Let’s Dive Right Into The Wall, Side One
“Honestly my favorite thing about 2019 is how everyone has slowly but surely realized that the Nostalgia Critic is terrible.”
I. When the Tigers Broke Free, Pt. I
It is 1944. Eric Fletcher Waters, a schoolteacher and left-wing activist, is killed in World War II. He was originally a staunch pacifist and a conscientious objector, working as an ambulance driver during the Blitz, but changed his mind as the horrors of Nazism became clear, and enlisted in the Territorial Army. The machinery of war chewed him up five months later, amid heavy losses at the Battle of Anzio. The British government sent a letter to his wife and five-month-old son. It was a nice letter, yes, a gold-leaf scroll styled as a personal correspondence from King George himself, but otherwise a generic form letter brimming with impersonal faux-condolence.
It is 1963. Eric Waters’ son, Roger, is in London studying architecture¹ at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he meets Nick Mason and Richard Wright. They assemble a psychedelic rock band, together with Roger’s childhood friend Syd Barrett, who would be the band’s frontman. They cycle through several names before settling on The Pink Floyd Sound, soon shortened to Pink Floyd. In 1967, they release an album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, forty-two minutes of poppy, jaunty psychedelia, similar to the whimsical Canterbury sound rippling through the English underground at the time. It hit #6 on the UK album charts and was well-received enough that the band attempted a tour of America.
¹ This is one of those little details that makes perfect sense in hindsight.
It is 1968. Syd Barrett, mental health already declining thanks to heavy LSD use, quickly buckles under the pressures of sudden fame and has a nervous breakdown, an event swiftly mythologized as him going completely insane.² He would be forced to leave the band in April of that year. After an abortive solo career, he would move into his parents’ home and retire from the music industry, becoming increasingly reclusive. In 1975, he makes a surprise visit to Abbey Road Studios, where Pink Floyd are recording Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Where before he was a gregarious, trim, vaguely mod-looking figure, he had by now become terse, heavyset, and completely bald, even shaving off his eyebrows and body hair. The band are reduced to tears upon recognizing who he is. He exchanges a few words with them, briefly attends David Gilmour’s wedding reception, and leaves. This would be the last formal exchange he would have with his old band. He would live out the rest of his life painting and gardening, and pass away in 2006 of complications from diabetes and stomach cancer.
² Most people think he was schizophrenic, but Barrett’s family swears he didn’t have any mental illness. I personally believe that he was at the very least more lucid during the back half of his life than he’s typically given credit for. When you’re a famous and virtuosic musician who turned your back on the industry that both made you a star and fucked you over, and you just want to live a quiet, uncomplicated life in peace but can’t be left alone, you do what you gotta do.
Down a primary creative force, Pink Floyd soldiers on, eventually finding its footing in complex and tightly structured concept albums, albeit at the cost of Roger Waters’ increasingly dictatorial control over the band. In 1973, Pink Floyd begins its imperial phase with Dark Side of the Moon, a dark and unsettling meditation on the tyranny of modern capitalist society and the way it pulls a person apart, widely considered one of the greatest albums ever made. This is followed up with Wish You Were Here in 1975 and Animals in 1977. Syd’s breakdown continues to loom over the band, becoming the subject of several songs (most prominently, Brain Damage and the parts of Wish You Were Here that aren’t about the music industry), and reflecting Roger Waters’ growing megalomania and isolation from both the band and their audience.
It is July 1977. Pink Floyd are wrapping up their In the Flesh tour of North America. They’ve been playing in stadiums, widening the gulf between the band and their audience considerably, as no one attending their shows could pay attention to the actual music, either too enraptured in the spectacle or so far back they couldn’t see or hear a thing. On the tour’s final date in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Roger Waters spits in the face of a fan who was trying to climb the stage. To Waters’ horror, the fan loves it.
