If you aren’t familiar with internet culture, the film provides a brief explainer of memes from British psychologist Susan Blackmore, who wrote a foundational text on the subject titled The Meme Machine.įrom here, Feels Good Man delves into the nihilistic and intentionally offensive underbelly of the internet in general, and imageboards like 4chan in particular. The image of Pepe saying “Feels good man” was posted on the imageboard website 4chan, and that community quickly repurposed the image, creating one of the internet’s most popular memes. Pepe explains simply, and with a sly smile, “Feels good man.” In the last panel, as Pepe and another of his roommates play video games, the roommate asks Pepe about his unusual bathroom habit. Pepe is standing up, but he has pulled his pants and underwear all the way down to go to the bathroom. The comic that features the image shows one of Pepe’s roommates accidentally walking in on Pepe while he’s peeing. One particular image of Pepe went viral in the late aughts. A totally innocuous – if juvenile – creation, Pepe was one character in Furie’s online comic Boy’s Club, about a group of twenty-something dudes (all the characters are anthropomorphized animals) living the slacker lifestyle. Jones’s film is an engrossing look at the power of the internet to shape the world that lies beyond the screen.įeels Good Man tells the curious tale of cartoon character Pepe the Frog and the man who created Pepe, artist Matt Furie. He paints a personal portrait of an artist who has lost control of what his art means he captures the zeitgeist of a singularly odious time at the intersection of American politics and culture he provides a cogent exegesis for one small part of the 2016 presidential election. First time director Arthur Jones covers a lot of ground in Feels Good Man. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual nooks and crannies in the picture, and what resonated with me was the aforementioned hopelessness and an impotent rage at the callousness of other human beings.

It’s the ultimate hopelessness of the situation that made it hard for me to buy into the uplifting ending of the new political documentary Feels Good Man.

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