Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Jump, baby, Jump! Jump into the Uncanny Valley, where chicks and hunks in black and silver body suit--kissers slicked over with CGI-bearing golden-brownish glow airbrush make-up--pretend to fight an onrush of enforced digital sameness, until the snake eats itself, the Uncanny Valley fills with ones and zeros and is so level the need for actors disappears altogether. They just float on the surface, newly born. And then mom starts singing "Clash City Rockers" (1) because it turns up on a car commercial, "nothing rocks the town like the Clash City Rockers... except the new Toyota Camry." 

Then, and only then, I'll know it's too late... even for me.

I'm old enough, even too old, to accept the brutal truth, which is that the kids today don't know there's even a brutal truth left to accept, which means there's no longer a truth at all, just the brutal. "Clash City Rockers" isn't cool anymore it's 'grampa's music' and hence undesirable, unless kids today are cool enough to realize their generation's music is the kind of squaresville Glen Miller nonsense that rock was invented to counteract. now grown to anthem size, filling stadiums rather than ballrooms. In the70s-80s, we punks and poseurs didn't have to decide if we were goth or emo or strait-edge or hardcore or Edward or Jacob or Erudite or Dauntless. or closeted or 'out' or bisexual: we were all just punks or (more likely) poseurs, smoking ourselves dizzy at City Gardens waiting for The Ramones or Replacements' All-Ages show to start. But today you need to pick your clique and must abide by its rules and brush off the rest, and if you jump bandwagons no one will talk to you and your reward for being a stunted in all other ways but artistic is the agony of another Saturday night spent alone in your room reading manga, until you turn to the make-up table and tart yourself up for Nerdtown.

This here's real

In both the recently released to DVD 2014 films, DIVERGENT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, there's a dude who's been brainwashed by the fascist dystopia and ordered to kill the one he loves. And in each, the one he loves doesn't give up on him, even risking their rebel coterie's lives while trying to break through to him because, damn it, you don't give up on your old army buddy or a cute guy who respects your virgin boundaries. Each brainwashed buddy is programmed to kill all those who pose a threat to a deranged Kate Winslet or brilliantly-against-type Robert Redford. But by now you've guessed that even buddy love is stronger than military-grade brainwashing. Love is able to survive even lame 'sensitive' male Subaru voiceovers, it's deeper even than behavioral programming or the ping pong balls of motion capture technology. Even Redford--the goddamned Sundance Kid!--can't change it. 

Taken together these two films paint a nice portrait of where we are today as an eternally teenage wasteland nation, and how it's our obsession with health that makes us sick, how it's our longing for security blankets that leaves us most exposed. Our presumption is that kids today already know who Neville Chamberlain is because they've been to high school or read a book. But we presume in vain. Kids today have no idea who he is, and so never glean the importance of the lesson his liberal utopian pipe dream folly teaches us.

Chamberlin, a pacifist dumbass

For old Neville Chamberlin is history's most glaring example of what not to do when every fibre of your national being wants to make peace at all costs, to live safe today and let tomorrow fed for itself, to waste valuable ammo-gathering time trying to get extra comfortable in your peacetime bubble.

Neville Chamberlain (in case you're one of those kids) was the British prime minister who let Hitler sweet-talk him out of sticking up for Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler's solemn promise to not invade any more countries. He came back to England waving a piece of paper guaranteeing "peace in our time."

This was supposedly because Britain was still recovering from the previous world war, but really it's because Hitler wouldn't let Chamberlin smoke in the Reichstag (according to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). If he just sparked up anyway, man, right there, he maybe would found the chutzpah to stand up for the Czechs. Well, I saw a picture the other day of a bunch of members of the 101st Airborne at a dance with some dames in the mid-40s, and every single one of them had a cigarette. They're the ones kicked Hitler's ass. Do you think ISIS would even exist if Obama was allowed to smoke in the Oval Office? Instead he's a Bluto-battered Popeye stripped of his contraband spinach at the door. Gotta be healthy, man. No spinach. Popeye's spinach-guzzling youth has left him with a bad case of chronic iron poisoning. 

So now you know about Chamberlin, and how our collective all-consuming horror of illness, death, and decay extinguishes the flame (and smooth filtered taste) of our own shortened life span and conversely poisons the Earth with overpopulation. Resources and living space get scarce and lack of security blanket options gives angry idiots the balls to not mind getting killed toute de suite by our noncommittal drones in the name of some fuzzy cause.

