Let’s Dive Right Into The Wall, Side Four
“You have already lost.”
— Elizabeth Sandifer, to Vox Day
X. The Trial
After the god damned marching cell phones, Taylor is spat back out into the real world, but only has about a minute to breathe before Doug is sucked into a creepy, surreal CGI universe (courtesy Sam Fennah⁴⁴) where the review comes the closest to making a point, accusing the characters and worlds of being insufficiently developed.⁴⁵ This is, however, only a position one can seriously adopt if, like Doug, one has absolutely no idea how symbolism works.
⁴⁴ I’ve heard mixed things about Fennah’s CGI work here. I personally think it’s far and away the most well-made portion of the review on a technical level, but I can’t tell if this sequence is good or not on its own because my sense of what’s good and what isn’t has been so thoroughly screwed up by the entire rest of this review. I can say, however, that their rendition of The Trial is simultaneously the laziest and most earsplittingly horrible of all the song parodies on here. Lucy!Judge’s part in the review is lifted almost directly from the original, with only a few lyrical changes, and let’s be real, when you’re evoking the Judge you need to sound fleshy and booming, like a giant talking asshole. Lucy Lakemaker does not sound like a giant talking asshole.
I’m not going to say a whole lot about the characters themselves because I don’t know much about them, although I gather that they all have histories and backstories and so forth. I’m just going to take it on faith that these critters are in a position to complain about some other universe being undercooked, whether or not those criticisms are correct.
⁴⁵ It’s tempting to describe the Fennah sequence as more accurately reflecting Doug’s actual feelings about the film; especially when taking into account that the criticisms he’d been levelling at The Wall were somehow even more half-baked than usual, implying it’s more what we expect him to say about a film than anything else. And yet, at the end, when Taylor angrily demands to know how Doug really feels about the film, he still says it’s “a little full of itself.” This makes the Fennah sequence feel less like a come-to-Jesus moment about the film’s merits and more like a desperate attempt to say something, anything polysyllabic about it, regardless of whether or not it gels with the rest of the review.
So, let’s begin. In The Trial, one of the film’s signature animated sequences, Pink finally realizes that it was not his mother, or his teachers, or his wife, or anyone else who was responsible for isolating himself from the world. He was not forced to build the wall. It was only him, and now he has to face the music. The sequence is set in an arena resembling a surreal version of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, where the spitting incident originally happened. A heavily stylized courtroom scene organically constructs itself, built like a theater stage, whose centerpiece is a Gigeresque judge’s bench made out of bones. The Prosecutor, a caricature of an amoral barrister, enters and calls three witnesses to the stand.
The Schoolmaster is a vaguely hammer-shaped marionette controlled by a large scary woman looming on top of the wall. This is the angry Scotsman we encountered in The Happiest Days of Our Lives and Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II, a man who firmly believes in the meat grinder of the British educational system because, as it turns out, if the kids are faceless drones they won’t start any trouble. The woman pulling the strings is his wife, a psychopathic Brünhilde who is brutally abusive to him when he’s at home. The Schoolmaster is trapped in a cycle of abuse; as his wife beats him, so does he beat the kids that are under his charge.⁴⁶
⁴⁶ Bonus: the Schoolmaster gets two (2) songs of his very own on The Final Cut, detailing his personal history and his motivations even further. That seems worth mentioning, as long as we’re arguing that Waters doesn’t flesh out his characters enough.
The Wife constantly shapeshifts: she first appears as a snake, who then morphs into a scorpion, who then morphs into a cadaverously thin fire-haired woman whose torso and limbs are contorted to unnatural angles, slithering out from under the wall and piercing Pink in his most vulnerable places. She’s also a reminder that Pink’s viewpoint is not authoritative: he might perceive his wife as mean, vindictive, and duplicitous…but ultimately she just wants to be loved. (“You shoulda talked to me more often than you did…”) Instead she got Pink, a downright monstrous husband who was emotionally distant at best and abusive⁴⁷ at worst, and who would always go off on tour and get high and trash hotel rooms and fuck oceans of groupies, leaving a trail of misery and heartache wherever he goes. No wonder she’s bitter. She was perfectly justified in cheating on him during Young Lust. She’s even justified in asking the judge if she can take him round back to finish him off.
