Ricky Hanson Video: Pink Floyd The Wall
Pink is a depressed rock star who appears motionless and expressionless while remembering his father. Decades prior, his father is killed defending the Anzio beachhead during World War II in Pink’s infancy; Pink’s paranoid mother raises him alone. A young Pink discovers relics from his father’s military service and death. An animation depicts the war, showing that the death of the people was for nothing. Pink places a bullet on the track of an oncoming train within a tunnel, and the train that passes has children peering out of the windows wearing face masks.
At school, he is caught writing poems in class and is humiliated by the teacher, who reads a poem from Pink’s book. However, it is revealed that the poor treatment of the students is because of the unhappiness of the teacher’s marriage. Pink recalls an oppressive school system, imagining children falling into a meat grinder. He fantasises about the children rising in rebellion and burning down the school, throwing the teacher onto a bonfire. As an adult, Pink remembers his overprotective mother and his marriage. During a phone call, Pink realises that his wife is cheating on him. His traumatic experiences are represented as a “brick” in the wall he constructs around himself that divides him from society.
Pink returns to the hotel room with a groupie, only for him to destroy the room in a fit of violence, scaring her away. Depressed, he thinks about his wife and feels trapped in his room. He then remembers every “brick” of his wall. His wall is shown to be complete, and the film returns to the first scene.
Now inside his wall, Pink does not leave his hotel room and begins to lose his mind to metaphorical “worms”. He shaves all his body hair and watches television. The young Pink searches through the trenches of the war, eventually finding himself as an adult. Young Pink runs in terror and appears at a railway station, with the people demanding that the soldiers return home. Returning to the present, Pink’s manager finds him in his hotel room, drugged and unresponsive. A paramedic injects him to enable him to perform.
In this state, Pink thinks he is a dictator, and his concert is a fascist rally. His followers attack blacks, gays, and Jews. He then holds a rally in London. Marching hammers goose-step across ruins. Pink stops hallucinating and screams “stop”, deciding he no longer wants to be in the wall. He cowers in a bathroom stall, quietly singing to himself as a security guard walks past him. Pink, as a rag doll, is on trial for “showing feelings of an almost human nature”. His teacher and wife accuse him, while his mother tries to take him home. His sentence is “to be exposed before his peers,” and the judge gives the order to “tear down the wall!”. Following a prolonged silence, the wall is smashed and Pink screams. Children clean up a pile of debris and an empty Molotov cocktail.
Ricky Hanson