“We must be flipping out”

Frank Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels offers its viewers a surreal and carnivalesque take on the rock and roll lifestyle. A loosely connected series of vignettes, the film aligns with Zappa’s broader oeuvre in both paying homage to and interrogating rock traditions. The film’s use of almost nonstop video effects provides a constant visual disruption, akin to the manner in which Zappa’s musical, lyrical, and comic interventions within his songs managed to disrupt the conventions of rock. Like Zappa’s music, the film is inventive, self-aware, and humorous—while using those elements to open up a discourse about the very popular culture milieu in which it exists: the commercial world of rock and roll.