⁴⁷ If, when listening to Don’t Leave Me Now, you lost all sympathy for Pink when he pleaded to his wife, “you know how I need you to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night,” I sure as hell don’t blame you. And, well, this underscores how Pink is merely using his shitty childhood as an excuse for his shitty behavior in adulthood, and how important it is that he realize he alone is responsible for the barriers he’s erected between himself and the world around him. Lots of people have abusive personal histories similar to Pink’s and don’t become abusers themselves. If you’re going to credibly argue that The Wall really is all about some rich guy’s manpain at the expense of every other character in the story, you build that argument off of lines like this, and it’s telling that’s what Doug didn’t do.
The Mother explodes out of the wall and comes swooping in like the airplane that killed her husband. She was never quite able to process the loss, and so is extremely overprotective of her son, terrified that something similarly awful might happen to him. She morphs into a stereotypical British housewife, smothering little Pink in her huge doughy arms, before finally becoming the wall itself, briefly encircling Pink entirely, becoming suffocating and claustrophobic. The wall thus both reflects the mother’s overbearing personality, and reminds us of its genesis in the dysfunctional relationship between her and her son.
The Judge is literally a giant ass, because he’s a big looming authority figure, and which end do big looming authority figures talk out of. The desires that have animated Pink for so long have finally turned on him, and so the Judge is simultaneously the singular manifestation of Pink’s darkest impulses (numerous characters address him as “Worm, Your Honour,” and is depicted as a giant worm before he becomes the asshole we know and love), and yet is also the character that talks the most sense. He recognizes that Pink’s behavior has harmed a lot of people and is suitably disgusted by it (“the way you made them suffer, your exquisite wife and mother, fills me with the urge to defecate”⁴⁸), and also realizes the only way Pink can properly atone for his numerous, numerous sins is through tearing down the wall and finally exposing himself to the world, naked and vulnerable, warts and all.⁴⁹
Pink himself is a lifeless, featureless rag doll, because he has no control over any of this and can only sit there and take it.
⁴⁸ Go on, Judge! Shit on him!
⁴⁹ Worth mentioning that for as much as Pink recognizes deep down that tearing down the wall is necessary, it’s also absolutely terrifying. As oppressive as the wall can be, let’s not forget that it was originally built as a form of security, a way for him to isolate himself from the parts of the world that be blames for fucking him up throughout his life. Facing the world also means having to deal with those same forces again, and more critically, facing the consequences of his actions. That’s gonna be rough for him even as he comes out the other side a better person.
Point is, we know more about every single character in The Trial sequence than you’d think from the brief time they actually appear on screen. These characters are very fleshed out and brimming with psychological complexity. Doug Walker has, in essence, confused brevity with shallowness, and thus do we get some of the most incredibly un-self-aware lines of dialogue in the whole review. As Lucy Lakemaker leads Doug through Fennah’s subconscious, she accuses the film of “[prioritizing] style over substance, showcasing a bunch of weird creatures and worlds, [with] not a drop of intellectual development,” all criticisms that accurately describe the review itself.
As if it wasn’t already clear why this review resembles those remarks: that this sequence references the characters in The Trial in only the vaguest of terms betrays Team Critic’s total ignorance of what the film is about. There’s no mention of the plot. No conception of how the animated sequences relate to each other. No understanding of who these characters are supposed to be and their purpose in the story. No indication that anyone involved in this review even tried to engage with The Wall on its own terms, or did anything more than watch it once and go “this is pretentious WWII manpain shit” and call it a day.
