For starters, there is Pink’s deep hatred of women. He returns repeatedly to the idea that women have made him this way, from his suffocating mother, to the groupies he sleeps with (and abuses) as a rock star, to the “fat and psychopathic wives” whose haranguing of their schoolmaster husbands is displaced onto young Pink at school. The film in particular makes this hard to miss, especially in the animation, which often uses the motif of a sinister-looking flower drawn to resemble female genitalia, which in one sequence even devours a second, distinctly phallic flower. That Pink participates in such a very ugly vein of misogyny never occurred to us as teens.

Even more repulsive is the story’s climax: Pink is forced by his manager to go onstage in a deeply depressed state, and in response, Pink dons a fascist persona who turns the concert into a pogrom-esque rally encouraging a “final solution” for “the queers and the coons and the reds and the Jews.” Those quotes are taken directly from the track “Waiting for the Worms,” and the film leaves even less to the imagination. In several animated sequences, the hammers that build the metaphorical wall form a crossed symbol whose angles and red-and-black colors are heavily evocative of the Nazi swastika, and even more explicitly, the late-film concert sequence has Pink marching into the arena with a posse decked out in a dark, jackbooted uniform. As the rally starts in earnest during the song “Run Like Hell,” we see in stomach-churning detail militarized concertgoers rushing from the show to brutalize racial minorities in the streets and ransack their houses and businesses.

So no, this is no typical movie angst. It’s disconcertingly real.

The Wall was made in the shadow of Pink Floyd’s experiences throughout the back half of the 1970s, not just their ’77 tour but also their observations of a British rock scene that had become alarmingly fascist-adjacent, with artists as prominent as David Bowie and Eric Clapton expressing admiration of fascist ideas (Clapton in particular may have been a direct inspiration for The Wall, as Pink’s “Are there any queers in the theatre tonight?” rant is eerily similar to a tirade Clapton went on in a 1976 concert, down to even the specific slurs used). Overlayed on this (especially in the movie) is a deep anxiety over the newly appointed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the generally rightward lurch of British politics at the time.

I was ignorant of that cultural context as I obsessed over The Wall as a teen, which is probably why the text of Pink’s rally slid past me, but in the years since, Pink’s journey has become sickeningly familiar. It is impossible to watch his trajectory from adolescent pain to misogyny to fascism and not see mirrored in it the way that so many young American men over the past decade have been pipelined from reactionary misogyny to the alt-right to the openly far-right, oftentimes lashing out at the same targets as Pink does: women, queer folk, Marxists, racial and ethnic minorities.

Obviously, Pink is an unreliable narrator; the misogyny, the homophobia, the racism—presumably neither Pink Floyd nor Alan Parker thinks these accurately identify the sources of Pink’s pain, and the fact that Pink does is symptomatic of his skewed perception of reality. Fascism is, of course, a lie that turns perceived grievances into fantasies of power and domination.