{"id":6935,"date":"2022-11-08T22:49:49","date_gmt":"2022-11-08T22:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=6935"},"modified":"2022-11-08T23:03:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T23:03:21","slug":"the-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/08\/the-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Empty Spaces<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Pink Floyd\u2019s feature-length music video, The Wall<\/em>, turns forty this year\u2014and the temptations to despair it depicts haven\u2019t changed much.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Michael O’Malley
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The Wall<\/em> has been with me a long time.<\/p>

Its story is well-trod at this point: in 1977, world-famous English art rock band Pink Floyd went on an expansive arena tour, an experience so miserable that the band created a whole follow-up album about their disaffection and exhaustion. That album was The Wall<\/em>, a \u201crock opera\u201d about Pink, an English rock star who builds a mental \u201cwall\u201d around himself out of alienation and trauma. A few years later, Alan Parker directed a feature-length movie adaptation. The film and the album are synchronous: Parker\u2019s movie is a feature-length music video, dramatizing the album through a dream-logic parade of surreal, nightmarish footage of Bob Geldof writhing through Pink\u2019s tribulations, punctuated by stunning animation by Gerald Scarfe, a cartoonist who had worked on the album\u2019s liner notes. That film turns forty this year. I turned thirty-two in July.<\/p>

The album and film have, since their releases, been near-ubiquitous staples of angsty teens, particularly teen boys. This Millennial writer doesn\u2019t know whether or not the Zoomers listen to Pink Floyd, but for a while, there was a deep connection between young adults and The Wall<\/em>. I have vivid memories of seeing the iconography among my mid-2000s high school peers; the \u201cWe don\u2019t need no education\u201d chant of \u201cAnother Brick in the Wall (Part 2)\u201d has been the frustrated mantra of bored, edgy students for decades; slightly less famous songs like \u201cComfortably Numb\u201d and \u201cRun Like Hell\u201d were staples of the rock radio I grew up with. In short, we spent a lot of time with The Wall<\/em>. The album speaks deeply to a certain self-pitying, embattled mindset endemic in teenagerdom, and I don\u2019t mean that pejoratively: to have captured the complexity of this emotional landscape with its grandiose yet intentionally off-putting style is a stunning achievement that other similar rock-opera-to-film-adaptation projects (e.g., 1975\u2019s Tommy<\/em>) have fallen short of.<\/p>

But returning to this film for the first time in several years, I was struck by how upsetting an experience it is to sit through. Now I see that it is not peddling garden-variety angst, at least not the morose kind glibly evoked in teen media clich\u00e9s; no, The Wall<\/em> contains something much darker.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Fascism is a lie that turns perceived grievances into fantasies of power and domination.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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For starters, there is Pink\u2019s 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 \u201cfat and psychopathic wives\u201d 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.<\/p>

Even more repulsive is the story\u2019s 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 \u201cfinal solution\u201d for \u201cthe queers and the coons and the reds and the Jews.\u201d Those quotes are taken directly from the track \u201cWaiting for the Worms,\u201d 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 \u201cRun Like Hell,\u201d 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.<\/p>

So no, this is no typical movie angst. It\u2019s disconcertingly real.<\/p>

The Wall<\/em> was made in the shadow of Pink Floyd\u2019s experiences throughout the back half of the 1970s, not just their \u201977 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<\/em>, as Pink\u2019s \u201cAre there any queers in the theatre tonight?\u201d 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.<\/p>

I was ignorant of that cultural context as I obsessed over The Wall<\/em> as a teen, which is probably why the text of Pink\u2019s rally slid past me, but in the years since, Pink\u2019s 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.<\/p>

Obviously, Pink is an unreliable narrator; the misogyny, the homophobia, the racism\u2014presumably neither Pink Floyd nor Alan Parker thinks these accurately identify the sources of Pink\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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For too many people I know, the pain and fear from these institutional betrayals have provoked them to flail wildly for meaning and control.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Wall<\/em> gives glimpses at what the band and Parker considered the real answers: an absent father, abusive treatment from teachers, exploitation from his bosses. The film, through sequences that expand Pink\u2019s past to show his crumbling, working-class hometown and his previous involvement in anti-war protests, shows even further wrinkles that splay out into the broader cultural malaise: the stalling of civil rights progress, the crushing of student movements by police, the collapse of working-class communities under economic austerity and deindustrialization.<\/p>

These are legitimate problems that have oppressed and alienated significant swaths of the Western world for decades. And like Pink, a fair number of people who have found themselves suffering either materially or psychologically from these environments have drifted toward the extreme right wing.<\/p>

I have watched some of the family and friends with whom years ago I listened to The Wall<\/em> make a parallel journey to Pink as they weathered their own experiences with childhood abuse and the failures of the 21st-century United States: the protracted military occupations in the Middle East, economic precarity in a deregulated and deindustrialized economy, drug-dependent burnouts grown from a wildly irresponsible market for medical opioids. For too many people I know, the pain and fear from these institutional betrayals have provoked them to flail wildly for meaning and control. When you\u2019re flailing, the lies of hierarchy and hate can feel like epiphany, especially if you have roots in a heritage that has already tasted of supremacy or has been promised it by the very institutions that betrayed you.<\/p>

What The Wall<\/em> argues is that at least in part, such an ideology offers an alternative to the loneliness and isolation and fear of a certain white, usually male demographic. There\u2019s a song not quite halfway through The Wall<\/em> called \u201cEmpty Spaces\u201d in which Pink muses: \u201cWhat shall we use to fill the empty spaces?\u201d Pink must place something in the void he feels. It\u2019s during this song in the film when the image of \u201cthe wall\u201d first appears, as well as the hammers that become the fascist cross. The connection is clear.<\/p>

That same song also shows what \u201cempty spaces\u201d the wall must rip through to be built: a church, a factory, a city. If fascism is the product of our churches, our economic systems, our nations, we must admit that these institutions have embraced lies. If fascism is the alternative to these institutions, we must ask ourselves why they have become so hollow and expendable.<\/p>

Watching The Wall<\/em> as an adult who has also watched people who look a lot like me and my The Wall<\/em>-loving high school peers engage in misogynist online harassment campaigns, acts of terrorism against refugees and racial minorities, social-media-fueled Proud Boys rhetoric, the Charlottesville rally, the January 6 insurrection, and more, it strikes me that our teenaged identification with Pink was a lot more prescient than I once thought. That realization startled me. Perhaps it shouldn\u2019t have.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Michael O\u2019Malley<\/strong> is a high school English teacher in Knoxville, TN. He loves his wife, two children, and public transportation.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Pink Floyd’s The Wall<\/strong> was released on July 14, 1982. It was written by Roger Waters, directed by Alan Parker, and animated by Gerald Scarfe.<\/em>
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Pink Floyd\u2019s feature-length music video, The Wall, turns forty this year\u2014and the temptations to despair it depicts haven\u2019t changed much. 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