NOTE: This post is rated R for thematic content and
an instance of mild strong language.
Introduction
Recently,
I watched “Pink Floyd The Wall” for the third time (not having seen it in
decades). I came across it in a big box
of videos on loan from a friend to entertain me as I recover from a broken leg. Inside the DVD case I found this little note:
“The
Wall” well deserves to be watched multiple times, and has held up well since it
came out almost thirty years ago. Other
movies from that year—even top-grossing ones like “E.T.,” “Rocky III,” and
“Porkies”—arguably have not.
In
this post I describe my introduction to the band and the movie; discuss the
difficulty of getting to see it again; and review the DVD extras you should check
out if you rent this movie. (In an
upcoming post, I’ll analyze the movie itself and put forth what I think is an
unusual perspective.)
Discovering Pink Floyd
In
1980, when I was ten, my friend David asked, “What’s your favorite band?” I knew this was just a ploy to get me to ask
him about his favorite band, and I wouldn’t
give him the satisfaction. He told me
anyway: “Mine’s Pink Floyd.” He described this amazing album that had just
come out, “The Wall.” I’d never heard of
the album, nor the band. David did a
sales job on me, saying, “On one of the songs it goes ‘And the worms ate into
his brain!’” I took a listen, and was
immediately absorbed. We’d listen to the
album all afternoon, looking at the album art and the handwritten (and almost
indecipherable) lyrics. I got some
attention at school for my rendition of a background exchange from the album, a
women crying “Eeek!” and a man yelling back, “Shut up!”
In
those days we grasped little of the meaning of the lyrics; singing them, we sounded
many of the words out phonetically, like parrots. One of my friends would sing “no dark sarhasm
in the classroom,” not worrying about what “sarhasm” might mean. I told him it had to be “sarcasm” but he
refused to accept this. For my part, I
had no idea what “psychopathic” meant but couldn’t be bothered to look it
up. I remember arguing with my brothers
about the little girl’s utterance before “Goodbye Blue Sky”—was it “there’s an
airplane up in the sky,” “there’s a snow plane up in the sky,” or “there’s snow
playing up in the sky”?
Around
1985, I won an art award and was invited to a ceremony in Denver to collect my
prize. My parents, recently divorced, bickered
over who would drive me. Trapped between
them and their two cars, I struggled to decide.
“Come with me,” my mom said, “and you can have Pink Floyd in the car.” My dad asked her what Pink Floyd was. Mom, triumphant, replied, “It’s the name of a
band he likes.” Defeated, Dad snorted, “It
sounds like the name of a pig.”
The movie at first viewing
My
mom really grew her cool-mom cred when she agreed to take my friend John and me
to the movie. This was 1982, a couple
years before VHS rentals. I was only
thirteen and it was rated R, so somebody had
to take us. Right away I knew this movie
would be far more harrowing than the album.
Even before the horrific animation accompanying “Goodbye Blue Sky” I was
terrified—not just by the movie, but by the prospect of my mom dragging my
friend and me out of the theater (as my dad would do the following year at “Fanny
& Alexander”). But to my amazement,
mere minutes into the film my mom had fallen asleep! The sound was jacked way up in there (at many
theaters the movie’s producers installed subwoofers to enhance the sound), so my
mom’s falling asleep was simply bizarre.
Sleep must have been a coping mechanism, or at least an excuse for not making
us leave. I looked over periodically and
throughout the movie Mom was practically catatonic in her seat, almost like
Pink up on the screen.
Of
course that movie completely blew my young mind. The images were almost unbearable, but I
couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.
The first thing that struck me was the battlefield scenes: none of the glory and excitement of typical
war movies, such as what Pink watches on TV, but mostly the grim aftermath of
collecting the fallen soldiers. Of
course I’d learned about WWII in history class, but in a sanitized
classroom-friendly version, never like this.
And then there was the deeply disturbing animation: those uncanny humanoid creatures with snouts
like gas masks; a guy getting brained; a white cross turning red, blood flowing
from it into a drain; and of course the seduction, copulation, and mantis-like
devouring of one flower by another. (Roger
Ebert wrote, “This is a flower so gynecological that Georgia O’Keefe might have
been appalled.”)
From
“The Wall” I got a crash course in the birds and the bees—from the flowers,
from the animated version of Pink’s scorpion-like wife, and from live-action
groupies. Even more disturbing were the
scenes of a fascist rally and rioting.
Coming out of the theater, I was speechless. I don’t remember ever debriefing with my
friend about it, but that movie has been drifting around in the back of my mind
ever since. (I will not let my kids
watch it until they’re at least seventeen.
