Pink Floyd - The Wall

by John

Pink Floyd's 1982 film The Wall is an ambitious, intense, and challenging film. Eschewing a traditional narrative, the movie tries to convey a sense of story progression through a maddening parade of live-action scenes both real and imagined, plenty of music, and even surrealist animated segments. Ultimately, the movie is a decidedly messy stew of ideas, but one not thrown together at random. It requires patience and a strong interest to sift through the movie's shortcomings, but behind the haphazard and sometimes overproduced concepts is a rewarding, insightful, and fully realized character study.

The schizophrenic product of the stormy collaboration between director Alan Parker and writer Roger Waters of the seminal rock band Pink Floyd, The Wall is at its core an analysis of one man's very troubled psyche. Heavily rooted in Freudian thought, the film takes an unflinching look at the mind of Pink (Bob Geldof), a rock star whose repressed childhood anxieties, coupled with the excesses of his uninhibited adult lifestyle, produce an alienated and self-destructive individual detached from the world around him.

We first see Pink in a hotel room, staring blankly at a television set, which is meant to convey his extreme social isolation. After the camera gradually focuses in on his right eye, we enter Pink's memory bank, where we discover some key experiences of his childhood. Pink's father was killed in combat during World War II, a tragic event that will haunt him the rest of his life. Pink's mother, forced to raise him alone, becomes an overprotective and smothering presence in his life, which will become another damaging influence. A third difficulty to his childhood is his school, which is dominated by cruel and sadistic headmasters; one in particular humiliates Pink by reading one of his poems aloud (actually a snippet of the lyrics to the Pink Floyd song "Money," off of the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon). The emotional damage caused either intentionally or unintentionally by these three figures—his father, mother, and teacher—form the beginning of Pink's "wall," or the psychological dividing line between himself and the outside world. This concept is crucial to understanding the film.

Another person who lays bricks on Pink's wall is his future wife, who becomes the first victim of the rock star's mental and emotional problems. Still prey to his repressed emotional hang-ups, Pink accepts the empty material rewards of his career as a musician rather recklessly. This leads to further building of Pink's wall, which in turn causes him to withdraw even more from social interaction. He succeeds in neglecting his wife, who tries to resolve her emotional and sexual frustrations by sleeping with another man. This latest blow to Pink's already highly vulnerable feelings only plunges him into a deeper tailspin of emotional detachment, despair, and self-destructive behavior. He spaces out watching British WWII movies on television almost constantly. He also frequently turns to violent outbursts to express himself, as well as performs seemingly meaningless obsessive-compulsive activities.

For example, after letting a groupie enter his high-rise apartment, he lets loose by completely destroying the whole place, nearly throwing himself out the window to the city traffic below in the process. The next morning, he meticulously arranges all his broken possessions in neatly ordered patterns and combinations. By this time, it's obvious that Pink has completely cut himself off from meaningful societal interaction and has lost the ability to feel. Back in the present, when Pink's manager finds him in his apartment unconscious, he is hurriedly woken up and made to perform at a concert. Here, Pink hallucinates, imagining himself to be a monstrous dictator ordering his screaming fans to spread violence and anarchy in society. This the culmination of his connection to other people, as he fantasizes about having absolute power while instigating racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of vile, devious hatred. It's at this point that Pink's conscience finally rebels and puts him on trial.

In a farcical animated segment, the figures in Pink's past that have damages him the most—his teacher, his mother, his wife—chastise him for his adult behavior and reveal Pink's deepest anxieties. Then a judge appears—who is actually a walking giant buttocks speaking from his anus—and condemns Pink to expose his repressed, tortured thoughts and feelings to the public. Having at least mentally atoned for his guilt, Pink's psychic wall finally explodes and crumbles to the ground, opening himself to the outside world again.

This synopsis is almost antithetical to the approach the film takes, which barely features any dialogue. The film's "dialogue" is its soundtrack, supplied by Pink Floyd's 1979 album that shares the film's title. Admittedly, without at least a working familiarity with the album, it will most likely take repeat viewings to fully comprehend what's happening onscreen. Knowing the music (specifically, the lyrics) will just speed up the process of understanding a movie that doesn't obey conventional storytelling rules and relies heavily on symbolism and metaphor to communicate.

Visually, the film is too scattered and overburdened with a cacophony of intense imagery to have a consistently satisfying effect. By the end of the film, you feel like you've witnessed a hit-or-miss approach to assembling a movie. The Wall certainly conveys what it feels like to be inside the mind of a person whose mind is spiraling out of control, but one side effect of this method is that the viewer is distanced from Pink's suffering. The movie takes a surprisingly cold and clinical look at the protagonist's psyche, almost academic in a madcap, rock-star kind of way.

The Wall presents intellectual concepts and eventually makes logical connections between them, but emotionally, we never get to know Pink as a person. Only occasionally do we truly sympathize with the strife he suffers through on an emotional level, torment that's caused by other people during his childhood, as well as by himself during his adulthood. Despite all the visual bombast, a humanistic portrayal of Pink is certainly nestled in the film, waiting to be discovered, but it is largely accessed through an intellectual, not emotional, understanding of the character.

The animated segments, courtesy Gerald Scarfe, are stunningly creative and compelling interludes. The depiction of the bombing of London is especially striking, as is the overtly sexual imagining of Pink's wife. Pink visualizes her as a menacing, ever-changing hybrid of flower and insect, showing both his anger and fear of her spite and judgment. Another memorable animated representation is that of the teacher during the trial, who is shown beating a student while his wife beats him in the shadows, holding him up with puppet strings. It's an example of abstract, visual character narration that's clever and effective.

Symbols in the animated sequences often cross over to the live-action scenes as well, such as the image of the hammer, which rises to prominence in Pink's final hallucination of himself as an evil dictator. Ultimately, the animation complements the live action in a crucial way, bridging the gap between dream and reality, the abstract and the literal, and remains as one of the film's strongest points.

Pink Floyd's songs interact well with what's happening on screen, from the emotional "When The Tigers Broke Free," which is initially set to a tense scene showing Pink's soldier father lighting a cigarette, to the pained "Comfortably Numb," accompanying Pink's agonizing resuscitation before his climactic concert. "The Trial" is also memorable, featuring sung dialogue for the animated characters to speak.

However, plenty of musical crescendos and roughly directed scenes of graphic sex and violence will likely turn off people looking for more nuanced, reflective filmmaking. The movie pays equal attention to complex, thought-provoking ideas and obvious, throwaway visceral strategies. In a way, though, The Wall is essentially a reflective film, as it deals almost exclusively with a character's tortured inner psyche, relying heavily on abstract thought to convey its ideas, although often in a very extroverted, nightmarish, in-your-face way.

Without a doubt, the film takes a fascinating approach to communicating a very particular vision that certainly has its share of missteps. Even with a close knowledge of the album's lyrics, some of the metaphoric images and symbolic scenes don't communicate that well, unless you think it's okay that loosely connected images don't have to all fit together like a puzzle. While it's perfectly good for the viewer to actually do some work by pondering the film's meaning, instead of having everything neatly spelled out, the movie's creators still have to meet the audience halfway, and there are definite points in the film where that isn't the case.

Still, The Wall is quite worthy of praise for truly experimenting with the medium of film, and, for the most part, succeeding fairly well. An intelligent character study that reflects the destructive emptiness easily found in modern life, the film doesn't simply cater to a Pink Floyd fan base, but grapples with issues, albeit clumsily at times, that have broad relevance. An open mind, a willingness to overlook its easily spotted flaws, and a recording of the album can make for an intellectually rewarding film viewing experience.