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

The Rich Roll Podcast

Rich Roll

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Society & Culture

4.8 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2021

⏱️ 113 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. This is a conversation about the complicated relationship between internet culture and the real world. It’s about the strange relationship between comic book artists, arch druids, data scientists, intellectual property lawyers, and alt-right mouthpieces. It’s about memetics—how memes drive cultural evolution in parallel with how genes influence human evolution. And, in this case, how one meme was perniciously coopted to democratize electoral engagement, enervating passive supporters into active participants. But more than anything, this is about the war between cynicism and hope. And why, to coin Matt Furie, you gotta go hardcore happy. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll576 YouTube: bit.ly/feelsgoodman576 I don’t understand why everyone isn’t talking about this movie and the ideas it presents. This conversation is my attempt to change that. Peace + Plants, Rich Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Our story tells the very strange and unlikely journey of this comic book character becoming
0:06.8	an internet meme that was wildly popular and then ultimately becoming sort of a propaganda
0:12.4	sort of tool for the alt-right and officially designated a hate symbol by the anti-definition
0:17.0	League in late 2016.
0:19.2	And the story is kind of twofold.
0:21.3	It's the story of Matt Fury who created this with no ill intent.
0:24.9	Obviously it becoming a meme and then a hate symbol had nothing to do with him.
0:28.2	And then the other part of the story is about how trolling moved off of message boards
0:32.3	and into mainstream politics because Pepe was really used as basically a tool for trolls.
0:37.6	And really there's this watershed moment that happens in 2015 where there's in the span
0:43.4	of two weeks you have a mass shooting at the Umequah Community College in Oregon which
0:49.5	still today is the deadliest mass shooting in Oregon history.
0:53.7	And on Forchand someone posted the day before the shooting a kind of warning, don't come
0:59.0	to the school, my Forchand friends, whatever.
1:01.0	And then it had at the bottom it was an image of Pepe holding a hang-gun and then the next
1:04.7	day the shooting happened.
1:05.7	And then that was sort of the first time that Pepe really made it into mainstream news.
1:10.1	Yeah, and then two weeks later we had this moment where Donald Trump retweeted an image
1:14.7	of himself drawn as smug Pepe.
1:16.4	So it was Pepe with like the yellow hair standing behind the sort of podium as if he was at
1:21.7	a press conference in the Oval Office or in the White House.
1:25.5	There was a wink, it was sort of like his precursor to the kind of stand back and stand by
	...

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