This incident causes Waters to reflect on his own fracturing mental state, realizing that he was building a mental wall between himself and others. This would inspire him to write a concept album, 1979’s The Wall. Operatic, oppressive, and relentlessly terrifying, this is the tale of a rock star named Pink who, thanks to a rough childhood and young adulthood in postwar Britain, isolates himself behind a mental wall of his own, and the psychological rot that ensues once he can no longer connect with others. This album would produce multiple hit singles and be certified platinum a month after its release. It also happens to be my favorite concept album ever, and a massive early influence on my personal aesthetic sensibilities, particularly sparking a lifelong fascination with shambolic men trapped in nihilistic mental death spirals, which goes a long way toward explaining why this essay exists.
It is 1982. After a truly brutal gestation period, The Wall receives an equally nightmarish film adaptation starring Bob “Live Aid” Geldof as Pink and featuring surreal, disturbing animations from old-school political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. The film received mixed reviews upon release, but those who “got it” really got it. It would become a cult classic amongst fans of the album, to the point where the animations especially are integral to the listening experience.
It is February 2010. Roger Ebert lists the film adaptation of The Wall as one of his Great Movies. That April, it’s chosen to open Ebertfest, his namesake film festival, showcasing films that may have been overlooked by the public at large.
It is September 2019. Doug Walker, as the Nostalgia Critic, attempts a review of The Wall, and instead vomits up an Ed Wood-tier clusterfuck of misplaced hubris and staggering incompetence. As I am a certified Wall-knower, it raises the Ted Signal, and I am plunged against my will into a bottomless rabbit hole trying to make sense of precisely what happened here.
II. In the Flesh?
It is 2007. Doug Walker begins posting a bunch of review shows on YouTube, one of which is the Nostalgia Critic, in which he adopts the persona of a high-strung Looney Tunes character, prone to explosive meltdowns involving prodigious use of the fuck word, revisiting the films of his childhood to see if they were actually any good. Spoiler: as one of his biggest influences was the Angry Video Game Nerd, and when people’s main takeaway from AVGN is Thing Diarrhea Bad…they frequently weren’t.
It is 2008. After one too many IP takedowns on YouTube, Doug starts looking for a video hosting platform more forgiving when it comes to copyright enforcement,³ initially starting with Revver but ultimately settling on Blip. Unfortunately, Blip was constructed to host videos that would be embedded elsewhere and is a platform on which, in a vacuum, it is very difficult to search for new things to watch. As a solution, Doug and his brother Rob, along with Bhargav Dronamraju, Mike Ellis, and CEO Mike Michaud (given the job because no one else wanted it), forms a website known as That Guy With The Glasses, rebranded in 2014 as Channel Awesome, as an official landing page for their videos. This website would grow rapidly, soon hosting not just Doug’s videos but also the work of other producers such as Lindsay Ellis, Linkara, Spoony, Brad Jones, Film Brain, MikeJ, and Todd in the Shadows, many of whom soon gained significant followings of their own by dint of their association with the site.
³ Note for people in the future: YouTube wasn’t the only online video platform back in the day, and you could still gain a decent following as a video producer while using a different service.
It is March 2010, my junior year at college. I am home for spring break, bored out of my skull, and randomly decide to watch a funny internet video by some shouty rumpled guy with glasses. That I would get into Doug Walker was probably inevitable, as I was already a fan of angry negative review series like the Spoony Experiment, Zero Punctuation, and the Agony Booth, and I was looking for something similar. My gateway into Dougworld was the crossover review of Alone in the Dark that he’d recorded with Spoony and Linkara, what seemed at the time to be a comedic tour-de-force, with our three reviewers tearing into Uwe Boll’s masterpiece like the sweary, irreverent love child of MST3K and the Three Stooges. A bingewatch followed, eventually encompassing the other producers active on Channel Awesome, beginning a deep investment in the fandom that would last six years.