Luckily there's always movies and movies about teenagers fighting back against the hypocrisy of dystopia overreach are big bucks, and that, my friend, is what irony sufficiency is made of.

Nurse, all that glowing stuff is going to have to be removed

But if grooving to a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, a Churchill not a Chamberlain, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger on the screen, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action like a true hero... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Keep your logos round and burning

Conversely, here's a little-advertised truth about addiction I've learned the 'hard' way: drug and alcohol withdrawal is brutally painful, terrifying, even soul-crushing, BUT it can bring sexual pleasure as exponentially intense as the pain, exhilaration as intense as the terror. But few know this because a) so often this withdrawal is done in a hospital, where opportunities are scarce; b) first you must truly suffer, convulsing, screaming, vomiting and rolling around on the cool tiles, riding an endless terrifying roller coaster that's all vertical drops and torturous climbs, for like three long days in one endless loop. In a similar way, perhaps, enduring the intensity of withdrawal from the media's cozy hypnosis brings true liberation, but who would be fool enough to know it unless forced to? Stretching your limits is just a nice way to say being stretched on the rack. 

And no one suffers like a teenager, whose stretching is involuntary, a werewolf transformation that takes agonizing years instead of a night or two under a full moon. The one part missing from the TWILIGHT movies that the (last) book went into detail about: the great flaming agony stretching on for timeless weeks that Bela endures in her transition from dying anorexic pregnant teen to hip, naturally-toned rich mom vampire. When you don't endure the trauma, the basic training breakdown, the post-marathon soreness, or the primordial terror of the final few bardos of death or deep meditation, then your transformation, your evolution, is not permanent.  Teenagers trapped in the torturous cocoon of braces, acne, dandruff, virgin angst, and clumsy self-loathing, can't imagine how the much their future self-confidence, straight teeth, clear skin, will depend on it, and how quickly the pain will disappear once theb benefits are known. This counter-intuitive need for trauma, coupled to our fear of it (inseparable from the fear of pain and dying), makes a good dystopian parable for the masses, and why teenagers resonate with them so strongly. Old men need no more dystopian parables, only escape from their oldness in the chimera of myth and chimera of youth. And it is the same resonating myth and escape into (and from) youth that brings old and young together.  No one wants a teenager in their living room, but onscreen everyone can be teenager just for two hours, or--if already a teenager--a hero whose diamond anguish is at last given the properly operatic golden setting.

It is the duty of any nonconformist or outcast in a conformist society to subvert that society, the force of the social repression on the nonconformist forming the response and creating the spatial form of the future: Jesus on the cross, Mandela in the jail, and Gandhi on the hunger strike; but if you want to avoid that pain, you can stay addicted to to the virtual pleasure of the simulacrum and just write a Young Adult dystopia novel or superhero comic or screenplay wherein your protagonist subverts an even more conformist future or alternate reality. And if it sells, and catches on with the teens everywhere, and is adapted into a big budget movie, conformity expands to envelop it, then shrinks back as it digests, and then the trappings from that parable are spit out a decade later in a lame car insurance commercial, as drained of its original meaning as a Times Square New Year in the post-Giuliani era.

On the plus side, by entering the collective fabric it will serve to caution the power elite about going too far in trying to repress and restrict the freedom of the masses. Certainly the power elite fear from these tales the fallout that would come with restricting freedom of speech, for any speech---no matter how anti-authority--can be subverted to power ("Clash City Rockers ride the streets in the new Ford Freedom") Truly it is written in Situationist theory books forced on liberal arts undergrads the world over: a reigning social power can find no surer way of survival than incorporating critiques of itself, ushering in an era wherein compliance as the 'reality' is never even noticed behind the simulacrum screen. In HUNGER GAMES, Donald Sutherland's nervous military dictator thinks suppressing the symbols of rebellion will suppress the rebellion itself, but a media savvy ruler doesn't outlaw symbols, he mass markets them. He flashes the Girl Scout / Revolution gang sign at press conferences. Anything--even Sid Vicious snarling "My Way"--can be digested, incorporated, and eventually spat out into a car commercial. No revolution can win against a government that burns itself in effigy every night on the evening news. What are you going to do to protest, put out the fire?

