Outside the Wall

When we're young we struggle to break free from the limitations imposed upon us. Hopefully, we progress toward a semblance of emotional and intellectual maturity, able to assimilate those experiences both negative and positive, real and perceptual, that have formed the basis of our being.

Pink Floyd the Wall (1982), starring Boomtown Rats rocker and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof in the role of the titular singer "Pink," is a film based on the themes of the group's 1979 mega-bestselling album of the same name. The album is a harrowing, melancholic, often bleak look at the emotional and psychological evaporation of a man behind his self-imposed "wall," an emotional fortification he built, brick by miserable brick, based on the abuses and traumas he suffered growing up without his father, who was killed at Anzio in WW2. Which, by the way, was the actual fate of the father of Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters, who wrote almost the entirety of The Wall.

The film is brutal and often ugly. It begins with an explosion, Pink's father preparing for an aerial assault while loading a gun, and the intercutting between soldiers storming the beach to be blown apart, and young people rioting (and being brutally dealt with by Los Angeles Police) at a rock concert performed by "Pink the Fascist," a surrealistic, insectile character who croons in a weird falsetto and is seen again, replete with his black uniform and iconic crossed hammers insignia (the actual insignia of the Northern Hammerskins fascist group) at the end of the film, once Pink the Man has become Pink the Monster.

Meanwhile, Pink the Man is ensconced in a lavish hotel suite, surrounded by material possessions that bring him no joy or comfort. Stoned and hallucinating, he floats in a pool of red, tears at his face in agony. The songs, "The Thin Ice," "Mother," "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2," are presented as hallucinatory visual interludes, often mixed with allegorical animations (demons become war factories belching out airplanes and smoke, the Union Jack falls away until it becomes a bloody cross, Pink looks backward into the past at the gory aftermath of the battle wherein his father was slain).

A huge aspect of Pink's alienation is his over nurturing by his mother (Christine Hargreaves), which is a central theme of the film. The father (James Laurenson), the absence of him, seems to point to something almost Freudian in the psyche of young Pink, perhaps the reason he cannot emotionally surrender to his wife (Eleanor David), who becomes a peace activist and has an affair with another man.

Pink brings a young groupie (Jenny Wright) to the hotel room while his manager, the sleazy, unnamed character portrayed by the late, great actor Bob Hoskins, is hosting a sex and drugs party. Pink explodes in a torrent of violent hotel room smashing; but, not out of an ironic sense of prankishness. He is pointed toward the destruction of the self and everything else.

"Take That Fuckers!"

His constant companion is the old-fashioned tube television, which broadcasts violent cartoons, crass commercials, images of Reagan, and an old British war movie. He hallucinates a desert landscape, an African battlefield with hammers growing out of the earth, twists of barbed wire, dead soldiers lying on the ground; a trench of dead men. He is still seated, surreally, in his armchair, still in front of the television, seeing himself as a Young Pink (Kevin McKeon) exploring this brutal inner mental terrain. He descends into an old-fashioned mental ward, as the Boy, and encounters himself raving in a corner, as the Man.

The imagery and sound are arresting, and sometimes overwhelming; it is also quite downbeat and violent. Straight razors and packs of bullets are shown lovingly, contemplatively in close-up, cartoon blood spatters on the cartoon Wall, which runs a ring around Pink; his wife and Teacher (Alex McAvoy) both become alien entities, walking skeletons with whips, hammerheads, and huge, penetrating scope-like eyes that extend. This is the inner landscape of his mental torture, demonstrated by the surrealistic animated landscape created by political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

There is gory, horrific bloodletting, and finally Pink becomes fully Pink the Dictator, Pink the Fascist, leading an army of young skinheads (all dressed in his distinctive black uniform with crossed hammers insignia), and eventually sending them forth to ethnically cleanse a neighborhood. Even rape is shown here, as well as violent destructiveness intercut with what seems to be scenes from a riot.

Pink then rejects this, coming back to a sense of "reality." He is now the cowering madman from the mental asylum--except cowering in a urinal stall. His psychological landscape then turns to an internal "trial," wherein he is judged for all his failings. His sentence? I'll leave you to guess what that is if you don't already know.

The final scenes are a sort of psychic assault, an excursion into violent visual excess that might have made Ken Russell proud. Audiences reportedly, "Found themselves reeling coming out of the theater," according to one commentator. Roger Waters has said he dislikes the film, finding it is so relentless in its onslaught upon the viewer that he "never had a chance to get involved with it."

Outside the Wall

Bloody and cheerless, The Wall has an undercurrent of nihilism and a sense, as one commentator put it, of "celebrating insanity and inhumanity as much as indicting them." This, of course, was not Director Alan Parker's intention. The broader theme of the film is how alienation, on a personal level begins, and like the animated flowers copulating in the earlier part of the film, gives birth to the fascist tendency and the industrial war machine that kills fathers, mothers, babies, etc. "The Wall" is a wall adorned with human blood, the barrier, the borderland from which fascism and the ugliest aspects of the human spirit are born.

We are never shown the progression of Pink from a young post-war fatherless boy to a rock superstar; we are never shown him giving an actual rock concert. His status as a famed musician seems rather superfluous to the rest of the film, as a plot device. Instead, he can be taken as a representation, almost, of Everyman; or, at the very least, an Everyman through whose eyes the viewer can be exposed to the alienating factors that blossom into ugly, bigoted, reactionary politics, violence, self-abuse, the destruction of love and self. There is a danger, of course, that the very elements the film seeks to expose, to satirize, really are, for some, going to be a "celebration" of the same. For some young people, prone, in their confusion, to assimilate a negative or nihilistic worldview, the film could be deadly psychological indoctrination, pushing the hopelessness of the human condition. Not, I know, the intention of Waters or Parker, but, there it is.

But it is the artist's avocation to push the envelope, to descend into hell and define our despair, expose our failings and hold the ugliest aspects of the human condition up, exposed in the naked light of dawn, for all to see, Out of this comes the inevitable progression towards change, to "Tear down the Wall." As the final lyrics remind us, the ones who feel love, the "bleeding hearts and artists," are out there, just beyond, waiting to "make their stand."

Outside the Wall.