The meme-fication of US politics: two films reveal the faces behind the posts

Feels Good Man and TFW No GF trace the impact of Pepe the Frog, lonely men, and the far right

On 13 October 2015, Donald Trump, who had recently announced his run for president, tweeted an image of himself standing at the presidential lectern, his face transmogrified into a green, smug-looking frog, known to certain corners of the internet as Pepe. With hindsight, this strange moment offers a stake in the ground, marking out the point when the meme was invited into mainstream political culture.

This collapse of the virtual and the real seems to have only accelerated since then. Online phenomena are no longer cordoned off in their virtual barriers but regularly pass through the screen to play mischief in the so-called real world". Two recent documentaries attempt to explain how this all happened - from two very different perspectives.