A Short Essay on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”

A Short Essay on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”

When one considers a film and its normative components, the result is routinely a consideration of the film’s dialogue, the plot and such. When one considers the film, by director Alan Parker, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the inner monologue of the viewer is far more likely to produce a reasonable, meaningful analysis than is one resting on the standard fares of film review. The most immediately striking aspect of the film here is that there is no meaningful dialogue, rather, sound-bytes and “one-liners” are packages in a certain context to enhance the meaning of the film’s true medium, the music of rock and roll maestros, Pink Floyd. With this being stated, there is little reason to indoctrinate with this essay, and thus it would be positively foolish to analyze the entirety of the film. The will necessarily mean different things to different people and the sequencing of the songs and the “story” they tell likewise. I will convey some of this meaning, rather, by assigning one song in the film’s score and its attendant video clip centrality in my own interpretation of the film generally. That song will be “Empty Spaces”, the driving hard rock song which appears towards the middle of the film which visually plays on the philosophies of Freud, Heidegger and Marx. Before doing so, I will relate, relaxedly, my view of what the film reveals to me generally.

Pink Floyd’s The Wall holds a certain place in my theoretical pantheon, conjoined in existence by the likes of Karl Marx and other imminent thinkers and artists. For me, upon viewing the film for the first time, the story of the film was the confirmation of several beliefs I previously thought impossible to articulate. The equation of money to sex vis-à-vis the notion of the “libidinal economy” theory which marries Marx to Freud, the helplessness of free thought vis-à-vis the need for the Ubermensch position in life which kills god and love replacing it with science and calculation, is what dominates The Wall thematically. The doom of liberal democracy in its constant reassigning of security threats imagined or real to replicate its existence and to protect the interests of elites like the main character of the film, followed by the angst and guilt felt by that main character concerning his elevated position. All these are drops in the bucket so far as the active mind can theorize while viewing and considering The Wall, and indeed these are primitive articulations of actual thoughts which are far to private and inaccessible to me at times. In short, my read of the film is that it is about the curse of victory following the second world war, where Britain and indeed the west in general were triumphant but after confronting the horrors of Germany and Japan, they became more like them in their science, in their society and in their sexuality. The god is the leader, nor is the ideology, but henceforth is only accumulation, robbing us humans of the matter of life, which enriches and contributes to love. Hence, my assigning of centrality to “Empty Spaces”, which is quite simply put, the story of capitalism and its excesses.

The tune begins with a low noise, produces and looped to repeat itself over and over, to produce a menacing aesthetic, which is further magnified when the drums arrive at the a pounding and deliberately slow pace. The feel is downright militaristic, which one may consider ironic when taken in context with the video clip now adjoining the tune. The animation of a pistil and stamen, the female and male reproductive organs, teasing each other until the vulture-like female eats the male, is however, not in the slightest ironic when contextualized appropriately. Throughout the film, Pink, the main character (loosely based on Roger Waters and Syd Barret), reminisces and agonized over the loss of his love, his wife, to another man. His anxiety over this is probably the immediate cause of his everyman-style thought pattern, using ego-defense mechanisms to deflect his agony onto all of womanhood rather than onto his former wife. This agony builds into the scene where the pistil and stamen tease each other, roughly representational of what Pink construes to be all inter-gender relations in the capitalist social matrix. The teasing, followed by the rapture, followed by the capture, with room for nothing else. Bleak, but something that thinking people (more likely thinking men, due to the over-arching male context of the film) everywhere in the west can appreciate. It conjures up images of the film Brazil, by another English Public School Boy, Terry Gilliam, where the protagonist lives in a matrix of responsibility and fakery, and where love is impossible to qualify, only to be quantified incessantly.

The completion of the opening segment, where the pistil becomes a bird of prey and devours the phallic counterpart, transforms the landscape into an open plane being quickly populated by buildings and society, and their implicit reasoning, safety in numbers and security in structures. The Wall is presented here as an accumulation of things, and primarily consumer goods such as cars, stereos and such. After its initial presentation, the Wall quickly spreads across the land, transforming the natural beauty in its wake into desolate beings and things, eager to kill at the slightest command from the Wall itself. This is the case with the baby who turns into a storm-trooper and beats the other baby-now adult to death. The dramatization of the intellectual and spirited resistance conjured up occasionally takes the form of a screaming head, attempting to free itself, only to be sucked back in by the Wall. These screams are the poor, the artistic, the different and free thinking, seeking to escape the hyperrized move to conformity and the rush for capital that requires that conformity of thought. While the Wall spreads further into the landscape, the viewer is presented with the image of a cathedral, regal and proud, only to be smashed to pieces by the Wall as it crusades through it. This is a very clear representation of the death of ideology, god, good and love, to be replaced with the search for more money and the insatiable circuit of capitalism, Money-Commodity-Money ((M-C-M) plus profit). This birth of this never ending cycle represents a crucial historical instance, where awareness of ideology, difference and beauty all are gone, and the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama[i] recently stated, has been ushered in. The song, indeed, is a historical metaphor, with the opening being the primordial scene twisted somewhat, the spread of the Wall metaphorical to the spread of man, the wars of man and ultimately, the death of those combative beliefs to be replaced by the docility and political inertness of society in, or behind if you like, THE WALL.

After the destruction of the church, the song continues its now momentous pace, and Waters sings about the trite life of the accumulating capitalistic, being laudatory and sarcastic in one. The animations now represent the M-C-M circuit, as the casino and the accumulating “blood chips” representing money now dominate the screen. Indeed, capitalism, like the casino game, is a constant gamble, where the business-man constantly liquefies his assets to acquire commodities only to attain more assets. Thus M-C-M, just like the compulsive, non-self-restraining gambler. Here the animations change once again to the equation of sex to money, where a loosely animated female body dances and teases the scene, followed by the transformation of that into a guitar, and then instantly to an automatic rifle which lets off a few shots. The final two lines of the song “but never relax at all, with our backs to the Wall”, is once again indicative of the cyclical M-C-M nature of the new society. With that, the hammer comes down, and the tune is complete.

There is no doubt that this song encapsulates more or less the majority of the themes of anxiety, lovelessness and greed, which define the film’s experiential viewing. Other songs that deserve credit as major thematic pieces within the film are “Comfortably Numb”, “Another Brick in the Wall (Parts I-III)”, and “In the Flesh?”. These are all essential contributions to the specific narrative of the film and tin the nuanced presentation of this highly specialized music. “Empty Spaces” is however, with specific ideological meanings in itself, the angst of the western man in the era of thoughtlessness and greed.