Fantasia 2021: You Can’t Kill Meme
fantasia 2021For better or for worse, meme culture has broken out of its once-contained role as harmless internet fun and has now become tools for both powerful political and social influence. For some, this power is referred to as "meme magic", with some even claiming that these jokes hold legitimate spiritual power. Screening as part of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, Hayley Garrigus' You Can't Kill Meme sees the filmmaker enter the world of these individuals to try and understand their beliefs and see what power they really hold.
This exploration of 4-chan trolls and modern meme culture is not something that hasn't been done before. Arthur Jones' Feels Good Man – which coincidentally played the 2020 Fantasia Film Festival – dove into the history and modern complexities of the Pepe the Frog meme to great effect, becoming one of the best perspectives on modern internet culture ever seen on film. It is this very potential that cements You Can't Kill Meme as one of the worst films of the year. Bordering on incompetence, the film gets completely lost within its subject and develops a confused and, ultimately, meaningless voice that feels like an utter waste of time more than anything else.
With little to no craft in how the film presents its oddball perspectives, the film quickly turns its own narrative into an incoherent rambling of conspiracy theories and flawed logic. Without any backbone giving the audience context or framing to appreciate the batshit insane ideas featured throughout the film, like Pepe the Frog memes spiritually causing Hillary Clinton to collapse and face major health issues, the film fails to find much to say or engage audiences with. The pathway of logic presented often makes no sense causing the film to become impossible to follow or even really understand on a basic level. By presenting these theories and stories completely raw, the film not only fails itself but also the audiences who are wanting to get something out of the 79-minute runtime. If anything, the lackluster presentation of the film could be seen as dangerous, as the film presents these ideas and perspectives as valid and respectable when they clearly are not as perfectly seen in a project like Feels Good Man.
The film is also badly made. Even past the narrative weaknesses, the film is boring in its meaningless and lackluster focus which wanders between perspectives with little to no flow or thought. The film will randomly center around a seemingly random moment, such as one of the women being interviewed making the filmmaker a cup of tea and use it as the only source of narrative grounding. These moments are so random, however, that they fail to achieve the point of what scenes like this are supposed to. The only positive found within the film's structure and voice is that it highlights obviously crazy perspectives in a fashion that is occasionally possible to laugh at and find humor in. The sheer shock of how far some of these conspiracies go can catch unexpecting audiences off guard and create a comedic reaction in the same fashion as a show like South Park. While not at all the goal of the film, this is at least some light in the almost pitch black tunnel that is You Can't Kill Meme.
All in all, You Can't Kill Meme is nothing short of a disaster. The film lets the inmates run the asylum and the result is an incoherent mess of insane conspiracy theories and wild characters. There was clear potential for a poignant and meaningful final result but, sadly, that feels like a distant dream from what the film ended up being.