You’ll notice I only talked about the Nostalgia Critic’s reviews in somewhat broad terms. That’s because I now realize that Doug’s videos were not exactly substantive. They sit at the uneasy transition between the MST3K-style riffing that inspired them and the analytical video essays that would supplant them, with none of the positive qualities of either. He clearly wanted to be like Roger Ebert and say “your movie sucks,” but was unwilling to put the necessary legwork into studying movies to be able to back up a statement like “your movie sucks,” figuring that screaming at the camera like a cartoon character would make up for it. And for a while, it did; the lay perspective he brought forward made him seem relatable, helped him connect with his audience, and in a way inspired quite a few other video producers to go, “well if he can do it, so can I!” When Doug loses his mind over the Bat Credit Card scene, there isn’t any substantial critique behind it beyond “that scene is bad,” but that’s not the point, either. We thought it was powerful because it’s how we would react to Bat Credit Card, if it were socially acceptable to do so. You’re not here to watch someone dispassionately pick apart a bad movie with a few jokes and rants here and there; you’re here to watch the loud funny man completely lose his shit.
And then we got internet video reviewers who actually went to film school, and could speak about film intelligently, and Walker’s old shtick immediately lost all its shine. Doug can’t speak movie, and when you have people like Lindsay Ellis and Dan Olson who can, screaming “bad movie is bad” doesn’t cut it anymore. Yet, albeit with a brief interruption from 2012–2013, he persists. He still cranks out reviews once a week, and despite significantly higher production values and over a decade of experience in this business, they remain every bit as uninformed and inarticulate as they were back when he first started out.
This means that when Doug Walker tackles something like The Wall, a film and album loaded with symbolism about isolation, insanity, fascism, conformity, personal trauma, and the empty, shallow life of a rock star, it’s abundantly clear that he is going to be massively out of his depth.
III. When the Tigers Broke Free, Pt. II
I believe Doug is aware of that on some level. The Wall is a Big Film, and he knew that if he had any hope of doing it justice, he’d have to pull together a Big Review. And, well, what we got was certainly big: a massive, epic parody rock opera mirroring the bombast of the source material. This isn’t a review. This is a production. It’s got costumes! Special effects! Dream sequences! The guy from Slipknot!⁴ Are you not entertained?
⁴ Yes, our viewpoint character is the scary masked nu-metal musician and nice corn-fed Iowa boy Corey Taylor, who was apparently roped into this production because his son (who plays Young Corey in a few places) is a Nostalgia Critic fan. He will mostly spend his time wandering through the review becoming more and more bewildered by what he’s seeing, and will have no bearing or impact on the plot whatsoever, despite the occasional vague feeling that he probably should.
Trouble is, they went for broke on the style and figured their usual substance would carry them through, and even going all out like that wasn’t enough to save this thing. A lot has already been said about how poorly this review is shot and lit and produced, and I certainly don’t disagree, but nevertheless I come away with one overwhelming thought: this is probably one of the most expensive reviews Team Critic has put together. You laugh, given the more sophisticated production involved in a typical YouTube video review today, but a Nostalgia Critic review from like 2009 could be thrown together with no budget and an extremely basic knowledge of video editing software. This, meanwhile, has production values on roughly the same level as one of the anniversary movies. Not professional quality by any stretch, but definitely more complex than the sort of thing Doug typically threw together back in the day, and definitely on the same level they hit when they want to do something Special. When Doug says this review is a labor of love, it’s true in the sense that they sunk a lot of time and effort and care into working on it. It’s just a pity that pretty much everyone involved in the production is terrible at their job, because the end result is profoundly unimpressive.
For instance: The In The Flesh? sequence starts with Doug Walker breaking through Corey Taylor’s TV in time with the music, interspersed with stock concert footage and stills from the film. And then Doug Walker actually opens his mouth, singing in a parody of Waters’ high register,⁵ and things fall apart instantly. “If you wanna find out what’s behind this weird shit, you’re gonna have to find out if it’s lame or legit,” he sings, and everyone watching immediately realizes anything he says about The Wall will be as shallow as when he calls his Hunter S Thompson parody character “Raoul Puke.”
⁵ Believe it or not, Doug Walker can be an excellent singer when he wants to be. Listen to the positively operatic Oh What an Adequate Morning part of the Year One Brawl to get an idea of what he’s capable of. Doesn’t exactly shine through in this review, though, because the Venn diagram of Doug Walker’s and Roger Waters’ singing chops are two circles that do not intersect. (One also suspects that overconfidence in his own singing ability was a factor in why this became a musical review to begin with.)
