Review of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) by Marion B — 14 Sep 2008

Marion: "The Locked Room. Miyazaki. Alienation. The Dark Stuff. Rimbaud. Mann ist Mann by Brecht. Control. The Scream by Munch. Hysteria by Muse. May 68. Fight Club. Syd Barrett (even if...). Those are some of the things I thought about while watching Pink Floyd The Wall. This movie is a unique musical and visual experience, disturbing, simply intense. The music is the movie; Alan Parker and Gerald Scarfe (whose drawings remind those of Miyazaki, at the same time, even though he was not known in Europe then) have perfectly set to frame Waters work (music and scenario). Shattering.

Some have tried to reduce Pink Floyd The Wall to a giant video clip. But I don't agree! It's really a movie, with a scenario and a deep reflection on alienation and, above all, the artist condition. Sinister and morbid; Parker and Waters take us on board for a trip from which we won't come back unscathed. The artist, sort of a circus freak, that people come to observe; a caged bird (remember Alicia Key's song). A man in an empty locked room, with monsters and specters; a physical mutation, chrysalis of madness, to a charismatic leader of a totalitarian regime, amalgam of Nazism, Stalinism and the skinhead movement; "If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot!" The artist and his audience, (e)stranged relationship, where the former needs the latter to exist, but would like to do without them anyway (French singer Leo Ferre was exactly saying that in January, 1969). Bob Geldorf is simply outstanding in that movie.

It's hard to talk coherently about this movie, it's so rich, so interesting, so intense, so terrifying! And this Wall, full of symbolic meanings; Walls with the illusive function of protecting someone, a group of people from the Others, the enemy, from Hell. Some have pretended that this movie was a tribute to Syd Barrett. We can seriously have doubts about this assertion. Since this movie is, even before being the Pink Floyd's movie, Roger Waters' project... the very same who suggested they forgot to pick up Syd Barrett on January, 26th of 1968 for the Southampton University concert. Therefore, it is rather, most probably, a film about the relational issues of the rock star (maybe Waters) with his audience. Waters was saying, in June 1987:

"Maybe the architectural training to look at things helped me to visualize my feelings of alienation from rock 'n' roll audiences. Which was the starting point for The Wall. The fact that it then embodied an autobiographical narrative was kind of secondary to the main thing which was a theatrical statement in which I was saying, 'Isn't this fucking awful? Here I am up onstage and there you all are down there and isn't it horrible! What the fuck are we all doing here?'".