In order to be free from our addiction to the cathartic thrill of battling Hollywood-conjured dystopia, we must learn to love the pain deprivation brings, which goes against everything capitalism stands for. No expensive wine ever tasted half so sweet as warm canteen water to a dehydrated ocean castaway. Is this not the the core truth of meditation, or stereograms, or the rapturous freedom of the starving, tortured artist hallucinating sausages and flagons in his swirling oils? And nothing's more disillusioning than realizing the spiritual crisis that cost you years of suffering and depression but resulted in artsy growth could have been solved with Effexor, and just as quickly turned into a raving maniacal sociopathy by adding Abilify. By extension, anyone with the right technology, drugs, or patience could turn you into their automaton. With the flick of an artificially-implanted cerebellum switch you could feel your friends are your enemies, and vice versa. Raymond, why don't you play some solitaire?

Thus the brainwashed super-conductive Winter Soldier (above) doesn't flinch or protest when his keepers want to give him an electric shock memory wipe. He just leans back into the chair and opens to receive his rubber mouthguard like an angry boxer thinking only of the kill. The captain meanwhile is thrown into a dilemma when he doesn't quite know who to trust within the NSA-Homeland Security-ish conspiracy web known as S.H.I.E.L.D. He himself is doomed to be incorruptible, no matter how many perish as a result of his principles. I simply cannot give more away, but it's this 'question authority' theme that gives the film its emotional resonance. Fifth columnist academes can say what they want, in Captain America's heyday (he was frozen in 1945 so he could miss becoming Reb Brown -left) we had a genuine uniform-wearing enemy to fight, and that we might actually lose was a real fear that brought Americans together and cured its Great Depression quicker than an Effexor / Neurontin / Wellbutrin cocktail.

And in DIVERGENT, the brainwash comes via a remotely activated chip air-injected into each 'Dauntless' member's neck as part of an alleged location tracking program, a process woven so seamlessly into all the other initiatory processes that no one can hardly complain--any more than an army recruit can complain if forced to do push-ups. The big fear for our plucky DIVERGENT heroine, Tris (Shairlene Woodley) isn't being brainwashed, it's that her friends will find out she's not one of the approved types of persona which act as fascist-brand masonic brotherhoods that all young citizens of this society must join, being allowed to pick for themselves at a big ceremony, because not doing so, not fitting a socially prescribed 'type' means being 'divergent' - i.e. a natural-born nonconformist, the type who must subvert the dystopia, write a book about subverting a worse dystopia, or die a death by slow closeting. Perhaps it's natural to have subversive artists in any society that gets larger than a few thousand people. Native Americans treated their gay tribal members with reverence, for they were signs the tribe was flourishing and needed to slow its population growth. A dystopia would of course not go for that display of difference, and with subversive artist types it's perhaps the same... no room for 'decadent' art in a dystopia. At any rate, Tris fears becoming cliqueless and alone by daring to say no to peer pressure, but can't help being chip (brainwash) resistant and so forced into the capacity of heroine. She's the type of person who, like myself can't connect for some reason to the giddy rush of 'mob mentality' (2). In the big picking ceremony she goes for the daredevil mesomorph soldier brigade (i.e. the jocks or the Wermacht) the 'Dauntless' group, but she's way too independent and peaceful. She's also too athletic and dopey to be an Erudite (the fretful nerd group, or Gestapo); too Erudite to be Abnegation (the Red Cross), etc. But this is a dystopia where your friends literally jump off a roof and if you don't follow them then you're not cool anymore. And you have to succumb to paranoia to not be suspect (if you're Erudite). And you have to let yourself get exploited and scapegoated if you're Abnegation (see also VIRIDIANA).

Sure it's a little trite, but I like DIVERGENT mainly because the twisty high school clique-as-metaphor-for-fascism stuff displays a keen savvy to the way initiation rites are incorporated into the lure of the popular clique. Here institutionalized initiation is conformist just enough that both the personal and political seamlessly interweave, like joining the Riffs, the SEALS, the Heathers, getting your ears pierced, your first tattoo, drinking your first beer and smoking your first cigarette all on the same day. Feeling like you finally belong somewhere is an intoxicating high, especially if you've never felt it before. The dissolution of apartness, of singular lonely ego subsumed into an inclusive group whole, is exhilarating in exponential ration to the amount of lonely bedroom angst you've suffered.

But that high has a price and you're suddenly being shipped off to Vietnam, like Treat Williams at the end of HAIR.

