Object #57 - Hammers - Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)

Dir. Alan Parker

Pink Floyd: The Wall manages the not-so-easy feat of adaption from one medium to another. Even more impressive is that it adapts a concept album, a bold and not often undertaken sub-genre of music, and manages not only to retain the spirit of the album itself, but enhances it. The film has gone on to become cult, but it would be cynical to pin this longstanding following and appreciation as only an extension of association with the Pink Floyd album of the same name. Obviously the two are inseparable, and yet, the film seems to have taken precedent over the album itself. It's impossible to discuss The Wall in person, or find discussions online, without someone using the film as a support for their interpretation, or at the very least as a complementary addition to their take on the subject matter. 

Take www.thewallanalysis.com, the first and most popular link if you search for an analysis of the album (and trust me, to a first time listener, it's inevitable) - it discusses both the album and the film synonymously, and in doing so suggests to anyone who visits the site, that listening to the album alone will not give you all the answers you seek. You can, and indeed should, analyse the album as a distinct entity, but if you want to see the big-screen, Floyd (or more accurately Waters) approved and produced interpretation, then the film needs to be seen. Yes, death of the author is a thing, but the beauty comes here in the contributions of director Alan Parker, who it seems to me brings his own twist into the realization of the music to screen (alongside animator Gerald Scarfe).

You can't build a wall without tools, and hammers are the tools that shape rocker Pink's (Bob Geldof ; Kevin McKeon) wall. The eponymous Wall, simply put, is a mental barrier that Pink has formed due to pivotal events, people, and concepts experienced throughout not only his life, but those of the generation before him. The entire film is a dive into the subconscious of Pink, and in it we find domineering mothers, absent fathers, abusive teachers who value order and obedience above free thought and expression, soldiers, and (in one interpretation) fascist fantasies. Each of these weave their way throughout the album, but what the film achieves by the addition of image and editing, is a more effective translation of the turmoil of Pink's mind. 

Take for example the famous Another Brick in The Wall sequence, where young school-children are conveyor-belted into a meat grinder, masked to appear grotesque and uniform. The overt parallel here is that these same children will fight and die in the meat-grinder of future wars - just as obedient as soldiers as they are schoolchildren. The stern teachers akin to a drill instructor - commanding, harsh, and dismissive of individuality, such as young Pink's poems. The song is powerful and conveys these themes alone, but that meat grinder adds so so much, linking it to mechanization, hearkening back to Victorian child-exploitation in factories, and to the future, where technology transforms our world. The film is worth creation for that sequence alone.

Some criticize the film for being too repetitive in the display of what formed Pink's Wall, but even if I agree a little, it's simple to defend this choice - by repeating the same images and concepts (such as the faceless masks re-occuring at Pink's fascist rally-cum-rock show) over and over and in different permutations, we feel what Pink feels. Anyone who has some self-loathing, and lets be honest who doesn't in some form or another, knows that it isn't one thing but multiple things at once, usually lying under the surface. The death of Pink's father is the core of his shattered soul - soldiers are a fixation of his, as he views them on television, has 'flash-backs' to child-hood where he seeks his father among returning soldiers, and as mentioned the parallels of the school-kids and the fascist followers of Pink himself. 

I'm going to have to focus this on hammers specifically or you'll be reading for hours, this is the nature of this film, one thing leads to another and despite the short run-time it is packed with things to analyse and discuss, to the point where I'd circularly discuss everything eventually. Hammers appear in Pink's visions of the world-war battlefield, as they link barbed wire across a beach - the wire itself a defensive wall designed to harm those who try and enter, which ties to the final track of the album Outside The Wall, the culmination of the story where we finally get a glimpse at the outsiders circling Pink and where the message of the film is brought home: "It's not easy banging your heart against some bugger's wall". 

The goose-stepping hammers are another iconic image from the film, genius in artistic expression, as they simultaneously: i) convey the destructive nature of war via anthropomorphism

 ii) Use a building tool as symbols of destruction, something that is inherent in the hammer itself as a real-world tool.

and iii) Are a visual endpoint of Pink's lashing out and reformation as a fascist in response to the weight of his Wall. The tool that built the wall is now used in the spirit of the Wall - to cause suffering and pain.

The In The Flesh sequence is laden with the hammer imagery, from the symbol of Pink's fascist regime emblazoned on his followers' and his own uniform, on banners on the walls, on the t-shirts of his choir, and is used as a cross-armed salute, a symbolic gesture of the values of this regime - strength, unity, and destructive creation of a new order - one where queers, coons, weed-heads, and people with spots are all ostracized.

This is Waters' finest moment as far as I'm concerned. He turns his experience with spitting on fans in god-like power on stage during Pink Floyd tours, to brutally hammer (haha) home the horrific end-point that this wall of pain causes Pink - he becomes a parallel of the dictator responsible for World War II, and ergo the death of his father, and thus the origin of all his pain. History will repeat if the wall is not broken, no matter the effectiveness of this rock-star-come-Fuhrer's regime on the country itself - we see older men and women close their curtains on the fascists, dampening their effect as hallmarks of true change, but tell that to the woman raped in the car, and the foreigners pulled from the homes as their property is destroyed.

 Actually, I say foreigners, what I really mean is non-white people. We assume they are foreigners, as clearly Pink's followers do, as all they see is skin colour as grounds to harm and discriminate. We don't know if the family shown have lived in Britain (and make no mistake it is Britain, even if it isn't named) for a few years, or for generations. In a beautiful display of attention to detail, Parker has in the final scene of the film, a young black girl move milk bottles into an overturned milk container, as white boys move rubble to a toy construction truck, and pour the alcohol out of a molotov cocktail. By including the black girl Parker conveys that everyone suffered in the Blitz (as the imagery calls back to), no matter the skin colour, thus undermining the beliefs that Pink's followers act on, and that the shared wish to return to pre-WW2 innocence by performing acts of racism is entirely misjudged. I mean this is obvious, but tell that to 2016 Britain who seemed to value thinly-veiled racist/intolerant insularity over acceptance and diversity. [Ed. I could go further on this but I'll leave it to you to watch that In The Flesh/Run Like Hell/Waiting For The Worms sequence and tell me you don't see the horrific endpoint of British nationalism.] 

The factory setting of the Another Brick In The Wall sequence also has an undercurrent of construction and hammers, as the rules and lessons of the teachers are hammered into the children. The teachers hammer the children with canes, believing that pain is the almighty teacher, even though we are informed that this is truly a sick perversion to get back at their domineering wives, who in turn control them - shown in animation as a fat naked puppeteer, controlling the teacher to hit the children. The end message is quite simply that pain is cyclical - as one generation harms another - directly here in the education system, and indirectly via their absence (Pink's father), the pain will create bricks in a wall that will form the basis for a new lashing out of pain via facism - construction and destruction in one handy tool. 

By breaking the wall, Pink is set free, and one interpretation suggests that the opener In The Flesh? (note the question mark) is told from the point of view of a Pink who warns his concert-going adoring fans of the danger of their fanaticism. The euphoria of the music will lead them, Pied Piper-like to their doom, ideologically and physically as they will die in conflict like the solider of old, leaving new trauma for future generation, hammers to build new walls. The final image of the film - the boy pouring the alcohol out of a molotov cocktail suggests that peace comes only in the ruins of the wall - we have to tear down our walls and move on.