Frank (2014): Papier-mâché Heads and Grass Shoes
This essay contains major plot spoilers for the 2014 film, Frank. My analysis of the film runs from the second paragraph onwards.
I wrote an essay a couple of months back about the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis and it's probably still the one I'm most proud of writing after Rusty Niall's soft reboot. While it blends a critical perspective of the film with a personal perspective about my own reminiscence of the London poetry scene of the 90s and 00s, the core of the essay's argument is about the need for the artist to love things beyond themselves and their work if they want to connect with an audience. The film a painful watch, not just because of Llewyn's decline but also because of all the opportunities for love and connection that he rejects along the way. You can read the essay here:
buttondown.email/niall/archive/the-morass-of-mid-career-inside-llewyn-davis-and/
Frank (2014, dir. Lenny Abramson) can be a similarly painful watch, albeit one that features a main character who is living in a state of lovelessness that borders of psychopathy.
The film begins with Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), travelling back from work in his home town, observing the world around him and trying to come up with a song by improvising lines and melodies in his head. He doesn't appear to have any friends and alternates his time between an office job and his bedroom. It turns out that he has a terse relationship with his parents that is typical for twenty-somethings that haven't been able to fly the nest.
It is within this loveless, disconnected state that Jon has become ensnared in the idea of fame. Twitter (albeit the slightly cosier 10s version) and Youtube have become his barometers for how he might attain it. There is no emotional connection between him and his immediate social environment.
The sea, children and neighbours of his home town are nothing more than prompts for his song ideas, scaffolding that can be dismantled once the moment of insight has occurred. Jon is also afflicted by the idea of the lone, frustrated genius waiting for that fully-formed bolt from the blue. Not long after listening to It Must be Love by Madness on his headphones during a bus ride, the chords for the song continue playing in his head and he becomes convinced that he's come up with it himself. On realising his own unwitting plagiarism after rushing back to his bedroom to write the song, rather than look for other aspects to work with and make his own (as many songwriters do) , he abandons it immediately.
The next day he comes into contact with a touring American band called The Soronprfbs right at the moment when their keyboardist is suffering a mental health crisis and is trying to drown himself in the sea. In the throes of his own loveless psychosis, Jon sees this as an opportunity, getting himself a spot on keyboards for their gig later on. As if to drive the point home, we see Jon watching the paramedics load the stricken keyboardist onto an ambulance to make sure that there's no chance of a recovery before his big moment. Jon's "big moment" will eventually arrive, but before then, he meets Frank.
Frank (Michael Fassbender) is the lead singer of The Soronprfbs who wears a papier-mâché head that he never removes and carries a certificate that states that he doesn't have to remove it. The head is almost identical to the head that was worn by the alternative cabaret legend, Frank Sidebottom, who the script's co-writer Jon Ronson once played in a band with. Thid massive head marks the point where the similarities between the two Franks end. Where Frank Sidebottom (the alter ego of Chris Sievey) was a quirky, Northern English eccentric who often showed up on children's TV in the 80s; the Frank of the movie is more a muscular, intense combination of Captain Beefheart and David Yow from The Jesus Lizard.
It quickly turns out that The Soronprfbs aren't destined, or aiming, for commercial, conventional success. While their first gig with Jon ends in mechanical failure and mutual acrimony, it turns out that the ensemble really gel when they are away from audiences – jamming out and making music in a remote part of Ireland with the fuzzy aim of having an album recorded before their rent runs out.
The other members are Don (Scoot McNary), the manager/producer and first keyboard player; Clara (Maggie Gyllenhal) the intense and occasionally violent theramin/moog player; Nana (Carla Azar) the drummer who doesn't talk much and Baraque (François Civil) the guitarist who only speaks french.
While Jon's ambitions make him the outlier, never truly connecting with the others because his delusions short circuit his empathy, the band are more of a hive mind, accessing a genuine state of flow as they lose themselves in the mutual endeavour of creation. It wouldn't matter if one of them started playing It Must Be Love because the others would quickly turn it into something else.
While the songs take form over the course of a year, Jon reports on their progress on social media without the rest of the band's consent, communicating his own narrative about them, one that fits in with his own perception of events as the lead up to his own destiny as a music star.
Don seems to be a convivial soul who endeavours to make Jon feel welcome, and Frank treats him with the openness he shows to other human beings. The remaining members react to Jon with varying degrees of nonchalance, suspicion and outright hostility. Clara, in particular, is forthright in expressing her hatred for him, going between telling him that he's just a set of fingers to outright threatening to stab him, a threat she eventually makes good of not too long after their hate-fuelled tyrst in a hot tub.
If The Soronprfbs operate as an organic whole, a kind of superorganism, then Jon is a virus, infecting their practice with his own ego and ambition. While the band appear to be resolutely offline and off-grid, Jon is a wretched embodiment of Web 2.0 and the need to be validated by clicks and likes. He is not just an outsider, he is a contagion, potentially fatal to his host organism.
