Mental Illness In The Movies: How FRANK Debunks The Myth Of The Tortured Artist

The general understanding of mental illness has come a long way in the last century. Even in the last decade or so, we have seen the general consensus change, with specific terms making their way into popular vernacular and outdated attitudes uprooted for more progressive ones. However, there is still some way for us to go.

In this series, I’ll be delving into explicit and understated portrayals of mental illness, health, and wellness. There will be those movies that can be interpreted, metaphorically or otherwise, to be saying something about these same issues, and some whose deliberate attempts to portray these aspects I’ll be critiquing. For my part, I’m only one person out of a large spectrum of different experiences, so nothing I say is definitive, but an opportunity to open up discussion.

This time we’re talking about Frank.

Suffering for your art

Great art comes from pain. That’s not just a cliché, but a belief held by a lot of us. It’s present in those times when, amidst turmoil and uncertainty, people say that “at least the music is going to be good.” This, of course, leads right into the idea that mental illness and creativity are somehow linked. After all, wasn’t Virginia Woolf hopelessly depressed? Didn’t David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath and Edgar Allen Poe all suffer from mental illness?

The arts are full of names of creatives who battled with trauma and mental illness, with stories of abuse, depression, schizophrenia and suicide hard to separate from the art they created. But the idea that these things go hand in hand is worth examining. One film that delves into this is Frank, Lenny Abrahamson’s 2014 musical oddity.

Frank follows Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) as he searches to find the creative spark to make his own music, hoping to discover the necessary inspiration after meeting a band of misfits, led by the eponymous Frank (Michael Fassbender). The frontman of the impossible to pronounce Soronprfbs has a natural gift for finding music wherever he looks, even a tuft of cotton from a sock. Most notably, however, he always wears a large papier-mâché head – a cartoonish mask that keeps his face hidden alongside his mysterious past.

Writer’s block

From the get-go we’re inside Jon’s frustrated creative process, as he stares out to sea, watches children play on the beach, searching for inspiration. Yet he has nothing to share, other than his own self-hatred and an accidental carbon copy of a Madness song.

Then he meets Frank, who doesn’t seem to have the same problem, and his band – most of whom seem to be outsiders. Jon is tired of the ‘little boxes’ of his hometown, but among these guys, he’s the straight-laced ‘normal’ man bewildered by their quirks.

Mental issues seem to be prolific in the band, with Frank’s behaviour and suggested past in a “mental hospital” becoming a point of interest for Jon. In fact, he covets their dysfunction. “Miserable childhood, mental illness, where do I find that kind of inspiration?” he asks himself, a joke that soon turns out to be a serious motivation, and the catalyst for a cautionary tale about art and those who make it.

There’s only one Frank

During their stay at the remote cabin Jon and Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) quickly butt heads over whether the band should remain in the shadows or step into the spotlight. Due to her resistance to his ideas and clear anger issues, Jon assumes that she also spent time in “the mental hospital”, but is set straight. All Jon’s understanding of Frank comes from his own vague preconceptions of what mental illness is, as well as the melancholic ramblings of Don (Scoot McNairy).

“There’s only one Frank,” Don tells the newest bandmember, his own personal crisis and deep depression leading him to covet the musician’s creativity too. For him, however, it’s a dead end. His heartfelt song on the piano is excellent to Jon, but to him it’s just “shit.” His inability to see goodness in himself or any of his work leads directly to his suicide, hanging from a tree… wearing Frank’s spare mask.

This moment is an opportunity for Jon to come face to face with the reality of depression and realise the futility of his mission to become Frank, but instead he keeps going. “Here I have found my abusive childhood, my mental hospital,” he whimsically narrates, before he takes the group to Austin’s SXSW festival, where the band dissolves and Frank is pushed over the edge.

Praying on Frank’s compulsion to make everyone like him and be ‘popular’, Jon puts his friend’s mental well-being second to his own success. For him, his mental illness is an obstacle to be suppressed rather than treated or understood, an attitude many suffering from similar conditions will recognise. This soon leads to catastrophe, and Jon is left searching the country for a man whose face he doesn’t even know.

Debunking the myth

When he does find him, he’s in a town of the same ‘little boxes’ that Jon found so stifling in his own home. Jon finds Frank and sees his true self, underneath the mask. Along with the revelation of his rugged features and strikingly different demeanour without the false face, comes the truth of where his creativity came from in the first place.

In conversation with Frank’s parents, he asks what happened to make Frank act this way, looking to hide himself from the world from a young age. “Nothing happened to him, he’s got a mental illness,” Frank’s father plainly replies, but Jon still refuses to contemplate that there wasn’t some “torment” that drove him to create. That’s when his mother tells him:

“Torment didn’t make the music, he was always musical. If anything it slowed him down.”

Frank grew up in “a good home,” according to them and, as Jon notes, it’s “just like my home”. What separated Frank and Jon as artists isn’t clear, but it wasn’t suffering, trauma or depression that led him to create. The reason his turmoil was so central to his music and the process of making it was because art is a place to find community and express that pain.

The lesson of Frank is that mental illness is a hindrance, not a gift of inspiration, and romanticising it is a dangerous road to go down.

What are your thoughts?