The thing DIVERGENT doesn't get is that having a weak central girl throws off the curve- Kristen Stewart is Antigone-stubborn in TWILIGHT; Jennifer Lawrence genuinely mythic in HUNGER GAMES; the kid in ENDER'S GAME spookily self-confident, but this chick Tris is perhaps--to her detriment--the most 'normal' teenager-like of the bunch. Rocking a terrible poker-face, she lacks the inner fascist to succeed as a Dauntless. She doesn't have a grasp of 'war footing.' She's not Artemis-esque or Antigone-determined or a math prodigy; her puffy face dilates and registers every emotion, which is not good if you're gay, I mean "divergent" in a world hostile to any sort of difference. If you show your true face they will get you. The same ones who urge you to be yourself are the ones who will attack you if your actually do. The core of every teenage fear lies in this idea, that the joy found in belonging to a cool group will soon give way to the terror of being abandoned by them once they see your face register the joy you feel at being accepted at last. This is part and parcel of the feeling teenagers never get over into adulthood: that the parent or god that watches over you is just a trickster demon awaiting the right time to remove its saintly mask to expose that which your whole life was a shield against seeing--his hideous giant demon face coming forward to consume you like one of Kafka's devouring industrial vaters--all the while encouraging you to take off your own mask, to be yourself, at last, to finally show your soul just in time to see it ripped to shreds... 


 In WINTER and DIVERGENT, the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut (SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD) around you, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, no access to yourself, no chance to catch your breath. What you didn't see coming suddenly comes, not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism, disarmed, isolated, and confused. Then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET just to deal with a couple of dudes with AK-47s and cell phones. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids! Little tiny Stalins swim in our blood. They're even in the money...

Masks on / masks off 

Now I don't really believe in a massive global conspiracy per se --I imagine the world to be far too chaotic for that--but I don't rule it out. What I do know, though, is that-when it comes to running Hollywood--the industry guys can tramp around their fancy desks high on all the megalomania-infusing coke they want, but deep inside their drawers they know who the real boss is, the capricious Middle American teenager. Their ample expandable income, their drivers' license, their need to get away from parental eyes even for a few hours, the crushing relentless sameness of suburban boredom, all bring them time and again to the multiplex. Why not tie high school subjects like social science and literature to cafeteria mores and social hierarchy to teenage hormonal angst and deep mythic dystopian allegories, so that the films they see double as Cliff notes to the classics in class and of their lives? Maybe the kids are reading Plato in fifth period or leaning about World War Two for the first time, so hey, if you commingle these big historical and cultural currents in with the high school threat of cyber bullies, peer pressure, and the rush of the first law break or sense of belonging to a clique, then you have hooked onto an iconography of coming-of-age mythic suburban metaphors, each multi-layered signifier keyed into a hormonally pained demographic. 

That's myth. At it's purest. In myth there's a way to apply what's taught in school to real life, to do it in a way where the result is fantasy on a larger more 'real' level than mere reality. 

Thus these teen dystopia parables become more and more urgent as the real and public sphere shrinks. Science tells these kids that their future is all used up but as long as their present is spent texting and downloading violet ray dystopian fantasies, they can live without anything so banal and limited in scope as science's concept of time line futures. These kids know that watching someone else fight the power isn't the same as fighting it themselves. But how do you fight a phantom who monitors your every move before you make it? Just trying to get a gun into high school or threatening Congress via your Tumblr will get you all sorts of expelled. But watching someone else fight a raging battle against a CGI windmill version of all the old American evils? That's doodle dandy do or die. 


I know it's cliche to say but, for my generation, things were different. The dystopian-spurred life-or-death need to assert your individuality and face the dreaded finality of conservatism was totally lacking in the John Hughes (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 80s. There were no cell phones or internet by which to stay constantly connected. As a result, that connection never felt threatened, that was our burden and our blessing. We had no faith to lose, and we knew it. Not no more. If you win a teenager's heart today by expressing their queasy post-digital angst, they'll come back for the sequels, then they'll buy the DVD (even after they downloaded it illegally (you hope), and in 20 years they'll buy it again in a deluxe commemorative edition, and it can run in perpetuity across a spectrum of cable channels... until that car commercial tie-in wrings the last dollar out.