It’s particularly galling because you could spend like five minutes doing research on The Wall online and come up with something at least vaguely similar to what I said up there. It’s not that I’m so smart, or that I’m doing something here that Doug Walker can’t. I didn’t go to film school either; I have about as much formal training on this stuff as he does. I just genuinely love The Wall and am trying to do right by it. Doug Walker, meanwhile, is actively refusing to engage with the film, even when appreciating it on a surface level.
It’s not hard to see why, and it’s not just his disdain for anything that forces him to use his brain rearing its ugly head again. The Trial is, fundamentally, Pink’s reckoning with himself, his damage, and the way he’s damaged others. If Doug Walker wanted to truly demonstrate that he knows what The Wall is about, then he needs to put himself on trial. He would have to take a good long look at himself and the way that his actions — and, by extension, Rob’s and Michaud’s — effectively ruined his company and his reputation. It would have to be unflinching; he could not make any excuses or otherwise try to minimize his own role in Channel Awesome’s implosion. And he would have to follow that up with sincere attempts to make things right, whatever that would look like, if indeed such a thing is even possible. A good Doug Walker review of The Wall would have to be the single rawest, most visceral, most gut-wrenching video he’d ever make.
It goes without saying that such a video could never get made, because Michaud effectively owns Doug’s career, and the only people Doug currently has are the people who helped put him in this position in the first place.⁵⁰ No one at Channel Awesome would let him create anything that would be a serious, honest self-interrogation, because if he publicly put himself on trial the way Pink did, what remains of his professional and personal life would be destroyed.⁵¹ Channel Awesome would effectively cease to exist, and Doug would have no source of income and would have to start from scratch again while hoping Michaud doesn’t lure away all his viewers with whoever becomes the Nostalgia Critic after him. That’s simply too steep a price for clawing back some small shred of moral integrity, and to be honest he’s so far gone I’m not convinced he could release anything that would successfully communicate genuine remorse. Let’s see what he did instead.
⁵⁰ Interestingly, this implies that Doug is in a more hopeless position than Pink was. The album’s final track, Outside the Wall, implies that Pink somehow still had people in his corner even has he hit his bottom. Doug, meanwhile, has successfully driven away anyone who could have helped him. He has no one.
⁵¹ Compare Spoony’s three-part review of Ultima IX, released in 2012, right as he was in the middle of a severe mental breakdown that damaged his relationships with his colleagues and indirectly cost him his spot on Channel Awesome. The subtext of what was going on his life while he was making it is palpable, as that particular Ultima IX review is the sort of psychologically nightmarish thing you only make when you are coming terminally fucking unglued. It’s also far and away the best thing Spoony’s ever made, the apotheosis of the angry review medium in general, very difficult to watch all the way through, and extremely not worth the personal cost. Anything Doug would make that would both do justice to The Wall and account for all the harm he caused over the course of Channel Awesome’s life would have to be a full order of magnitude more uncomfortable than that.
XI. Spongebob Squarepants
I said before that Corey Taylor has no role in this review beyond wandering confusedly through it, presumably mirroring the audience’s confusion because this thing is mirroring The Wall and The Wall was confusing (geddit). I lied, slightly. At the end he calls out the Critic for not clearly articulating his thoughts on The Wall, indignantly shouting, “it’s a REVIEW!” At which point Doug’s like, yeah, it was all right, whatever.
I can see what Doug is shooting for here. For as much as I’ve spent this whole thing describing what Doug made as a “review,” it’s actually more of an homage to The Wall, mixed in with typical Nostalgia Critic snark, than a straight review dryly discussing the film’s pros and cons.⁵² It wasn’t meant to be a review in the way that Corey Taylor as the audience surrogate would understand it, so if your reaction to the previous thirty-odd minutes of lunacy was the same as Corey’s…that’s kind of the point.
⁵² Again, I’ve not been following Doug’s work in any capacity since he brought the Nostalgia Critic back, but from what I understand it’s been trending in this direction for a while. One could describe this as the climax of his new (“new”) reviewing style, but that’s an argument I’ll leave for someone made of stronger stuff than I.
