Feels Good Man?

Ok, so after saying I was going to try do a blog post every day I promptly missed the next day, shit it went by fast.

Anyway, earlier this year I started to get a strange tingly, dull pain that would run up my arms up to the shoulder & would make my fingers numb, it would get so bad I wouldn’t be able to grip a glass in my hands at times. Initially, I thought it might be a heart problem, but after not collapsing & going to the doctor I confirmed that I am surprisingly healthy for someone who’s had the kind of lifestyle I’ve had, the magic of youth I guess.

I decided to go & see a physiotherapist, they gave me electric pulse therapy & a bunch of exercises to do. They told me it was a “non-specific injury” meaning they have no idea why it’s happening. Long story short I was told that I basically need to exercise daily from now on & the pain would go away.

So I started doing an hour of weight training a day & the pain actually went away. But after a while, I started to get bored of the exercise regime & the thought I had many times over many years came back to me. ‘I should do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu’. It’s been about two & a half months now & I’ve totally fallen in love with it.

But the reason I brought it up was that I just came back a couple of hours ago from a session & my god I am in so much pain, my knees, my arms, my neck. The neck is bad, I think it’s because of all the looking down I do. Looking at my phone, looking down while eating, painting, talking to a short person. But overall, I gotta say it’s been good. Losing weight, getting fit, learning a skill. All nice things right?

Ok so enough bullshit about me, I watched a documentary that had piqued my interest when I first saw it; Feels Good Man. A documentary about the creator of the Pepe The Frog cartoon that later became the meme & its adoption by the internet as a meme, which was then claimed as a hate symbol which the creator is now trying to reclaim from the evil clutches of the Alt-Right.

It was an enjoyable watch while I painted my mini’s, a worthwhile watch even if you’re not particularly interested in the politics of the narrative. Which unfortunately for me, cheapens the film & turns it into a piece of propaganda that had me just kind of…sad at the end.

The creator (Matt Furie) seems like a man disillusioned, one of the first things he says to the camera in the film is “I just want to be a kid again”. This really struck me & it resonated throughout the entirety of the film, this idea of nostalgia & paradise lost. Within this is the naive notion that things will get better over time, or that things will just work themselves out.

The first half of the film tracks the Pepe Meme‘s rise to fame as harmlessly & stupidly as any other meme has before it. The tone shifts completely in the second half when the film begins to paint a narrative, linking 4chan, White virgin men, Elliot Rodger & The Alt-Right together as they hijack Pepe & meme their way to a Trump election victory in 2016. There are some interesting observations here to the film’s credit, but I thought it didn’t go deep enough.

There’s this realisation Matt has that he’s been living in this world of the naive & now his work is being used to fuel hate speech, which he inevitably feels guilty for. By the end of the film Matt just seems tired & broken down, after a short legal battle with Alex Jones.

There’s something wrong with the sentiment of this film, I feel like it’s missing the point a little. I think it’s partly because of this constant habit humanity has of lumping people into group identities so you can more easily compartmentalise information. ‘The Alt-Right’ is an easy way of lumping a massive group of people together to rally your allies against, the same can be said for ‘Neo-Liberal’ of course.

But to some extent it’s unavoidable, & so nuance is continually lost in translation & the worst & loudest of any group shines to the forefront, painting a world of violent madness on the internet. Which is also very real in 3-D space but is always more complicated than is narativised in any piece of media I’ve seen.

I think the film ultimately fails to sympathise with ‘the enemy’, & instead decides to take the easy way out, painting members of the Alt-Right as insane people that basically need to be ‘silenced‘. Just to caveat incase you’re retarded, I am no fan of Nazi’s beliefs, or any other tenant of an ideology that makes a judgement call on a group of people based on an arbitrary characteristic.

I see these people, some in the film like the fat bearded man-child who spends all his time on 4chan as deeply, deeply sad. I feel so sorry for them, the same way I feel when I see a super rich kid try everything in their power to stay on the high. Or the same way I feel when I see an Armenian Soldier singing a heartbreaking song in a trench two days before he died in combat.

I want the same thing Matt wants ultimately, peace. But his naivety as well as the filmmakers seems nestled in the fantasy of ‘it will all work itself out’. God I hope that’s the case, but ultimately I’m pessimistic. I worry alot about the notion that there are competing ideologies out there, not just ‘Red Vs Blue” Western culture wars, but many more. Based maybe on nationalism, or just sheer survival. What happens if those ideologies are completely incompatible. I worry about the idea of world peace being a hopeful fantasy we privileged few pray is inevitable.

Because the alternative might be too hard to bear for two generations of people who on the whole have never seen the sheer horror of war, or famine, or pandemic. That we still live in that history book we all thought was a thing of the past we were lucky to escape. Maybe we’re already in a war, just not a kinetic one. Yet.