Jazz-Hands

Every so often, a event comes along that jolts us into realising what we have become.

The plaudits for the dire Frank (2014) are such a moment.

Save for the paper-maché head, the film has absolutely nothing in common with the person it purports to be inspired by – They may have added the proviso that the tale is ‘loosely based on’  Chris Sievey’s life, but the truth is they may as well claim the film to be based on Anne Frank as Frank Sidebottom (Sievey’s alter ego) for all the correlation here.

The whole cult of Frank always had little to do with toasting Frank Sidebottom so much as cultural snobbery – elevating tripe certain to be derided so its patrons can sneer ‘you simply don’t get it’ at the vulgarity of the beastly lower orders (‘damn their impertinence in existing’).

But this film oversteps the mark to an offensive level: reinventing Frank into the makers’ cerebral masturbation fantasy of the perfect entertainer, played out to a predictable script rehashing tired themes of ‘artists’ battling career demons (becoming successful vs ‘selling out’) and personal (a bit of the idealised ‘legend of Syd Barrett’ thrown in), with more than a few cut and paste set-piece events from the well blogged histories of true surreal artists such as Cardiacs, Stump and They Might Be Giants thrown in.

What next, a film where Barney The Purple Dinosaur was the fifth Beatle? Where Screaming Lord Sutch equates to Noam Chomsky? Yes, Frank Sidebottom is a lily easy enough to gild when there was little substance to ruin in doing so, but this crosses the line of artistic licence to an outright lie.

The script writer Jon Ronson was part of Frank Sidebottom’s backing band, who knows full well repainting Chris Sievey en passant as some sort of misunderstood eccentric genius – rather than some tenth rate fame-whore refusing to accept his true talent for entertainment came from behind the curtain not in front of it – is an Ecce Homo sized travesty.

Frank is Ronson’s ego trip: a Pound Store Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle – the late Malcolm McLaren’s vapid fantasy on the Sex Pistols as some master plan to earn a million pounds Bialystock and Bloom fashion from creating the worst band in the world, but which gullible later generations still take as gospel. If Ronson truly had any respect for the man he claims to revere, he’s hang his head in shame. But in showbiz, anything is fair game – even your dead friend’s legacy.

The disturbing part is he’s plenty of fourth estate friends happy to help him do it with reviews that appear almost word for word identical. Before this week’s out, the pseudo-intelligentsia of ancient universities and art college undergraduates along with the usual weekend supplement creeps of the broadsheets still believing themselves part of a counter-culture (decades after the real counter-culture disappeared in the black hole created from going too far up its own backside) will have conned enough into believing this to be some cinematic epic and parting with their money for the privilege.

The even more gullible will have bought up Frank Sidebottom’s back catalogue (there’s a grubby haste in the surviving high street stores to stock his CDs they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot when he was alive) to be up with the new hip trend. Plenty may lose part of their ever shrinking entertainment budget before discovering they’ve been had.

Frank (2014) is less a homage to a dead pub entertainer and more a symbol of the malaise in today’s  British Isles: where a cultural, economic and political elite dictate to the masses the ‘truth’ even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, where reality is whatever they want it to be or have been  – and Frank is very much a self-indulgent display of that capability distorting reality into their own whimsies. For all we may mock the North Koreans’ loonyverse, at least their people have the excuse of having little choice with guns to their heads.