Cinema
Off the wall
Peter Ackroyd
The Wall ('AA', Empire Leicester Square)
As soon as the film begins, one's ears are assailed by the sound of Pink Floyd, screeching and roaring like a thou- sand jet engines in an echo-chamber. Strange, how impotent loud music can be. 'The wall' itself is a symbol of non- communication — quite appropriate under the circumstances, but here applied to the barriers which the hero of the film, a rock star, has built around himself. Bob Geldof, himself a singer, plays the star. It is not a difficult role: he simply has to look bored and lonely. That is, after all, how pop singers are supposed to look, since their 'images' are marketed to resemble as closely as possible the images which most adolescents have of themselves.
But The Wall goes one step further: it has been devised by Roger Waters, yet another rock musician, and is supposed to demonstrate that pop stars really are bored and lonely. What is more, they are anxious and misunderstood. What is more they are important enough to be taken as significant emblems of our culture. And so, as Mr Geldof flicks from television channel to television channel in his hotel room, he slips into a manic reverie in which the images of his past life return in phantasmagoric array. The film, which has no script, presents a series of memories and hallucinations: his father dead in the trenches of France, his lonely childhood, his terrible marriage, his fame his disillusionment, his fear of madness.
The narrative, however, is really only a vehicle for a number of self-indulgent fan- tasies in which sound and spectacle over- compensate for the lack of meaning. The film is conceived rather in the manner of contemporary 'video' performances, where
the pop singer pretends to be Hitler, or a harlequin, it doesn't matter which. But although The Wall is clearly aimed at a teenage market, it aspires to higher things. It is, in fact, importunate in its claims; in- stead of remaining at the level of mindless fantasy, it introduces passages of realism and social comment. We see, for example, soldiers fighting and dying on the battle- fields of the second world war but they are rendered merely picturesque, a visual shorthand of the pop star's preoccupations.
Since the film has no script, it relies en- tirely upon song-lyrics in order to make its point. But they are absurd where they are not meretricious: The general gave thanks As the forward tanks Held back the enemy ranks For a while . . .
or words to that effect. There was a time when rock music was designated as a form of 'counter culture' but it is really pre- cultural: history is reduced to a nursery rhyme, and an image of narcissistic self- regard distorts and cheapens everything that it touches.
It was obviously a hard assignment for the director, Alan Parker. With no script and no coherent narrative, he employs a technique of rapid montage, yoking together a number of disparate scenes and hoping that something will emerge by the end. Children are turned into sausages by malevolent schoolmasters, youths con- gregate at a fascist rally, maggots crawl around on a plate. The form of the film is so attenuated that it can really only sustain itself by scenes of violence and brutality, scenes which in their emptiness manifest the hollowness of the film's conception. After all, we are dealing only with cliches: society is based on violence, it forces people to con- form, individual aspirations are crushed by commercial pressures, rock stars always try to kill themselves, etcetera etcetera. The idea is to create some vision of ultimate hor- ror — fears of nuclear holocaust lurk uneasily in the background — but what we get is Top of the Pops whimsicality mas- querading as important statement. One doesn't know which is meant to be worse: the horror of war or the horror of schoolmasters.
Gerald Scarfe, for reasons best known to himself, has provided animation sequences; rather in the manner that contemporary pop music produces hyped-up versions of 'the classics', so here he imitates Blake, Beardsley and Dali. You name it, and he will caricature it: the result is a kind of wine-bar horror, horror as chic. And yet it would be wrong to single him out for blame, since the whole film is suffused with meretricious brutality and second-hand im- ages. The mood is simply one of adolescent nihilism, with ranks of children singing 'We don't want no education. We don't want no thought control'. It is paradoxical, I sup- pose, that a film based on the premise of non-communication should itself have nothing to communicate.
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