There are many phrases that can be used for Pink Floyd The Wall. An orgy for the senses. A total mind f*&k. A piece of shit. It's one of those movies that you either love or hate. There's no middle ground to this movie.
The film is about rock star Pink (Bob Geldof) who is slowly falling to pieces in his hotel room on the sunset strip. This is before the world was ingesting happy pills to eliminate or horrible pasts, so Pink is doing what was done in the era- sitting around watching TV with groupies. As the film progresses we see the things that pushed Pink to the precipice- the father he never knew dying in a war he didn't understand. The education system that was an assembly line for "citizens". The overbearing mother. The promiscuous wife. These things serves as his "bricks", layering upon each other until he really is behind his wall. Pink will be vulnerable no more. But at what cost?
The Wall is one of those films that breaks conventions, especially when thinking about musician movies. The norm is for the actual band to appear in their own film, but that's not the case with The Wall (though concert footage was going to be intertwined, but that's another story). This is a visualization of Pink Floyd's album from three years earlier. The fact that the band doesn't appear and most of the cast are relative unknowns shatters the idea of the rock star movie, most of which were either corny or bad (A Hard Day's Night is the logical exception).
Alan Parker's haunting visuals give us the starkness of Pink's outside world. It's a world of dark hotel rooms, fascist parades, and a general malaise from the title character. What really allows us to get inside Pink's head is the animations by Gerald Scarfe. You know you have a good design when kids are wearing them on t-shirts thirty years later. One of the most striking pieces in the film is the one I like to call the Georgia O'Keefe sequence where two flowers court each other, make love in a swirling vortex of Freudian images where you see the act, yet you don't and finally ending with the female plant consuming the male counterpart. This is Pink's psychosis as he continues to build his Wall. This isn't the Incredible Mr. Lippett.
The reason The Wall has continued to be relevant in an ever changing society is that it's issues go straight back to that age old rock n' roll ingredient called teen angst. Parents are lost to death or divorce as they also can be hindrances, schools want you in the classroom to meet a quota and get their government check, and who can forget those good old teen age relationships that really weren't as monumental as they were at the time. Every generation goes through this same stuff, making it relevant over and over again. This film has become a right of passage. Somewhere right now a teenager or a whole group of them is watching this for the first time. There won't be an analytical discussion of what the movie was about or Pink's little mental glitch, but it will stick with whoever watches it. I expect the day will come shortly when my copy is missing from the shelf, along with Manos: The Hands of Fate.
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