The transmogrification of Pepe the Frog

By S.V.

MATT FURIE is studying a frog. He has been keen on the amphibians since he was a child, he says, and over the years has drawn a series of them for his comics. The camera cuts to him at a desk, sketching his most famous—or indeed infamous—creation, Pepe the Frog.

“Feels Good Man”, a new documentary, tells the story of how Mr Furie’s character became a meme beloved by the alt-right. Pepe was originally created in 2005 as part of “Boys Club”, a comic strip based on Mr Furie and his stoner college friends: the half-animal, half-man creatures would hang out, get high and partake in some innocent shenanigans. (The documentary’s title was Pepe’s catchphrase, a reference to his enjoyment of urinating with his shorts around his ankles.) Mr Furie uploaded scans of the comics to Myspace, an early social-networking site, and strangers enjoyed the simple jokes and familiar archetypes.

From there, Pepe started to spread, appearing first on bodybuilding forums, then on the message boards of Reddit, 8chan and 4chan. Thanks to his features—bulging eyes that conveyed a kind of sadness, a downturned, impish mouth—Pepe was embraced as a patron saint of the weird and the unlovable. But before long bigoted users of 4chan, in particular, started to photoshop him into offensive imagery (under an Islamic State flag, for example, or wearing a swastika).

This was to discourage “normies”, women or people of colour from feeling as though they could connect to Pepe, too. In the documentary Matt Braynard, a former strategist for Donald Trump, says that Pepe became a kind of dog-whistle thanks to his growing association with the alt-right. To anyone who did not spend a lot of time online, the image of a cartoon frog seemed harmless enough; for those in the know, Pepe became a way to symbolise affinity with a malevolent movement. Images of Pepe were retweeted by Mr Trump in 2015 as well as by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

At first, Mr Furie is unperturbed by Pepe’s presence in the darker corners of the internet, telling Adam Serwer, a writer at the Atlantic, in 2016 that it is “a phase”. Shortly afterwards, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) labels Pepe a hate symbol; Mr Furie then tries to wrest back ownership of the image. He collaborates with the ADL on a futile #SavePepe campaign to make the frog “an image of love”. He begins enforcing his copyright and takes Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, a conspiracist website, to court. (Mr Furie won a settlement of $15,000, some of which he donated to a frog conservation charity.) In 2017 the artist “killed” his creation, depicting the frog in a casket. These efforts proved hopeless, however, as internet users created even more grotesque pictures, such as Pepe decapitating his former self.

The documentary, directed by Arthur Jones, an artist and friend of Mr Furie’s, combines footage and interviews with hallucinatory animations. The film covers a lot of terrain in 92 minutes in a clever and propulsive way, as observations from journalists, sociologists and even experts on the occult are intercut with chilling real events. (In 2014 Pepe was photoshopped into a car with Elliot Rodger, an “incel” who murdered five women, minutes after the news of his killing spree broke.)

One of the documentary’s most poignant scenes shows Mr Furie meeting with a group of researchers in 2018, who tell him that Pepe is a “gateway meme” or “entry point to radicalisation” on the web. Throughout the presentation, Mr Furie is attentive but visibly distressed. One of the academics asks him whether he feels any personal responsibility for the evolution of Pepe’s image, and Mr Furie admits that he could have been more proactive. Yet “Feels Good Man” is a reminder that, particularly in the internet age, artists cannot control the afterlife of their work.

“Feels Good Man” is streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. It airs on the BBC on October 26th