Stream It Or Skip It: ‘You Can’t Kill Meme’ on Hulu, a Documentary About Memes and Politics That Spreads the Fog Instead of Clearing It

Now on Hulu, You Can’t Kill Meme attempts to have a serious conversation about meme culture and its impact on American politics, which might be a difficult goal to achieve. Director Hayley Garrigus assumes we already know what edgelords and shitposters are, and jumps right into the deep end of creepy internet niches where self-proclaimed “chaos magicians” communicate in Pepe the Frog memes and attempt to sway the electorate. And if that sounds like something you kind of already knew something about, well, some of them tie it to occult and new age hooey, and credit a collective hex of sorts for making Hillary Clinton wobble and almost faint while getting into a truck six years ago. I think the way the internet has enabled isolation and detachment from a collective interpretation of reality is sort of what Garrigus is getting at in this documentary, which aims to enlighten but mostly just obfuscates.

YOU CAN’T KILL MEME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It begins with something about an ancient Egyptian frog-faced god known as Kek, and I assume Kek has manifested itself in the modern day as Pepe the Frog, the cartoon poster boy symbol of alt-right conspiracy wackjobs. Then there’s some text on the screen about “thought viruses” that, if strategically positioned in the “root social matrix” would cause people to act “in accordance to the will.” And yes, this is one of those instances where quotation marks will be used generously to keep nonsense from escaping into the text of this review, thus allowing me to clearly and concisely attribute ridiculousness to sources that are not myself.

Anyway, that bit about the “viruses” and “the will” is from a book, Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality, that R. Kirk Packwood wrote and published in 2004, and quickly unpublished in 2006 when he saw its ideas were being appropriated by bad actors on the internet. Garrigus, the director of this movie, proclaims herself a “big fan” of Packwood’s writing – we read that on screen in the text exchanges she has with him as she persuades him to agree to an interview. (What exactly does that mean, “big fan”? We can only guess.) He does, and by the end of the film, he says he’s not speaking to her as intensely or in depth as he could about “memetic magic,” because people who are “programmed” might think he’s a lunatic.

Please note, I clearly resemble that remark, and therefore prefer to interpret his use of the word “programmed” as “based in recognizable reality” and/or “within the confines of logic and reason.”

Anyway. Garrigus makes a big deal about relocating herself to Las Vegas, because it’s isolated and has therefore fosterd its own cultural hodgepodge, and will help her get into the mindset of exploring the topic. She roots around in the idea of “memetic magic” by interviewing some practitioners of the art, e.g., a guy named Billy Bruno, who either wears a red mage’s hood that obscures most of his face, or black-and-white heavy metal “corpse paint” makeup. She talks to a woman named Carole (no last name given), a self-proclaimed “lightworker” (no definition given) who conducts obscure rituals and speaks in tongues (no subtitle translation given) and says her cat can detect “vortexes” (also no definition given) and, when asked about politics, goes on an old-school jag about the illuminati. One terrifying woman Garrigus interviews says she voted for Donald Trump because America needs him to sow chaos and tear everything down so it can be rebuilt; she pulls shotguns, a big-ass knife and a couple of machine guns from under her bed. Garrigus talks to a career military man who apparently believes reality is not what we’re experiencing, and says that 85 percent of the world’s population is “deaf dumb and blind,” 10 percent are keeping them that way and five percent are “trying to wake everybody up.” Guess what? He says he’s in that five percent. Also guess what? Don’t gaslight me, bro.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: You Can’t Kill Meme blends Feels Good Man, an explainer of the Pepe the Frog phenomenon, with A Glitch in the Matrix, which provides a platform for wackos.

Performance Worth Watching: Anyone who can watch this movie and distill it down to a coherent summary.

Memorable Dialogue: The most comprehensible statement anyone makes in the movie comes from, of course, sigh, a man whose face is blurred and his voice distorted for the sake of maintaining his anonymity: “The idiots have banded together on the internet to legitimize idiocy.”

Sex and Skin: None. The word “incel” isn’t mentioned in this movie, but it’s pretty much implied.

Our Take: Perhaps I’m too dumb or tired to know where to begin with this doc, which tackles esoteric subject matter from a somewhat philosophical standpoint, and comes off like an amateurish essay lost in its own tangents. There’s not much solid ground here, just a lot of unreliable narrators sharing slippery commentary – and an uneasy sense that Garrigus’ interviewees are either being exploited or unjustifiably indulged for their “outsider” interpretations of reality.

Any big-umbrella analysis of the Big Lie and the war over truth in American culture – or even how people are persuaded en masse to believe in outrageous bull puckey – is lost in a smokescreen of tedious, mealy-mouthed drivel bereft of context, logic or those pesky things. You know. Whaddayacallem. Those things: Facts. You Can’t Kill Meme is shoddy from a technical standpoint, poorly structured and pockmarked with self-aware microphone adjustments or shots in which the director leans into the frame, its rough-hewn approach signifying that it, like its subjects, is not a mainstream documentary; perhaps that’s why IMDb calls it a “hybrid documentary” and the Hulu description characterizes it as an “anti-documentary.” Whatever those terms mean, just like whatever it is “chaos magicians” actually do. They post on the internet more than your average person, I guess. Garrigus frequently returns to animated rabbit-hole imagery throughout the film, but considering its lack of clarity and focus, shots of a mudhole would have been more apt.

Our Call: SKIP IT. You Can’t Kill Meme is full of people who are full of shit.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.