Here’s the problem, though: you can get away with spending most of the “review” not talking about the thing you’re reviewing if you’re using the thing as a way to make a broader point about something. Elizabeth Sandifer has always been very good at this. Her earliest blog project was a chronicle of every NES game in alphabetical order, but since a shockingly large percentage of the official NES library is aggressively mediocre, she quickly pivoted to using each game as a jumping-off point for exploring esoteric histories and theories and flights of fancy. Some examples: Bubble Bobble is about her sexual awakening. Days of Thunder is actually writing advice. Godzilla demonstrates dialectics. Defender II and Defender of the Crown explore Kabbalah and Tarot. Gradius is about the grinding nightmare of grad school. Bucky O’Hare is about the spiraling cosmic horror of rabbits. That’s the sort of thing you have to shoot for in order to get away with being oblique or elliptical about your review’s subject.
Doug Walker doesn’t do that, thinking the format of the review is its own justification. It isn’t. Instead of something actually thought-provoking about the nature of fiction, film, or adaptations,⁵³ we conclude with the Slipknot guy performing not even a song from his own band, but the freaking Spongebob theme. Because that’s what passes for humor in Dougworld nowadays. After this, the review finally, mercifully ends, and we are free at last. (Well, you are. I’m stuck here writing this damn thing.)
⁵³ Again: the Fennah Trial sequence tries, but it’s undercut by its incredible ignorance of the film.
This was meant to be a masterpiece. This isn’t a masterpiece. This is just as much of a vacuous nothing as any other Nostalgia Critic review, one more milestone in Doug’s decline as a video reviewer and Channel Awesome’s decline as a company. There will be moments just as humiliating as this one pockmarking Channel Awesome’s future until the day it folds. This was, quoth Shakespeare, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I’m only writing this big long nightmare of an essay because The Wall is one of my favorite albums ever and seeing Doug butcher it like this took a chunk out of my soul.
I wish it hadn’t. I wish I could have just laughed it off or dismissed it with some off-the-cuff snark the way everyone else did. Instead, once I learned about this review it colonized my brain to the point where it was all I could think about for days afterward, because I could sense that this thing was more than just yet another poorly-informed Nostalgia Critic joint, that this was an unmitigated disaster that both in execution and in choice of source material oddly resonated with Doug Walker’s own history, and that it would require a proper deep dive to make full sense of. This is an exorcism, not just of the Nostalgia Critic but also of this whole sorry chapter of my personal life and of internet history. When I am done with this and it’s loosed upon the world, I want Doug Walker to be dead to me.
Here, then, is the final banishment.
Let me be clear, Doug, in case it wasn’t obvious already: you are Pink. You have, through your mismanagement of your company and poor treatment of your colleagues, constructed a wall of your own, separating you from everyone else in your line of work. No one out there gives a shit about you anymore. The only people in your life now are the people who enable your delusions of grandeur as you comb through the ruins of your company, convinced that none of this was your fault. And lest we forget, they don’t prop you up because they genuinely support you as a person; they keep you around because, even after all that’s happened, you’re somehow still profitable to them. Just pump you full of metaphorical amphetamines once a week and turn you loose in the studio, and watch as the skin peels off your body while you rage in front of the cameras. Dance, Dougie, dance. Good boy.
But know this: there will come a time — I don’t know when — when the well runs dry and you won’t be worth winding up and letting go anymore. It’s going to happen eventually; Channel Awesome has been stagnating for a long time, even before Change the Channel, and one can only tread water for so long. What will you do, Doug, when they can’t wring any more money out of you? What will you do when it turns out Malcolm and Tamara and that woefully unsoundproofed studio just aren’t worth the expense? What will you do when the parasites that are Rob and Michaud finally bleed you dry?
