To critical acclaim, Frank premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. The film stars Michael Fassbender as the title character, the phenomenally talented and charming singer for a band with an unpronounceable name.
Frank wears a paper-mache mask, and hasn’t taken it off as long as anyone can remember, representative of a crippling social anxiety that becomes more and more apparent as the film goes on. These sorts of depictions of the mentally ill in popular culture are important, and are something to be taken seriously.
I spoke with Jess Hettich, a skills trainer at ShelterCare, about her work in order to get a better idea of the value of their accuracy.
Hettich works to help those struggling with these issues to meet their specific needs so they feel comfortable interacting with others in their day to day lives. I spoke with her about the way she perceives our society’s interaction with the mentally ill.
“It’s so embedded in our society that if you stand out at all, it’s not a good thing,” Hettich said about how strong the stigma is toward the people she works with, that it’s something that they can feel while trying to work through these issues. “(They’re) trying to get through daily life and struggling with symptoms that other people don’t understand and can’t understand because society doesn’t teach them how it actually works.”
Cinema often depicts characters with mental illnesses. But most frequently in Hollywood, the depiction of mental illness is a violent one. Insanity leading to violence has been a prominent plot point for a long time. Movies like Psycho paint a harsh picture of the affected, and more often it is those with the disorder who are suffering the most.
“It’s not a matter of their comfort so much as the rest of society’s,” Hettich said about this balance in working to meet goals for her patients. It’s difficult to hear, but it’s clear that the issue isn’t with the individual alone, but is with the community. “(In Africa), they treat it as a community issue, it isn’t a shameful thing, it’s like, ‘we need to work together to manage these symptoms, you’re still a part of our family.’”
Recently another common theme has developed, which is a tendency to glorify antisocial disorders among adolescents in particular. Films like Donnie Darko can make introversion and depression seem almost appealing or attractive. This encourages an idea that these disorders are trivial or unsubstantiated.
“People don’t treat mental illness like they treat things like cancer,” Hettich said. “But they’re just as legitimate and they affect your life just as much. You don’t romanticize cancer.”
The idea that if it isn’t tangible it isn’t worth treating has been difficult to overcome, and the portrayal of the mentally ill in pop culture is a huge part of that.
“It’s like a novelty, people don’t know too much about it,” Hettich said. “They know the stereotypes that you read in books or see in movies.”
These conditioned stereotypes really do change perception.
But Frank is different. Frank depicts a man, someone with strengths and faults like anyone else. We watch this character grow and learn to live with what had been a crippling social anxiety. A film depicting the mentally ill as people beyond psychopaths and superheroes is uncommon, Frank goes a step further. It shows not just a real man behind the mask, but a real way to take it off. The mentally ill have been brushed aside in their representation in film, and this affects the way we see these people outside of the theater. But we made these characters, and we can do something different.
“People have to take the initiative to change that, it isn’t going to change on its own,” Hettich said. We need to eliminate the idea that it isn’t our problem, because it is. We as a community can work on broadening our ability to accept, rather than expecting everyone else to meet a standard. Frank is a strong step towards this. Representation is important, and films like this are exactly what we need.