Mostly, the band members tolerate him because Frank appears to like him. While the band react with justifiable derision at Jon's attempts at composition (though I still think "Lady in the blue coat where ya goin' with that bag" has the potential to be a banger), there is a point where Frank accepts a particularly pathetic dirge ("La, la, la-la, la") and immediately sets about transforming it into something else. While Jon immediately interprets this as a snub, I think it might just have been a case of Frank trying to teach him something about how the point of the band is not be recognised as great individuals but to dissolve into the collective act of transformative creation. Jon fails to cotton on and storms out of the cabin as the band continue to play regardless.
Being that I am not trying to write an elongated plot summary disguised as an essay, here's how the rest of the film pans out. They finish the album. Don takes his own life. Jon gets the band a slot at the South by Southwest festival, where he alienates the rest of the band, gets stabbed by Clara, but is well enough to rock up on stage as a duo with Frank for his big moment. Unfortunately, due to the absence of The Soronpfrbs, Jon launches into the alpha version of "La, la, la-la, la" and Frank collapses into a heap on the floor crying, "the music is shit!" Jon and Frank end up in a motel, where an argument leads to both of them running out and getting hit by cars, Frank's papier-mâché head being smashed to pieces in the process. After Jon recovers, he tracks down the band to a dive bar to apologise before tracking down a maskless Frank and returning him to them. Frank begins to improvise a song that reflects on the environment that features the refrain, "I love you all" and the band play along. The end.
If you've read enough of this publication, you'll know that I love a good Zen koan, so here's one that I think is relevant to the themes of the film.
A not very bright man called Sok Du, literally "rock head", is not up to the task of following the Buddhist scriptures or sitting still for hours. Still, he wants to practise and one day overhears a lecture from a Zen master about how "Buddha is mind". However, Sok Du mishears the korean and thinks that the master is saying "Buddha is grass shoes". From that moment, Sok Du procures some grass shoes and stomps about all day saying, "Buddha is grass shoes" to himself again and again. This goes on for a while until one day, Sok Du trips up, tumbles down to the ground and his grass shoes are smashed to pieces. This leads to Sok Du having an immediate moment of insight and he runs back to the old master. Sok Du swipes master with the broken shoe, but he remains unimpressed and asks him to elaborate on his insight. Sok Du replies, "all of my grass shoes are broken!" and the master smiles in acknowledgment of Sok Du's genuine understanding of Buddha nature.
When we look to the characters within Frank in the light of this story, it's natural for Frank's shattered papier-mâché head to come to mind. While I think that this moment could be seen as Frank's "grass shoes" moment, the insight doesn't arrive until long after. This occurs when he is reunited with his band and sings a song that details elements of the bar where they are playing – the patrons and the smelly toilets – bookended with a refrain of "I love you all".
While Jon's ambition was an infection that had a disastrous effect on the band, Jon's meddling also led to Frank losing his mask and reconnecting with the world in a more genuine way. While human connection is the ethos of The Soronprfbs, it is still a connection that shuts itself away from the world in the same way that Jon's atomised, online ambition shuts him off from his local community.
Frank knew this, hence why he was susceptible to Jon's plans for world domination. The problem was that Jon's method relied on alienating Frank from his friends and his own creative heart. In another scene, when a German tourist family arrive at the Irish house that the band should have left, it is Frank that immediately connects in a profound way with the mother and eliciting an ecstatic response.
It's also interesting that the final scene mirrors the first one. Both Jon and Frank are improvising in response to their surroundings and the people they see. The difference is that Jon is not seeing the humanity of these people – instead seeing them as props to extract inspiration from – whereas Frank is wide open and reaching out with a declaration of love. He is reconnecting with the world, his friends and his own soul.
Jon also has his own set of "grass shoes": his obsession with becoming a famous musician and performing at South By Southwest. It is the moment of the disastrous gig when his "grass shoes" shatter. In the moments before Frank's collapse, Jon exclaims that it is the happiest day of his life. This marks the highest point of Jon's delusion, despite him being in front of a very real audience of cheering punters, he still cannot engage with reality. The gig ends in disaster before a single song can be played but the insight only really arrives after Jon loses Frank at the roadside motel and is himself hit by a car.
It is here that Jon is able to see the damage that his delusion has caused and he set about making things right again. Jon quietly leaves the bar at the end of the film and we don't know where he's off to or how his life turns out, but he is no longer carrying the toxic virus of ambition and is maybe ready to return home and see the "endless rolling waves" for what they really are.
Thanks for reading this
I don't have much to say for myself this week. This was another one of those posts that has been on my backlog for months and this week was the moment to finally cough it up.
I was quite set on the idea of writing about Frank with the notion that Jon represents all the evils of the "content" machine, but on watching the film again it became more apparent that he was the necessary agent of chaos for unmasking Frank and returning him to the world.
In the same sense, there's really nothing wrong with making content per-se, it's more that Jon wants to have his cake and eat it too – to be a viral sensation while at the same time maintaining his artistic credibility. That's the place where it always seems to come unstuck.
Anyway, I'm glad I gave myself a reason to watch it again and listen to the soundtrack a few times as I plodded around Sainsbury's.
Cheers,
Niall
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