Here I would invite you to wake up and realize what you really are, but the truth is, Doug, you’ve already asked yourself if you’ve been guilty all this time, and you’ve decided you aren’t. You’ve already been exposed before your peers, multiple times, and nothing’s changed. You will never tear down your wall. So now we must leave you, a limp rag doll, with empty black sockets for eyes and a mouth grotesquely pried open in a permanent scream, slumped alone against your wall, as the worms drill deeper and deeper into your brain, until the inevitable rush of history consigns you back to anonymity for good.
XII. Outside the Wall
By the time of To Boldly Flee, Channel Awesome, for all its years as the premier internet reviewer network, believed itself to encompass the entire world of internet reviewing. So whether or not it was their intention, the script for that movie implies that when Channel Awesome ended, so would the concept of internet reviewing itself. In other words, Channel Awesome could not imagine a universe without Channel Awesome in it.
And yet, that’s what happened. Channel Awesome built their entire brand on AVGN-esque angry reviews, and no one makes AVGN-esque angry reviews anymore.⁵⁴ Some producers have abandoned making videos entirely and moved on to livestreaming or podcasts. Those who still do reviews generally maintain friendlier personas now, with outright anger only reserved for special occasions. Others, like Lindsay, Kyle, and Dan Olson, have become video essayists. And then there are people like Todd in the Shadows who clearly spring from the angry-review tradition but who’ve since carved out little niches for themselves, where no one’s doing quite the same things they are.
In addition, there’s a bunch of internet reviewers who’ve never been on Channel Awesome and who may or may not have fit in there. Jenny Nicholson methodically dissects Disney films and theme park attractions. Anthony Fantano and Mark Grondin, who draw from radio and text respectively, review new music releases. Lazy Game Reviews looks back on retro computer hardware and software. RebelTaxi looks at animated shows from the late 90s and early 2000s (and, for the record, has some of the best graphic design chops in the business). And Quinton reviews basically anything that strikes his fancy. He’s been doing a lot of Garfield stuff lately, but he’s also tackled some things related to Channel Awesome, most recently a video about To Boldly Flee, which takes a completely different approach to this whole mess through prying the anniversary movies’ ultra-cheap student-film aesthetic out of CA’s cold dead fingers. Where this thing is a disavowal, To Boldly Suck is a reclamation.
⁵⁴ To me the point at which angry reviews as a medium bowed out and ceded the floor to the new hotness was when Spoony published those Black Hole of Board Games installments on VCR Golf and Gone Birding. The first is peak late-period Spoony, after Ultima IX but before his neuroses swallowed him whole, all frayed nerve endings and hair-trigger freakouts. With the second, he just sits there, with a look of existential despair on his face, letting the soul-crushing banality of the game speak for itself, finally out of things to say. These two videos are the angry review medium brought to their natural conclusion, when we finally understand what doing this for years does to a person.
In fact, one of Quinton’s earlier videos, a relatively broad overview of the rise and fall of Channel Awesome itself, was a secondary source for this essay when my own memories of the site failed me. In this video, in a display of delicious irony given Channel Awesome’s inflated opinion of itself, he describes the website as “obscure” and “forgotten.” Turns out CA was right about an existential threat to their business looming on the horizon, but were wrong about its nature. It wasn’t the Feds coming to take away their Fair Use that would finish them off, but themselves, and their own shortcomings, and their inability to grow and evolve as pop culture criticism became more sophisticated.
The Wall ends with a short, poignant scene that efficiently sums up the themes of the film. After Pink’s wall is destroyed, we fade into a group of children cleaning up after the wreckage. Some of the kids are placing bricks into crates and toy dump trucks, perhaps to build walls of their own, perpetuating the cycle of abuse that produced Pink and turned him into a monster. But one child breaks the cycle, emptying an unspent Molotov cocktail, choosing peace over violence and love over hate.
Channel Awesome is gone. It had its time, and it didn’t even deserve the time it had. And as it was dying, those within and adjacent to it were building a future that it would have found incomprehensible.
[with profuse thanks to Emily Nejako and Michael Gleason]