Maybe not even then; one imdb bulletin boarder wrote, “Maybe it’s better
I waited till age 45, cause if I’d seen this at 17 I’d probably have shaved off
my eyebrows or something.”)
Chasing “The Wall”
Years
after seeing “The Wall” in the theater, I began to want to see it again, with
the hope of understanding it better and, frankly, being able to enjoy it more
since my mind wouldn’t be so completely blown.
I was torn because though I continued to enjoy the album, I somewhat feared
the movie. I had moved away from home
but not yet started college, and my footing in the world was tenuous enough
that I sought movies for escape, not so much to get all freaked out or
depressed. Finally, in 1988 I got my
roommate to rent it with me, along with a light romantic comedy to bring our
spirits back up afterward.
This
didn’t go so well. Unexpectedly, two
neighbor girls came over, decided to watch with us, and we ended up passing around
a big jug of Carlo Rossi red wine. Having
guests created an awkward dynamic, because one of the girls was gorgeous and my
roommate and I both wanted her bad, while the other was, God forgive me, pretty
homely. It might not have mattered if
nobody tried to bust a move, but the wine worked its magic and soon my roommate
was hitting on the homely girl. (There
wasn’t enough wine in the world to embolden my roommate or me to hit on the hot
one.) To make matters worse, both girls
were chain smokers. Yuck.
I
couldn’t focus on the movie. The girls
were talking too much, and the TV had poor, monaural sound, and I was
distracted by the spectacle of the homely girl wisely and persistently shutting
down my roommate (who’d have had no use for her the next day, it must be
said). The girls bailed on us toward the
end, and after the trial scene my roommate and I were depressed and becoming
maudlin. We turned to our second video
to cheer ourselves up, only to learn the hard way that “Sid & Nancy” is
anything but a light romantic comedy. The
seemingly helpful clerk at the video store clearly had a mischievous streak.
In
the intervening years I’ve wanted to rent “The Wall” again, especially after
DVDs came out and I bought a large, stereo TV.
(Note to peeping-blog-toms: it’s
not a gas plasma or LCD TV and there’s a rat’s nest of cable going out the back
of the entertainment center cabinet and back through, so it would be hard to
steal this TV, and you’ll find a much better set at either of our neighbors’
houses.) But watching “The Wall” would not
be a good way to unwind after a workday, and I couldn’t play it loud because of
the kids, so it’s never seemed like a good time to rent it. When I got the loaner DVD, I knew I’d finally
get my chance.
(On
a side note, this film has developed a reputation as something best watched
stoned. The IMDb bulletin board page for
“The Wall” is full of pointless posts to that effect. Were I interested in such activity, I had a
golden opportunity here, with some rock-star-grade prescription pharmaceuticals
left over from the most painful days of my convalescence. But that’s not my style. I have only ever used painkillers as
painkillers, and I want to be able to think—when I’m watching a movie and when
I’m not. Moreover, I wasn’t interested
in having this film freak me out again.)
The DVD
If
you’ve only rented “The Wall” on VHS, it’s time to watch it again just for the
picture and sound quality. There’s verbiage
on the case about Hi Definition film transfer and digitally remastered Dolby
Digital blah blah blah … suffice to say, the DVD looks and sounds great. The menus have a lot of little gimmicks like
Floyd music from other albums, interesting icons, etc. which are fun (though
the icons are slow to slide into place and become click-able, which gets a bit
tedious). Note that turning on subtitles
doesn’t show you the lyrics, but you can turn the lyrics on separately. There’s not much dialogue in this movie (Pink
has exactly three words), but you should turn subtitles on anyway to catch all
the dialogue coming out of Pink’s TV.
You can also tune your sound system through the DVD controls, which is
kind of cool.
I’m
normally not a big fan of DVD extras—a good movie should speak for itself—and I’m
especially wary of musicians talking about their work. I hated Sting’s 1985 documentary “Bring On the
Night,” which a one-star amateur reviewer accurately described as “self
indulgent even by Sting’s standards.” In
fact, that movie kind of ruined Sting’s music for me. This isn’t to say there aren’t great music
films out there, like “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” and “8 Mile,” but “The Wall”
is pretty heavy-handed to begin with and I didn’t want to hear a lot of blather
about alienation and metaphorical walls and so forth.
Happily,
nobody makes an ass of himself on the documentaries, of which there are
two. One is a documentary of the making
of the film, and the other is a fairly recent retrospective. Both are well worth watching. There’s quite a story behind this film: the creator of the album who wrote the screenplay,
Roger Waters, fought constantly with the director, Alan Parker, each trying to
shape the movie to his liking. Neither
ended up satisfied with the end product; Parker called it “the most expensive
student film ever made.”
