it, but has some flaws

As Pepe becomes a meme, he becomes more than what his creator intended him for. To some, he’s an icon of the far right and white supremacists. Why would they start using a cartoon frog? Who can say? In 2016, the Anti-Defamation League listed Pepe in its hate symbol database and that’s when Furie started suing people who used his creation against the spirit he was created in.

Pepe was also used by protesters in the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, a stance that its creator can agree with.

I know that we’ve forgotten so much about the last five or six years, but it was a big deal when white supremacist Richard B. Spencer got punched in the face. Remember that? He was trying to explain his Pepe pin when that happened.

Источник

Feels good man

Feels Good Man

Director: Arthur Jones Run Time: 93 min. Rating: NR

Starring: Matt Furie

About the film:

An Official Selection of SXSW and winner of the 2020 Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. Artist Matt Furie’s personal struggle to reclaim his creation, the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, now one of the most recognizable and controversial hate symbols in the world.

“A strange and terrifying odyssey.”

About the filmmakers:

Источник

Feels Good Man
(Feels Good Man)

Year: 2020
Country: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 93 minutes

If you’ve been online in the past decade, you’ve probably come across a little green frog named Pepe. Although the sad, big-eyed cartoon swept across social media as a viral reaction image, his humble origins are in indie cartoonist, Matt Furie’s, comic Boy’s Club. What started as an innocent meme grew into something far more nefarious than Furie could have ever expected. During the lead up to the 2016 election, Pepe was appropriated as a white nationalist symbol of the far right. Furie’s creation took on a new, extreme life of its own as it became a deity to those spouting racist and anti-semitic views online. When both Hillary Clinton and the Anti-Defamation League declared Pepe a hate symbol, Furie knew he had to find a way to regain control of his now-infamous art. Pepe’s transformation from silly to sordid represents a larger ongoing battle against the dark online forces shaping our society in surprising ways. Tracing Furie’s fight for reclamation, FEELS GOOD MAN is a cautionary documentary for a post-modern age in which authorship and meaning are constantly challenged by the memeification of our culture and politics. — D.O.

CIFF44 Screenings

Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 8:25 PM

Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 2:20 PM

Monday, March 30, 2020 at 11:55 AM

Accessibility (?)
Closed Captions: No
Audio Description: No
English Subtitles: No

Sidebar
Film Is Art

Competition
Ad Hoc Docs Competition

Director
Arthur Jones

Producers
Giorgio Angelini, Caryn Capotosto, Arthur Jones, Aaron Wickenden

Screenwriting
Giorgio Angelini, Arthur Jones, Aaron Wickenden

Cinematography
Giorgio Angelini, Guy Mossman, Kurt Keppeler

Editing
Aaron Wickendenc, Drew Blatman, Katrina Taylor

Источник

Pepe the Frog gets dissected in internet culture doc ‘Feels Good Man’

Pepe the Frog may not be able to explain everything about these trying times. But Feels Good Man finds the little cartoon amphibian at the crossroads of a whole lot of it.

Directed by Arthur Jones, the documentary opens on an idyllic scene of Pepe creator Matt Furie carefully cupping a tiny frog in his hands, speaking softly about his lifelong affection for the creatures.

But if you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the past five years, you know the peace won’t last. From there, Feels Good Man traces Pepe’s transformation from indie comic strip character to hate symbol to protest mascot. It follows Furie’s growing dismay at seeing his own creation take on an ugly new meaning, and 4chan’s ride from band of outsiders to mainstream political force, and in the process breaks down the mysterious and unpredictable power of memes.

Jones braids together these ideas cleanly and confidently, adding more and more threads until we’re left in awe at everything the story of Pepe encompasses. His use of animated interludes featuring Pepe and his pals from Boy’s Club (the series where Pepe originated) feels like a small effort to help Furie take back Pepe, recasting him in our minds as the lovable slacker he was always meant to be instead of as the hateful meme he’s become.

Pepe is bigger than any one person, or even any one movement.

Depending on how closely you follow news, politics, and web culture, you may not walk away from Feels Good Man with much new information about Pepe the Frog. The biggest developments in the story, like Donald Trump tweeting a photo of himself as Pepe or Furie killing off the character in a comic, have already made headlines, and there are no new bombshells to be discovered here.

You may, however, walk away with some new insights into Pepe the phenomenon. Jones demonstrates an insatiable curiosity about his subject, speaking with everyone from a former Trump campaign insider to a collector of Rare Pepes to an expert on the occult, in addition to the usual friends, pundits, and academics, and chasing the frog’s story everywhere from the dark corners of the internet to the streets of Hong Kong.

Gradually, the sense sets in that Pepe is bigger than any one person, or even any one movement. Furie’s efforts to save Pepe — by reclaiming him as an icon of love, by issuing statements and filing lawsuits, by pleading with the ADL to take him off their hate symbols list — are framed by Jones as sympathetic but largely futile. Nor does the 4chan crowd have sole control of Pepe’s image, as we see when he hops across the pond in the final act of the film.

«It’s a tough genie to put back in the bottle,» sighs more than one talking head of Pepe’s virality. The modest creation Furie described at the beginning of the film has taken on a life of its own, and it’ll never go back to its former state again.

But Feels Good Man proves Pepe can still be a force for good — among other things by helping us, through stories like these, to better understand the world we live in.

Источник

Feels Good Man

Encyclopedia from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Feels Good Man is a 2020 American documentary film about the Internet meme Pepe the Frog. Marking the directorial debut of Arthur Jones, the film stars artist Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe. The film follows Furie as he struggles to reclaim control of Pepe from members of the alt-right who have co-opted the image for their own purposes. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. It was also nominated in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance. [1]

Contents

Pepe the Frog, a character created by Matt Furie and first featured in a comic on MySpace called Boy’s Club, is one of four twentysomething postcollegiate slacker friends who live together. [2] [3] In one installment, Pepe is caught by one of his housemates with his pants around his ankles, urinating. [2] Asked why, he replies, «Feels good man». [2] The image becomes a viral Internet meme and is co-opted by the alt-right. [2] [4]

Too late, Furie attempts to take Pepe back from the alt-right who have turned him from a cartoon character into a symbol for hate. [2] The film deals with the question of whether Pepe can be redeemed. [5] [6] [7] The coda of the film alludes to Pepe’s appropriation by pro-democracy demonstrators during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. [8]

Development

Feels Good Man is the directorial debut of Arthur Jones. [4] [8] Jones described the film as: [4]

The movie is really about him negotiating that uncomfortable reality for himself, [. ] Matt’s personal journey really makes the movie really unique that I hope a lot of people find satisfying for a lot of reasons.

Jones, who was also film editor, finished the edit two days prior to the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. [4] He described the editing process as a «slow-rolling panic attack», but said he was looking forward to showing the film at the festival. [4]

Release

As of early February 2020 the film was seeking distribution. [9] It also appeared as part of PBS’s Independent Lens. [10] In October 2020, it was broadcast by the BBC as part of its Storyville series. [11]

Critical response

The film has earned critical acclaim. [6] [7] [3]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95%, based on 81 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website’s consensus reads, «A cautionary tale on internet culture, Feels Good Man is a compelling look at an artist’s journey to salvage his creation.» [12] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating «generally favorable reviews». [13]

Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote: «Jones’ movie is a beacon of internet literacy about a whole new language—that memes are flexible, omnipotent, and pieces of a phenomenon more powerful than their creators». [5]

Vox Media’s Polygon called it «the most important political film of 2020». [9]

Источник

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Источник

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Feels Good Man
Directed by	Arthur Jones
Produced by