Spoiler: we never find out what’s behind this weird shit because Walker himself can’t keep up with any of it. Nor do we truly find out if it’s lame or legit because his criticisms of the film rarely advance beyond that it’s “pretentious” and “whiny,” and when they do, we wish they didn’t.
IV. Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II
Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II, for instance. This song, as filtered through Pink’s harrowing experience at boarding school, was written in protest of the way the British educational system is an almost literal meat grinder, full of strict rules and abusive teachers bent on transforming kids into little dead-eyed identikit robots with no individuality of their own, perfect for their future careers on the factory assembly line, perpetuating the cruel inequities of industrial capitalism. When the kids start chanting “we don’t need no education” and riot against the tyranny of their headmasters and the dull gray future laid out before them and burn the school down, it’s a delicious, cathartic moment. This song is so powerful that it was banned in South Africa because the organizers of an anti-apartheid school boycott adopted it as a protest anthem.
Doug Walker thinks those kids are entitled little brats who need to stop whining. “There are no good teachers! Not one! Not even by accident!,” he bellows, exposing the fundamental problem with his line of critique. Roger Waters calls himself a socialist, and as such thinks in terms of systems. On The Happiest Days of Our Lives, he may couch his criticisms in terms of “certain teachers,” but it’s clear that those certain teachers are representative of the system as a whole. There might be other good teachers working within that system, but they’re swimming against the current. The conformist meat grinder is still a conformist meat grinder, and the presence of good teachers doesn’t change that.⁶
⁶ Thing One: Waters did a really good interview in 1980 that dives into some of the thought behind The Wall in a bit more detail, and once it reaches The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Waters immediately clarifies that the problem is indeed the school as a monolith. Of course there were Good Teachers. His point still stands. In addition, it of course warrants mention that it was a Good Teacher at Islington Green School who snuck the kids into the recording studio, behind the headteacher’s back, so they could sing the second verse and the chorus. Good on him. The bit with the children’s choir is the most bone-chilling part of the song.
Thing Two: Doug, honey, Waters isn’t saying schools are the same as concentration camps, but he is saying they both were dehumanizing, oppressive institutions in their own special ways. Also he grew up reeling from the psychological effects of the war so the transition between the two in Pink’s mind is pretty damn natural. This is the single least coherent accusation of anti-Semitism I’ve ever seen (and Waters, because he’s a harsh critic of Israel and a supporter of BDS, gets accused of this a fair bit), and is very definitely not the gotcha you’re looking for.
Doug Walker, meanwhile, presents himself as a centrist, and as such thinks in terms of individuals. He looks at a thesis like “the educational system is systematically rotten” and believes that can only be true if every single individual working in the educational system is also rotten. He fundamentally cannot comprehend the venom that Waters is flinging at the school system he was wrung through in his youth, and so we get Walker falling back on a well-worn standby and thinking that because it couldn’t possibly reflect anyone’s actual school experience, Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II is cynical pandering to upper-middle-class teenagers’ victim complexes. This will be a small recurring theme in how Walker approaches this film.
The whole this-album/film-is-for-alienated-teenagers angle pretty clearly comes from Doug figuring those are the circumstances under which people discover The Wall for the first time. I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong; there are a lot of bits in there that appeal to disaffected high schoolers…but that’s more because of the way certain aspects of the story resonate across time (from 1950s Britain to 1990s America, in this case) than anything else. “We don’t need no education” isn’t in there because Waters figured the kids would find it #relatable, but because it’s an important part of the story, and if we take Doug’s word here, the next generation, wallowing in a post-Cold War 90s malaise, were in a perfect position to latch onto it hard. Or: no, Doug, it’s not pandering. Things just shook loose that way.⁷
⁷ That’s not to say the trajectory Doug describes here is completely without merit. Tom Ewing, in his blog project reviewing every UK #1 hit, gave Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II a 5 out of 10, citing his own embarrassing adolescent experiences with Pink Floyd as a factor in how he soured on them so quickly. However, Ewing also takes care to mention that he understands both what the song and the album are getting at, but he rejects them because of Waters’ overwhelming misanthropy and hypocrisy (despite all this rumination over his fractured relationship with his audience and the people close to him, his reign of terror over the band wouldn’t subside until he left in 1983). In fact, that Popular entry mounts a more coherent criticism of The Wall in three paragraphs than Doug could manage in an entire forty-minute video.
