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Santa Francisca Romana School 

María Paula Murcia 

Eleventh A 

January 31, 2022 

Edward Moore 

Pink Floyd The Wall, Essay 

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On the Edge of Happiness 

“When lies become a reality, you numb 

yourself with drugs and TV” 

-Gorillaz 

In the flesh, is where we find ourselves becoming comfortably numb, wanting to say goodbye to this cruel world and those blue skies, thinking of the happiest days of our lives, asking our mother if she thinks they’ll drop the bomb. We become scared of the fact that we are all just empty spaces. Hey you, stop waiting for the worms, come outside of the wall and run like hell, because the show must go on and even though we are just another brick in the wall, we are all together in it, so please don’t leave me now. Is anybody out there understanding what is happening in their lives? This feels just like a trial, everyday we are being judged and we don’t even know it. All these thoughts wander around Pink Floyd’s mind, the fictional protagonist of the movie of Pink Floyd’s concept album “The Wall”. 

This artistic film combines a very complete critique of today’s society, with concept art, animation, a dark photographic representation of pain, and musical lines that guide you through the entire experience of this movie. It is a representation of the building of a metaphorical wall that contains every brick provided by life's sufferings. All these ideas are based on the mind of a nihilistic victim as a kid, teenager and adult that has been surrounded completely by these traumatic experiences in his life. All that baggage leads him to the creation of a fragmented personality and even a possible alter ego that becomes the ruler of his own dystopian society. This text will focus on the analysis of society portrayed through the eyes of Roger Waters’ visual and musical creation of Pink Floyd The Wall, comparing it to the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World. 

The creation of the album The Wall came principally from the mind and imagination of one of Pink Floyd's band members, Roger Waters. The album was produced during a band’s tour, when Roger felt consumed by stardom and being portrayed as a godlike figure by his fans, as it was described by Far Out magazine about his inspiration; “Even if the inspiration from it derived from a dark place, Waters channeled this energy into his art to

deliver a masterpiece that perfectly depicts the pitfalls of fame.” (Taysom, 2021). Wanting to show the dischanting reality of a denominated “rockstar” in this society, he began creating the image of Pinky, a modern anti-hero and someone who is struggling to find himself and self meaning. This album came out in 1979 and the film inspired by it came out in 1982. 

Brave New World, a dystopian social science novel, was written by the English author Aldous Huxley in 1932. This novel narrates the story of a society that believes in scientific ideas based on how to become “perfect” human beings. In this community, all kinds of emotions and individual development are regulated and conditioned for everyone since they are just babies. There, every individual belongs to everyone else, meaning that you are no longer able to have personal relationships, and all sentiments must be basically numbed. In comparison with The Wall, the two societies show how, from a young age, everyone in the world becomes conditioned and formed into what the ones who “know more” want them to be. An example of this is academic education, as shown on the song Another Brick in the Wall Pt.2. Children have to become conscious of the thought control in which they are being involved; Pink Floyd expressed this in the song; “We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control” (Waters, 1979). This song portrays the way in which although we might know how we are being controlled, we just end up being as messed up as everyone else in this world and our thoughts, even if they aren’t actually our own, no longer have any value. 

Apart from the criticism of the educational system, both the book and film show how inhuman people might become when they are exposed to the reality and hardness of life. When we become aware of the difficulties we have to face, we try to separate our consciousness and our feelings from those realities. This, sometimes, leads to derealisation, that stands for the feeling of alteration from what we perceive as real or what we think we are living in relation to the outside world. Therefore, both main characters in the film and novel show their process of understanding the difficult feeling of being separated from their real life as they experience complex situations that society brings to them. From that idea comes the concept of building up the wall with each of its bricks being one cause of separation from one’s feelings and emotions. 

On the other hand, 1984 is another dystopian novel written by George Orwell and published in 1949. This novel takes place in a civilization where a totalitarian government controls each individual by watching them through a technological device called a telescreen, which conceived them complete control and pure power over the masses. The story follows the life of Winston Smith, a frustrated worker of a low branch of what they called “The

Party”, a form of government shown in the novel. Everyone belonging to this community believed in an omnipresent leader called “Big Brother”, the one who was always watching everything. Like Pinky in The Wall, Winston feels imprisoned by all the ideas imposed by his surroundings and the fact that everything he does can have profound and dangerous consequences. Therefore, he has no escape from the government’s control or the veil that covers everyone’s eyes and that hides the reality of genuine happiness away from them. This loss of individuality and freedom of thought brought both Pinky and Winston to desperately search for the feeling of being understood in the middle of all that social chaos. As Winston states, “Perhaps one did not want to be loved as much as to be understood.” (Orwell, 1949, pg 318). Both fictional characters suffer from the lack of feelings and company. Because of their solitude and similarities, I believe that if Pink and Winston knew each other in another universe, they would have a strong friendship, they would understand each other very well, and be a part of the revolution against what is established by society. Both look for a way out of the crazy world portrayed in the art pieces and that becomes the basis of their similar personality development along the stories. 

We can see how in our current ways of living, the aspect of searching for a way to get away from our sufferings, like in the film and novel, can relate with the use of drugs or the immersion of our mind focused upon television, marketing, extreme consumption, alcohol and technology. We can see that the ideas that inspired both Roger Waters and George Orwell to produce their critical point of view in their works, is nowadays our true reality as it has been for many years. We build our metaphorical wall around us that separates our feelings from ourselves as well as we are being watched everyday and used as a product for powerful people to become richer and gain more power, giving them the opportunity to consume greater parts of our thoughts and the chance to lead our lives in any way they want. 

This relates to the philosophical Critical Theory, which provides a new view of how we are being controlled throughout our civilization’s history by totalitarianism in any economic and political systems such as capitalism and socialism. 

A theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of” human beings. Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. (Horkheimer 1972 b [1992, 246] as cited by Bohman, 2021).

This idea opposes the separation of the human being from reality and states that all knowledge depends on the practices of the time being and on experience. It also analyses profoundly the society's characteristics and relates that there is always a changing justification for the human’s need of seeking for a greater experience that can separate their existence from the decadence of the world we live in. As we can not bear to suffer, we try to liberate our minds by not relating with our feelings. This is a reality we see in our life, the film and the novel, we justify our absence of self realization through drugs, television, religion and technology. 

In conclusion, The Wall, 1984 and Brave New World are a representation of how our current society is always on the edge of happiness, between the thin line of psychological control of the masses and being deceived by the promises of the leaders. Our society is partially ruled by oppression and the separation of feeling from reality. Will there be a day when we can finally be outside the wall? We can only hope that the thin ice we walk on doesn’t break and that someday our minds stop being empty spaces.

 

References 

Boham. J. (2021). “Critical Theory”. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) 

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/critical-theory/ Orwell, G. (1949, June 8). 1984. Secker & Warburg. 

Taysom, J. (2021, March 23). The horrific incident that inspired Roger Waters to write Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. Far Out Magazine. 

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/roger-waters-spit-fan-inspired-pink-floyd-the-wal l/ 

Waters, R. (1979) Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 [Recorded by Pink Floyd]. On The Wall [Album]. Harvest and Columbia records.