Documentary Review: You Can’t Kill Meme

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2021
Images from the Internet

You Can’t Kill Meme
Directed by Hayley Garrigus
Utopia
79 minutes, 2021

Media is fascinating. I have been a student in the field of Media Studies for decades, so when this particular “anti-documentary” came up, I just jumped on it. I have been saying for as long as the Trump administration has dumbed down the culture, that the right is more interested in memes than facts.

According to the Oxford Languages Website, which gives two main definitions of a meme that are both accurate to this film, it is ”an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitations.” It is also described as “a(n)… image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.”

The film describes the meme process with a bit more flamboyance, as “memetic magick.” Any way, you want to designate it, it is created on a computer and then hoisted upon the Internet, via social media such as Facebook (yes, I am still calling it that), Instagram, etc., and it is spread around through like-minded individuals who often accept it as truth, in part because it is in print, but more because it falls into their own ideology. While used by both sides of the political aisle, it is especially accepted as gospel by the alt-right, who are willing to accept conspiracy theories without seeking out the sources, because receiving a piece of sometimes amusing art from someone who has like-minded leanings is easier to digest than the often-complex text of those who they have chosen to distrust (such as a quick meme about COVID, rather than the complex and changing science). It is apparently easier for them to believe a meme than known fact, because it is beyond their ken and not in their realm of belief systems.

Billy Brujo

As an interesting point of entry to the meme, the director chose to focus on R. Kirk Packwood’s 2004 book Memetic Magick: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality. This was at the rise of the 4chan Website and, of all things, the Pepe the Frog meme, which became one of the first viral memes, especially one that was adopted by the politically right leaning, according to Chaos magician (yeah, I have no idea what that is), YouTube personality, and apparently goth by his make-up (observation, not criticism), Billy Brujo. He states, “We’re looking for magick until we find it” on social media. Sounds a bit like the equivalent religious search for the god-being. In Brujo’s case, to me that could be another way to describe an algorithm. I actually felt sad for him, as I do for religious fanatics.

Marshall McLuhan’s theories turn up here and there, such as one anonymous government worker who states, “…this myth [is] that the Internet opens people up to new ideas. It doesn’t; it actually allows them to close down”. McLuhan famously said that most technologies do the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do (e.g., a car was supposed to make it possible to visit relations far away, but it makes it easier to go so far you may not come back).  

Pepe Trump

The main focus of the beginning narrative of the film starts in earnest with the Trump presidential campaign, and the use of Pepe to promote the Trump team and to mock Hillary Clinton.

While director and narrator Garrigus breaks down the meanings of the coded language of “magick” and “memetics,” she also does not talk down to the audience. Occasionally it sounds a bit “New Agey” for my tastes, but her point is valid and worth noting. That being said, Garrigus seems to come from a higher (or is that deeper) tech world than I do. She claims around 2014, the acronym “LOL” was replaced by “KEK,” who was the frog-headed Egyptian god (symbolizing the bringer of light after the darkness, or chaos). Really? I don’t remember that, and I still see the former to this day, but have never noticed the latter. But then again, I have never been on 4chan, nor hang out at alt-right sites.

The documentary, I find, is a bit disconcerting. We are facing civil unrest, “the big lie,” voter suppression, the scrapping of voter right and rights to abortion,” and the documentary is discussing mixing the internet with magick – literal metaphysicality – with speakers like Dave Mullen-Muhr, a right-wing pundit (to give you an example of his trustworthiness, he deals in Bitcoins) who believes in the Matrix, and calls Trump the “red pill.” And people listen to him, why? And why should we? Or there is Carole, a New Age Buddhist, who discusses the “science of spirituality.” There’s an oxymoron for you. She is part of a group of Lightworkers, who “are awakened beings who bear the highest interests of all living beings and Earth in their minds,” according to www.happiness.com. One of them that we meet is Nick Peterson, a “scientist magician.”

Sometimes it is hard to tell whose “side” Garrigus is on, stating Mullen-Muhr is a dear friend, while pointing out the evils of KEK (or as I now call it, pre-QAnon, which is quoted a bit here, as well). Rather than pointing out what right wingers are doing, she almost gleefully gives them a voice. Remember, sometimes things are actually opposite of what they are intended.

I must confess, I went through the New Age movement indirectly in the early 1980s when I dated someone neck-deep in it. I never believed, but I saw with her friends the reliance on crystals, psychics, and yes, magick. This deep-dive look at a very technical product (memes and social media) has the same woo-hoo as that. It was hard to take the topic seriously, and that’s on me, not the film itself. Harold Innis may have called it a bias of communication, both as sender and receiver (I could bring up Shannon-Weaver at this point…oh, I did; never mind).

Taking out all the New Age Shaman stuff, to put it simply in my opinion, a better way to describe memetic magick is a word that was once incredibly popular in big business during the 1990s: synergy. That is when something grows beyond one’s control and gains a life of its own. The expression “Jump the shark,” for example, has gone beyond “Happy Days” and is now a description for an act of desperation. That’s synergy. Memes do not use magick to become powerful, they are used enough to become cultural icons – for good or in this case bad – and go beyond the originator’s control until they become something broader with a wider base.

It is really hard to take a lot of this seriously. I mean, Carole discusses how Obama went to Mars in a secret space program with someone who started time traveling when they were 5 years old; another woman pulls four assault rifles out from under her bed as well as a huge army/Bowie knife while spouting she likes Trump because he’s a “disrupter.” There is a belief expressed that both the left and the right use wizards and witches to cast spells on the other side but the right uses dark magick. It also would be quite easy to just substitute the word “magick” with “Jesus.”

Carole

As the film gets to the last quarter, the narration starts sharply turning anti-Liberal (Garrigus claims they hate the Middle Class, like the Conservatives help them with tax cuts for the uber rich?). At some point, the memetic fades away, and it’s the magick that becomes forefront through the middle section. This documentary isn’t as much about social media as New Age philosophy with a right-wing twist.

Towards the third act of the doc, Garrigus brings it around again by interviewing Packwood, author of the book that foisted this film, Memetic Magick. He humorously declares that he and 12 others can change the course of the world, while describing himself as  “underrated,” and numerous times as “intelligent.” Okay, then. It’s around this point where the meme topic raises its head again, as the meme is claimed to have elected Trump in 2016, according to the film. No focus at all on Russian hackers or the interference of James Comey.

As far as the form of the film, Garrigus makes it personal as she narrates opinions, films a variety of people (sometimes a bit too long), adds some nice stock footage as well as her own, animation, and 4chan screenshots, and does her best to avoid the dreaded talking head syndrome. Kudos for that. I just wish the documentary was more about what it claimed, how the right uses memes, than a guide to magickal thinking. The narrative straddles the fence (a metaphor for right/left politics) between technology and mysticism, and perhaps it would have been less whiplashy if it had been two separate accounts.

You can find the documentary on Altavod, Apple TV and Video on Demand.