V. Goodbye Blue Sky
Walker’s complete inability to grok what he’s watching goes on to affect the entire rest of the review. He might acknowledge on a surface level that Goodbye Blue Sky, for instance, is about the Blitz, but it’s clear he ultimately believes Waters is using the Blitz as a cynical vehicle for his own manpain. This when you have the cold, metallic, extremely German stylized black eagle bloodily decapitating England’s hilltops and reducing London to ruins, leaving cadaverous naked people in gas masks cowering in sewer tunnels and tube stations. Pink is never mentioned, as the Blitz, contra Walker, is not Waters’ personal trauma. He was born in 1943. He wasn’t even alive for it. This is a systemic (there’s that word again), national trauma, inflicted upon Waters thanks to (a) his English nationality, and (b) having a father who died in the war.⁸
⁸ That this song was recorded and released before Oscar bait was popularized as a term is obvious, but it’s about WWII, and in Doug’s mind anything about WWII is clearly Oscar bait, so that must mean that’s what it is.
We could go on. The Young Lust/One Of My Turns/Don’t Leave Me Now sequence documents the event that finally pushes Pink over the edge.⁹ Upon learning of his wife’s infidelity while on tour in America (“See, he keeps hanging up! There was a man answering…”), he invites a groupie up to his room, because that’s what rock stars are supposed to do (eugh) and maybe that’ll bring him happiness, but his depressed, erratic behavior, culminating in trashing his hotel room, drives her away. He’s alienated everyone around him so thoroughly that he can’t even get someone to casually fuck him. Thus does the wall that he’s built his entire life, slowly and methodically isolating him from the outside world, finally reach completion.¹⁰
⁹ By the way, saying this not entirely morally objectionable betrayal (and it isn’t, because Pink was never a good husband) is equivalent to Johnny’s betrayal in The Room is…aggressively poor. Pink’s wife leaving him is meant to simultaneously demonstrate how his estrangement from the rest of the world affects the people in his life and push him ever further toward total isolation. Johnny’s fiancée inexplicably leaving him happened because Tommy Wiseau thinks, in a vacuum, that makes for a gripping story when it, uh, doesn’t.
¹⁰ It’s particularly amusing, by the way, when Walker mocks that shot of Pink floating in the swimming pool in the crucifix pose, going “LOOK AT ME I’M JESUS,” because that’s actually what the film was going for. Pink thinks he’s the perpetual unsullied victim, when even a cursory look at his situation reveals he’s more responsible for putting himself into this mess than he lets on.
Walker skips over all of this (literally, with Corey Taylor fast-forwarding through it) thinking it’s just a rich and famous person moping about being rich and famous…even though this isn’t about being rich and famous as much as how he’s so fucked up from his life so far (deceased father, overbearing mother, abusive teachers, distant adulterous spouse; there’s a reason “all in all you’re just another brick in the wall” is a refrain) that the hedonism of being a rich and famous rock star offers no solace.
Anyway, one of the songs he (and the film, to be fair) skips over is Hey You, the moment when Pink, fresh off completing the wall he spent his whole life building, realizes he fucked up big time. He starts metaphorically banging and clawing against the wall, trying desperately to communicate with someone…anyone…but is unsuccessful. The bridge ends with the following gut-punch of a lament: “no matter how he tried, he could not break free…and the worms ate into his brain.” Pink has, in his isolation, allowed his darkest and most repressed thoughts and fantasies to take over his mind, and it will transform him into something terrifying.