Frank Sidebottom's Failure

Frank Sidebottom is the stage name for Christopher Sievey, a musician and comedian somewhat famous for his act, which involved a large, round, fake head. Frank Sidebottom was portrayed as a hopeless, aspiring, failure of a popstar, who wore old fashioned suits and lived at home with his mother. Frank, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Michael Fassbender as the enigmatic titular character, is not about Sievey, nor Sidebottom. It does, however, include the familiar fake head. In the film, Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), a desperate amateur musician, finds himself surprisingly in cahoots with a local band that has failed to garner any sort of remarkable popularity. Their name is the Soronprfbs, and their frontman is Frank. The newly rearranged
This means that the Soronprfbs’ unavoidable failure has nothing to do with the intended lesson of the film. The real reason they venture into the unknown is to discover, or rediscover, themselves. Shortly after Frank is found by Jon, they arrive at the El Madrid, an almost-empty, dusty old bar. The three remaining members of the band (Clara, Baraque, and Nana) are the night’s entertainment. A somber tune with slow and shaky vocals is performed by Clara, perfectly encapsulating the despair felt by those close to Frank in his absence. The Soronprfbs see Frank without his fake head, for the first time in their careers. They all come to realize that their real purpose, what they really should be spending their lives on, is making obscure music that will never see the light of day, together. Jon then returns home, realizing that he was never meant to repair the band, and that some things are better left untouched and adapted to. (this is actually foreshadowed quite cleverly in the in-movie song “Broken”).
On the surface, this is a quirky questing film about perseverance and enlightenment through apathy. But the movie contains an unnerving atmosphere that pokes and prods and tells viewers that something else is going on under the
All throughout the movie the plot blindsides viewers, building things up only to have them crash down. The “travel-and-find-success” cliche is crushed by their total failure. Frank’s legendary head, the object that led Jon to suspect that Frank had suffered a cruel childhood, twisting his mind into that of a brilliant and troubled musician, turned out to simply be a product of Frank’s mental illness. The viewers’ expectations are shattered, and everything they predictably suspected about Frank’s genius turns out to be completely untrue. Thus is the nature of irony. Thomas Foster says that ironic works include “characters who possess a lower degree of autonomy, self-determination, or free will than ourselves” (Foster 253). This rule rings true when it comes to Frank. Our protagonist, Jon, is plainly unable to turn the Soronprfbs’ fate around, leaving him fiscally broke and with nothing physical gained from the experience. This is a sort of sad irony, though it is cathartic in that it delivers to the audience the film’s overarching lessons on a silver platter. It relieves them of the burden that is watching Jon fail over and over again, falling repeatedly into the stale patterns of friction within the band. Irony injects the unexpected (whether tragically or comically) into a plot. After all, what other quirky, fun, indie film involves an attempted suicide, a successful suicide,