Starship Troopers (1997)

And of course, there are the girls, the ladies, all locked into the golden gloss that makes all them all now look like they're CGI avatars slick with softener, every frame of their face Maximed to abstraction, all the better inject them into the video game vein. But hey, the good news: boys have picked up some slack to become objects, which is like, so like, finally, you know? It's the baby steps, man. Before women can be free of objectification they must first choose a replacement way for us to look at them, and there's but one traditional gender left to objectify. There is a reason, burn, turn, worm, but don't say I didn't warn you about that Uncanny Valley crossing, ladies. This is John Connor coming to you from inside Crystal Peak: let the revolution commence broadcasting on UHF, on the Emergency Broadcast System, on the HAM radio, anywhere it can be safe from the digital detection. Analog only, No digital, man. Analog got the warmth and the resonance, 'cuz nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockazz!

NOTES:
1. The Clash, in case anyone doesn't know, were a prime example of politically left-wing, anti-Thatcher English punk rock, hence their use in car commercials is the kind of thing that runs counter to their message.

2.  I've been there at the start of three riots in my life -- and each time I walked away before the violence began, horrified by the way all my friends seemed to transform into bloodthirsty animals, and feeling strangely abandoned, as if they all disappeared right in front of me, just as would happen later when cocaine came back in vogue in the '98. I simply could not catch the mob or coke mentality anymore than I could 'get' the Grateful Dead. I guess that makes me... Divergent!

Remote in Reach: THE WALL (1979)

Believe it or not, there was a time when I, too, despised all stoners. It was 1980-83 in central Jersey; nothing personal to Eisenhower Middle School -- a few evil schoolmasters aside -- and nothing personal to the stoner kids, who were all nice enough in their brusque way. Just too loud and too comfortable in their dirty denim and unkempt hair for my 13 year old's new-kid-on-the-block super genius morbid acuteness of the senses. I kept waiting for one of them to bully me, but only one little rat bastard named Matt Muniz ever bothered, and even he only a handful of times and generally only picking on one of my weaker friends while I trembled. But he was on my bus and on the way to school I'd hear him and his buddies in the back singing: "we don't need no education / we don't need no thought control," and I'd whisper to myself "yes you do, Matt Muniz." And so, without knowing much about them, I hated Pink Floyd, and burnouts of every description. Contempt prior to investigation -- it can strike anyone. 

A mere five years later in college I loved Floyd like the rest, but The Wall record was still a problem area due to these past associations--and that included the film, which I naturally painted in the same contemptuous colors as I painted Matt Muniz (and likely myself for not stepping into help my abused fellow nerds). Especially grating was the "We don't need no education" song, which I would skip even if it wasn't my record player, much to my fellow freshmen stoner's consternation.

It's absurd to think I would be dumb enough to waste my time disliking a song because it triggered mental associations with slack-jawed Jersey thugs, all long gone, yet the pain, if that's the word, lingered on. I eventually owned every single Floyd album, except The Wall. And of course, I preferred Syd Barrett-era Floyd more than late era, blah blah zzzzzzz.

In 1997, though, the film--directed by Alan Parker and written by Roger Waters--found its way to me via a big VH1 premiere marathon. It was on 24 hours a day and I'd done recently done a voiceover for a Curve Perfume ad ("Curve for men, Curve for women. New from Liz Claiborne"--that was ME!) which VH1 and MTV were playing--also around the clock-- during almost every break, so I watched THE WALL over and over, in a drunken haze of self-satisfaction, taking a heroic swig from my 1.75 Ten High bourbon bottle every time the Curve commercial played. In the process, THE WALL became mine,  associated with my big Curve perfume glory and whiskey exaltation. Matt Muniz association, adieu!

And now, long after the last of the Curve royalty checks has gone, I finally understand: THE WALL, for all its midnight cult cache, turns out to be one of the few movies works noticeably better with commercials, and as a relic of past association rather than 'future memory'. The Ads and station breaks help metatextualize the film's repetitive jumble of semi-autobiographical 'rock star in mental decline' vignettes, and youthful associations make one more forgiving of its glum, emotionally-arrested self-absorption.  The Wall benefits from the double-meta layering a commercial break provides. We now have a commercial movie about a man alienated by commercial society, interrupted by commercials for the new Mitsubishi Gallant. Recuperation-meets-itself on the avenue and they both disappear in a Situationist explosion... of flavor. 

