Pink’s father dies in service to his country during WWII, his death depicted in a sequence that cuts from the bombing of his bunker in continental Europe directly to the grotesque image of his overweight wife-Pink’s mother-napping in a beautiful British garden, snoring through not only her husband’s death in a foreign land but also the crying of her infant son in his baby carriage a few feet away. While Waters classifies The Wall in Retrospective, a documentary of the film’s making, as a study in human disconnection characteristic of the post-modernist period, I argue that it situates the mother as the impetus behind not only fascism and WWII but also conformity, death, and hatred in general. Pink, a rocker representative of Waters himself, is ultimately portrayed as shaped-through a childhood dominated by an alternately neglectful and overbearing mother, an education at the hands of repressed schoolmasters, and marriage to a sexual devouring fem fatale-into a murderous fascist leader.
#PINK FLOYD THE WALL ALBUM OR MOVIE MOVIE#
Is it me, or does this film project written, directed, and produced by a bunch of middle-aged, male British rockers and movie artists posit Roger Waters’s mother herself as the root of all institutional and national evil?Īfter a similar experience to mine-watching the film as an adult equipped to handle its insidious self-centeredness instead of a teenager enthralled with Waters’s countercultural overtures-fellow blogger Sarah Foss concludes, “There’s something insular and myopic about it, as if Waters lacked the introspection to sort through his unhappiness and anger and create a work that actually had something to say about the world” (par. I find it, however, more than a little masturbatory and am frankly disturbed not only by its superfluously surreal scenes, like the one in which Pink, the main character, takes a nighttime swim in a pool of blood, but also by its blatant sexism, which has apparently passed for nearly three decades as a reasonable depiction of some vague sense of a universally-felt post-WWII angst. The film-based on the experiences and personal anxieties of Pink Floyd founding member Roger Waters, first envisioned by Waters as a companion piece to the 1979 album of the same name, and produced in 1982 by award-winning director Alan Parker-is, of course, legendary among Pink Floyd fans. Until last Saturday, that is, when my husband pulled the film musical from his amazingly eclectic DVD collection and popped it into the Blu-Ray, stating that he hadn’t seen it since high school and was sure that he couldn’t have possibly “gotten it” back then and that it therefore deserved re-watching.
#PINK FLOYD THE WALL ALBUM OR MOVIE FULL#
I had somehow lived through a full thirty years without having to view it.