There
is a certain amount of blather involved in the retrospective, but Waters and
Parker are thoughtful, articulate, and frank.
For example, Rogers recounts the creative process without casting
himself as some sort of sage: “Alan
Parker would ask me, ‘What’s this fucking song about?’ and I’d say, ‘You know,
I’m not really sure,’ and I’d dredge up stuff from my past, or sometimes from
other people’s pasts.” Parker, when asked
what the point of the movie is, does make a fairly grandiose speech about the
wall as a symbol, etc., but then he seems to catch himself, chuckling, “But
you’ll really have to ask Roger, it’s his deal.”
The
animator, Gerald Scarfe, offers some insight too and it’s fun to see how
dismissive he is of the movie as a whole.
An unexpected highlight for me is Peter Biziou, the cinematographer, who
revels in his every memory, with a wide smile and a sparkle in his eye that are
perfectly charming, especially given the dour reminisces of Parker and
Waters. I wish I could have Biziou for
an uncle.
There’s
some fun trivia to be gleaned from the documentaries. For example, we find out why “What Shall We
Do Now?” is in the movie but not on the album, which is something I’d wondered
about for thirty years, ever since I first saw the lyrics on the album jacket
for this nonexistent song. (Turns out
the song simply wouldn’t fit on the LP, and by the time they decided to cut it,
the liner notes had already been done.)
We learn why “Hey You” was cut from the movie (more on this later). We also get a funny story about the collect
call Pink places to his wife, with the befuddled long-distance operator—“It’s a
man answering, is there supposed to
be someone besides your wife there to answer?”—inadvertently salting Pink’s
wounds. To get that bit of dialogue,
they placed an actual call from the U.S. to England and recorded a random,
unsuspecting phone operator.
Here’s
one more example of the usefulness of the documentary. I’d gotten confused, this time around, about
where the big concert supposedly takes place.
Pink’s hotel room is in L.A., but so much of the movie is hallucination
anyway (including the whole fascist rally sequence) that I thought Pink might
have shape-shifted to London. I based this
notion on the scene in the stadium bathroom.
The sink there is clearly a British model, having separate spigots for hot and cold. Even if one of these
primitive sinks had found its way to an L.A. stadium, the security guard’s
expert technique of swishing up the cold and hot water in one fluid motion
clearly shows him to be a Brit:
The
mystery is resolved in a single sentence from the documentary: “For the
American stadium stuff we had to do, we went to Wembley Football Stadium.”
I’m
pretty sure there’s a running commentary you can turn on while you watch the
movie. I didn’t check this out because
frankly, this movie can become exhausting and there’s only so much of it I can
take at one time. I’ll save the
commentary for next time.
Two more videos
As
a kid, I was stoked when the movie included the song “What Shall We Do Now?” that
was mysteriously missing from the album.
At the same time, I was bummed that my very favorite song from the
album, “Hey You,” was excluded from the movie.
Good news: you can see “Hey You” on
the DVD as an extra, though the resolution isn’t very good, for complicated
reasons involving lost footage.
“Hey
You” is worth watching for three reasons.
First, it’s a great song. Second,
you can decide for yourself whether this number actually deserved to be cut
from the movie. (My opinion: like most of the scenes cut from movies, it
was cut for good reason.) Third, the
omission of this scene ended up changing the rest of the movie
significantly. After deciding to cut
this scene, Parker had the idea to re-use most of its video content elsewhere,
and he actually re-cut the entire rest of the movie to graft in the extra
footage. I think this is a major reason
the movie seems so disjointed at times, with strange visions (such as the riots)
that, to me, have as little to do with the movie as they did with “Hey
You.” We also get those screenfuls of
writhing worms that got their original context from this song and don’t make
much sense beyond it. I wish I could see
the version of the movie that came just before this odd backfilling of discarded
footage.
There’s
one last video on the DVD, which is the original rock video for “Another Brick
in the Wall, Part 2.” This video is fricking
lame.
It was clearly made on the cheap, with rampant recycling of footage and
animation. (Of course the footage is taken
from the movie, but within the rock video the same sequences are shown again
and again.) The song itself is easily
the weakest of the entire album, with its disco beat and silly lyrics, and the
video takes it to new lows in tedious repetition. But it’s worth watching, if for no other
reason than to fully appreciate how well-made the movie “Pink Floyd The Wall”
really is.
‘This
Roman Meal bakery thought you’d like to know.’dana albert blog Pink Floyd The Wall
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