If this WALL is stoner-worthy today, it's only because of its animated sequences, which are so psychedelic they go all the way back to disturbing. flowers morphing into iron hammers, flowers fields into battle-scarred war zones, marching hammers, screaming mouths, all caked in working class LSD-spiked political oppression Orwellian fascist critique as only the Brits can do it. Scenes are strung together in associative and movement/color-related fashion, stretching and collapsing time and space but stuck in a schizophrenic dissociative thought loops. There's no real arc of a narrative beyond the run of the mill nervous breakdown imagery (perhaps reflecting Syd Barrett's descent to too-much-acid insanity-something that sounds badass but is traumatizing and dispiriting). So we see avalanches of rioting kids, crashing gates to the stadium, burning cars, etc. over and over, all seemingly in some giant soundstage. and the wandering of a laddie this way and that way through the train station, envying the kids whose soldier dads do come home, over and over; the grotesque obese working class mother looming down on us like a carnival attraction; Pink as older and a rock star convalescing in his hotel room, a vacuum cleaner whirring in the hallway outside launching him into a tantrum; Pink ignoring his wife, then getting furious and surprised when she leaves him; Pink ignoring a sexy groupie in his hotel room to watch The Dam Busters instead; Pink ignoring other people etc. His entourage trying to get him in good enough shape to take the stage, etc. No one ever laughs or has a good time, unless it's gluttonously, ala the mom having tea and crumpets, or Bob Hoskins as the Cristal-sippin' manager (if this were a musical version of DEMENTIA, and it kind of is, Hoskins would be the Bruno Ve Sota --it's that kind of deal The music (jazz and theremin-like Marni Nixon vocalizing) might be better in Dementia, but that's a personal taste kind of thing). 

It's common lore paring Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz (1939), right? Never tried it but I hear its a blast. Also, it's clear how that started: a bunch of stoners watching OZ with the sound off and the album playing and catching a presumably random series of time/theme coincidences. It's proof Floyd is weird enough it goes well in any meta mash-up. And The Wall is a mash-up art waiting to happen.

That's why, then, that last night I was flipping the channel to/from The Wall and World War Two documentary, one similar (same war at least) to  The Dam Busters (Pink's favorite), possibly even using some of the same archival footage. So during the commercial breaks between aged Allied veterans talking plainly and humbly about the gore and mass slaughter of D-Day on the Military Channel, I flipped to The Wall on VH1. These old dudes in this D-Day documentary were just grateful to be alive and to have been spared--and then---commercial for a "catheter that hurts less." What a reward! I toggle back over to VH1, and there's old Geldoff smashing the telly because he's too famous and fucked-up and nobody loves him. 

I wanted to wire the ghost of Winston Churchill to rise up and kick him in the bum.

But the animation sequences indicate that, despite the rampant solipsism, the movie kicks it most acidly. As with "true" psychedelic art, the animation captures the way sensory perception, metaphor, dream symbolism, fantasy, and the horror of mortality all collapse into a single unbearably chthonic flower grinding up on its stamen and eating/fucking/killing anything it can reach.

Medical science might dismiss this kind of close reading of non-temporal reality as mere hallucination, but it's the other way around. If we can see the apple decaying in the pantry, or bursting with health fresh from the tree, see it breathing in the sunlight, aren't we, in fact, seeing more clearly than those with the illusion that is a finite, unchanging object? If we see flakes of skin and waves of electromagnetic energy rippling around our face and hands, are we 'hallucinating' or seeing what normal people screen out because it's not necessary for us to survive day-by-day? When the blinders are off due to whatever madness or drug, we see that is the perception of organic matter as inert is the hallucination --everything is rising, decaying, rising again with every breath and death. It's the sense of "permanence" and completeness--from second to second--that's the illusion. But without it, without being able to just say 'okay, that's an apple in my buddy's hand, do I want an apple, too? no - okay, move on, no reason to waste seconds being awed by its beauty' we'd be just sitting there bug-eyed all the time, like an infant looking out the window, and never get anything done. The blinders help us plow from goal to goal and meal to meal , like the mother with her crumpets, and the dimwit groupies with their hair and nails.

Another thing the film gets definitely right is the whole confusing "warm thrill of confusion / that space cadet glow" that comes from being all fucked-up in a giant sea of fucked-up people at some packed, fucked-up rock show, where you can sense the violence seething in the hormonal ebb and flow of the turned-on fucked-up crowd. One of the very first scenes of THE WALL is a bunch of stampeding, rioting fans plunging into the darkness from a broken chained-up door. Rioting - is there any more depressing example of mammalian 'spooked herd' behavior?

