When I sit down in The Virginia tonight, wife on one side, and adult friends on the other, I suspect that the way I view Pink Floyd The Wall, the film that kicks off this year’s Ebertfest, might be a touch different than the last time I saw it.
Rewind to 1995. I’d just started my first band, and I was obsessed with taking drugs — grass, mushrooms, whippets and nicotine, mostly — and listening to as much Pink Floyd as I possibly could. My grades were better than ever, and I was finally starting to attract the attention of some of the second tier hotties in the school post-braces, but none of that really mattered. I just wanted to mess my brain up, watch things melt from the drugs, and listen to Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason. Pink Floyd. They were the best band I’d ever heard.
By the time I decided to watch Pink Floyd The Wall — Roger Waters’ rock opera was written in 1979 and produced into a film three years later — I’d already taken mushrooms a few times. I had great times on mushrooms. No regrets here. None whatsoever. In controlled environments, mushrooms are tremendous. Yes. I am advocating for decriminalization. There. I said it. But that’s a different article.
I had listened to the album The Wall plenty, as well. And I knew the plot: rockstar goes batshit crazy after alienating his wife and allowing his father’s death in World War II to consume him while trying to “tear down” his own psychological “wall.” Well, that’s the short version anyhow.
If you are looking for a preview about the movie, there are countless places you can find it. Just even reading the wikipedia page should suffice, honestly. It’s truly a great story, and while the album stands the test of time and sobriety, for me and most people, the film is something of a different organism.
I know this because, in the last 13 years, I haven’t ever sat down and watched it again. I remember it pretty well actually, considering the fact that the floor was breathing and that Bob Geldof started to look a bit like a Klingon throughout the film.
Those were good mushrooms.
The film was alive, as are most things when on mushrooms. And I could hear sounds in the music that I’d never heard before. The B3 Hammond that Wright plays on during both “In the Flesh?” and “In the Flesh” just popped out in ways I’d never noticed. To this day, I still hear it above all sounds in that song, despite the fact that it was mixed deliberately to lay under the wildly dramatic and heroic Gilmour guitar riff. I got that out of the film, and the drugs, not just the music.
But something about the film makes it hard to want to watch again. It’s not a happy tale. And like most of Pink Floyd, it’s just a little bit more fun and interesting if you are taking it in while you’ve been taking drugs.
I don’t really do them any more, the drugs or the band. Things are different now, and I am not the kind of fella to keep chasing a dragon; I know I won’t be able to experience these things for the first time again, so I may as well move on to different things. Despite how cheesy and psychedelic it sounds, it’s all about perception.
Tonight will be the first time since I was a 17 year old boy that I will have seen Pink Floyd The Wall in its entirety. And it will be the first time that I will have seen it without having ingested psilocybin mushrooms beforehand. As an adult at age 30, and as someone who hasn’t taken mushrooms in well over eight years, I am looking forward to watching it with a new perspective with regards to what it means — not just on the whole, but to me as an individual.
Perhaps one of the reasons that Waters’ magnum-opus–tour-de-force was and still is so successful is simply because the story of Pink Floyd, the lead character in The Wall, can so easily be applied to our own lives. Oh sure — we’re not all rock stars with fathers who died in dramatic fashion during World War II. But we’re all constantly dealing with personal demons. And that’s really what The Wall is all about. Do we allow ourselves to be consumed by our fears, or do we actively find ways to combat them with healthy relationships and behaviors?
Before Pink Floyd and drugs, for me, there was baseball and dreams of playing in the Majors. I was on the high school team, and I was pretty good. But my whole first season, something didn’t feel right. All of my teammates, except for two, were raised in Republican families. Clinton was in office serving his first term, but Newt Gingrich was about to run off with the 1994 midterm elections. There was a divide on my team: three of us liberals and then, everyone else. For what it’s worth, of those two friends — one of them ended up becoming the bassist in my band of seven years with whom I am still in touch, and the other is my very best friend to this day.
I made my choice between those groups, and I know that for years and years, like lots of teenagers, I was a drug-addled kid looking for attention from wherever I could get it. And certainly, while some of those notions still exist, it’s been interesting to see how I’ve changed over the years. A good woman replaced the drugs. A career in presenting live music replaced performing it myself. Interest in following college sports replaced playing baseball. Red wine replaced mushrooms. I still smoke pot. Just not very often. And only when it makes sense.
Just the same, it will be interesting to see how The Wall has changed as well. The world is different now, and while the concepts and action in the film remain intact — especially on this version, the last 70mm print on loan from the British Film Institute — the way we might see it 28 years later will no doubt be different. It’s dated. Anything developed in the early ’80s has a certain feeling to it. It was one of the more intense and tumultuous periods of recent global history; Thatcher was tied up in Great Britain’s last grasp of their empire, and a story like The Wall reflects that uncertainty and elderly pain that can only come from years of abuse. I was just a toddler when the film came out, and I still couldn’t tell you much about British politics in the ’80s, but for some reason, I feel like I remember that era like it was my own. I think my love for Pink Floyd and The Wall has something to do with that.
Remember, it’s all about perception.
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Pink Floyd The Wall kicks off Roger Ebert’s Ebertfest tonight at 7 p.m. Tickets are $12 for the general public, and $10 for students and seniors. The rush ticket line will open 30 minutes before the screening begins.