Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words

Directed by Thorsten Schütte (2016) ***1/2

“To many people, Zappa has often seemed to be a force of cultural darkness. Bearded and gross and filthy, entirely obscene, a Mephistophelian figure serving as a lone brutal reminder of music’s potential for invoking chaos and instruction.” –Time Magazine, 1969

Frank Zappa was always a divisive figure, starting with the beginning of his role as rock artist in the mid-’60s, during which he satirically savaged the hippy movement with as much fervor as he savaged the establishment. As a late ’50s and early ’60s follower of such modernist classical composers and experimenters as Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky and 12-tone serialist Anton Webern, he stood aloft and adrift from the counter-culture movement while at the same time riding its wave to success and looking, to such stuffy, middle-aged commentators as above, like the ultimate expression of scary hippiedom. (They were correct, however, about Zappa being a reminder of music’s potential for instruction.)

Director Thorsten Schütte’s compelling Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words, uses no narration and no context for its story. He merely allows Zappa, in a succession of interviews covering three decades, to speak for himself. Though some concert and TV appearance footage is used (and is instructive), most of the film is Zappa explaining his work and railing against idiocy and cultural ruin. Here’s a typical sequence:

Zappa: People are just not accustomed to excellence. They’re not trained to it, because, when you go to school, you’re not given the criteria with which to judge between quality this or quality that. All they do is teach you just enough to become some kind of a slug in a factory to do your job so you can take home a paycheck and consume some other stuff that somebody else makes. There’s no emphasis in schools in the United States put on preparing people to live a life that has beautiful things in it, things that might bring them aesthetic enrichment.

Interviewer: How did you manage to escape all that negative brainwashing?

Zappa: I got out of school as fast as I could.

Eat That Question doesn’t tell the whole story (nor could it, in such a short running time). For all of Zappa’s talents and railing against ignorance and hypocrisy, his lyrics and views were often raunchy, hateful, patronizing and derisive toward those he had contempt for, including intelligent women. In the concert footage the documentary does utilize, Eat That Question demonstrates how his music degenerated over time (that’s my admittedly subjective opinion, based on the conviction that his music never sounded as full and lively again after he fired the original Mothers of Invention members in 1969). His concerts, as well, seemed to get increasingly preachy and polemical. It’s truly embarrassing, for example, seeing him in concert spitefully satirizing Devo. Devo was a group that had more in common with Zappa’s worldview than most, and were also musically influenced by Zappa and musical cohort Captain Beefheart. A telling lyric from the very Devo-sounding 1966 song “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here”: “Plastic boots and plastic hat / And you think you know where it’s at?”

Zappa’s pioneering musical adventuring is on display here, too. In amazing concert footage circa the late ’60s, Zappa mixes experimental classical modernism, rock, doo-wop and R&B. If that sounds interesting to you, buy or rent this documentary (and purchase his first two albums while you’re at it, Freak Out! and Absolutely Free, both masterpieces).

—Michael R. Neno, 2016 October 6