Two Views of Frank
Frank (Lenny Abrahamson, 2014) is a film about a band trying to realize their creative ideas; First while writing and recording an album, then while putting it out into the world. I like the film, but also have some issues with it. My video addresses this through two contrasting montage trailers I made for the film.
Frank contains weighty commentary on the potential personal costs of the creative process. But it seems frustratingly unwilling to commit to that message. My question for the movie is this: why does it seem so intent on walking back its most powerful elements? A fundamental structural problem with the film for me is that Frank isn’t ultimately about the character Frank. It’s a hero’s journey centered on Domhnall Gleeson’s character, Jon.
Frank: an artist dealing with mental health issues, in a band, who by the end of the film has experienced multiple suicides.
Jon: a hapless cubical worker who tweets about his attempts at writing songs that sound and feel like TV commercial jingles.
I can’t help but sense a hesitation by someone (filmmaker? Or more likely, studio people?) to fully commit to making a complex movie about a complex character.
But I have another observation about Frank, which I think informs the way we see and hear films more broadly. There’s a complicated relationship between the diegetic and non-diegetic music in Frank. The movie focuses on an experimental, underground band whose edgy and sometimes atonal music is seen and heard in the film. The band is fictional, but the music is real (and surprisingly good), and played mostly by actual musicians on screen. But there’s an affective dissonance between the band’s edgy diegetic music, and the non-diegetic soundtrack that consists largely of light and whimsical cues, that I might categorize as “early 2000’s indie-film-twee” (see Juno, et al.).
This leads to broader questions about the relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic music in film. Namely, what effect does the stylistic and tonal relationship between these two musics have on a film’s overall expressive result? Put another way, are diegetic and non-diegetic music in a film linked in a way that informs the overall expressive sonic ecology of the film? Or are they just two streams of quasi-independent information among many in the medium of film? (along with mise-en-scène, cinematography, lighting, etc.) Based on my experience with Frank, I would answer that the diegetic and non-diegetic are most certainly linked. The same way most would argue that mise-en-scène, cinematography, and lighting are not independent streams of information, but integrally linked components in the signification of a film.
Postscript: In most mainstream cinema this stylistic disconnect between the diegetic and non-diegetic isn’t particularly questioned. Imagine a film with a traditional, orchestral-based non-diegetic soundtrack, in which there is a scene where we hear a pop song on the radio in the diegesis. No problem, right? Why do I not hear this stylistic affective dissonance as an issue? It seems to speak to the ways we have internalized late 19th century Romanticism as the standard, naturalized grammar of Hollywood film scoring. To the point that it is above reproach, as it were.