The Wall
The mind can be a tricky thing to navigate. And something that is near impossible to protect. While you may think that there are people in this world who find it easier than some, most are suffering from the delusions of memory. However, for a select few, this is exaggerated beyond repair. A combination of terror mixed with the imbalance of chemicals, the past and present moulding into one with the future hallucinations tricking the reality and bending it around jiggered shards. These people are impossible to reach, as each moment they add another brick to the wall to shut people out.
Movies often over sensationalise it, draw illness around romance as though a kiss can cure the bleeding thoughts that. Pink Floyds- The Wall, which tackles the debilitating psyche of an overbearing stardom and troubled life, is possible one of the most accurate.
Starring Bob Geldolf, it is a musical adventure set to the music of Pink Floyds seminal classic album The Wall. Directed by Bugsy Malone director Alan Parker and written by frontman Roger Walters, Pink is a rock star who spends most of his time planted in a sofa, watching the television. He whittles his life away as he ponders over his life, the death of his father, the overprotectiveness of his mother, the loss of his wife through his adultery and the shell he has built up by the mistakes and regrets he has made. With the cartoons of political satirist Gerald Scarfe, The Wall is an excellent portrayal of madness in its most humanistic forms.
One of the main draws to The Wall will always be the music. One of the more famous of Pink Floyds back catalogue (rivalled only by Dark Side of the Moon,) The Wall and it’s movie go hand and hand with its concept. Although though Pink Floyd members and Parker subsequently fell out during film and the entire affair polarized the two masters of medium, the music is unforgettable astute in telling the tale of Pink. With classic tunes such as Another Brick In The Wall and Comfortably Numb, they speak of an aching person turning to drugs and shelter in order to protect themselves from pain. Helped with competely visceral vocals from Roger Waters and David Gilmore, The Wall smatters with anguish
A personal highlight will always be The Trial. Alongside the piano melody and Roger Waters different characters bouncing on screen, it is an indictment of guilt and persecution. It expresses how simple it is to blame someone for their own illness, or blame themselves, and the only way to counterattack this to expose them. It is also the moment in the film where Scarfes glorious and twisted animation come into full affect as images conflict and combine. It’s near theatrical but it still beats with this vein of sick realism.
Admirably, Park decide to make the movie filled with imagery to time almost impeccably with the music. Surrealist, there are scene of warfare, desolation and flitting scenes that increase the further down the rabbit hole you go. Every metaphorical brick that lands on the wall also drags you down to the pit of your soul. It is supposed to make you squirm uncomfortably, feel uneasy and make you suffer the way Pink is. It goes inside his mind, lays it bare and says see, this is accurate. A more difficult scene is when Pink imagines himself as a neo-nazi dictator (and funnily enough, this is a trait used by many while portraying mental illness.) The obliterating effects that he feels rockstars like him have on their fans and the chaos that ensues is terrifying. The flashing effects that Parker used (which may make people remember the war scenes) in Evita, are ferocious.
Pink Floyds – The Wall accurate because this is exactly how mental illness feels, a show reel of fantasies and an amalgamation of images that flit desperately throughout you. It comes from a place scrutinising the commercialisation of rock-stars and burns with the surrealist pictures of a brain cursed with depravity. It is compelling and quaking, sitting with you a long time after first watch, as you waste away with ponderings in your sofa.