I know because I was in two riots, or rather was direct witness. Before the Curve commercial, after Matt Muniz, right in between there, 1987-8, I witnessed, and was almost part of, a truly horrible-to-behold-while-on-acid mass stampede of ticketless Grateful Dead fans roaring up the side entrance ramp of a West Virginia amphitheater. I was in the head of the charge to begin, part of a "who's got my miracle ticket?" posse of revelers. Unlike them, though, I didn't give a shit about getting in... I was just there for the drugs. "There's only one old lady taking tickets at Gate seven!" noted my friend when he returned from scoping it out, seeing if he could somehow sneak in. My whole ticketless broke-ass posse took off at once, me following. But as we went from a walk to a run toward that gate, everything intensified and became riot strength---stampeding (you could feel the asphalt vibrating like horses hoofs). I found myself walking off to the side of the ramp going up, not wanting to be part of it. If I hadn't left right then, I would have been trampled, thrown against the glass, arrested, or forced to listen to yet another 20 minute medley of "Aiko Aiko / Not Fade Away." 

My heightened fear of violence and general lack of interest in seeing the Dead trumped my fear of being alone that night so I was able to witness--in full on acid-just-kickin'-in hyper-real lysergic intensity--a huge explosion of violence as the crowd smashed through the gate, glass breaking, security guards and cops chasing and clubbing bloody hippy faces on the upper decks; cops grabbing kids by their tie-dyes as they tried to jump back into the crowd below; cops grabbing their long dreads in a balled up fist; screaming and yelling by everyone about everything; cops with clubs and the heavy sound of bodies smacking into pavement, blood, and then... just as quickly, it was all over and forgotten.

I couldn't believe it. Even the cops with hand-cuffed hippies in tow seemed to just go back to laughing and standing around. One busted kid had a broken nose which was why all the blood was all over his shirt, so no worries, he's fine, or so some kid explained in passing me as he slunk back down the ramp, just a nose broken --no big deal.

But I was by then super high on a lot of acid, and the violence I'd just witnessed had electrified a part of my brain usually unplugged... for a reason. It went deep into my psychic tissues and stayed there, twisting like a bloody animated nerve - my hippie flower within was pulled out by an ugly metal flying eagle... Goodbye, blue sky.

I imagine old Roger Waters had plenty of similar altered state traumas while touring with the Floyd, and probably--as I did that day--found his faith in his fellow man forever shattered like plexiglass partitions as suburban teens bumrushed the gates like the jackbooted yobbos of old. Roger, I've seen them too! The ugly mass of crank-fed Matt Munizes, chomping at the bit with potential post-show rioting. And this was on Dead tour in 80s, bro! I can only imagine how bad it was in the UK's infamous Thatcher 70s. And I've felt the ugly terror of tripping on waaaayy too much acid (because you were insecure about playing so weren't careful when some was offered by an eager fan), while trying to play electric bass as stage lights shine in your face like giant tubes of light through the cigarette smoke haze, and the flashes of audience faces and their roars of encouragement are suddenly stripped of their modern gentility by your now woefully under-shaded windows of perceptions, the primordial cannibalism inherent in their weird Dionysian consumption of your music, the ecstatic danger where they seem always about to devour you, ripping you to shreds ala Suddenly Last Summer. If your emotions weren't scattered across the endless lip of the infinite you'd be screaming and screaming until they carted you off like Syd Barrett before you. Yes, I've felt all that and that was playing trippy acid rock covers to 100-200 dancing college hippies. I can only imagine thousands of Thatcher-era druggie youth, fighting each other for prime front row positions, as you sway on your shaky thousand-toed feet, myriad effects pedals, lights, lasers, smoke and basses spread out below and around you like the controls of twenty different jet planes. 

To stay sane you have to position yourself as outside the masses, to privilege your position, make yourself the barker at the sadomasochistic carnival of torture (standing around for hours) and degradation (lining up to overpay for T-shirts just to prove you were there, in a faceless audience of thousands). You can't help them. They are moths to the flame of hell that is 70s rock-and-roll theater, a vortex of fire and deafening amplification, draining the youth and beauty of the throngs in a giant hoover, leaving toothless old junky faux-sages, incoherent even in their laughter, many of whom will later develop tinnitus from standing too close to the speakers. Still, they prove they don't need no education, and waving their dying lighters, they don't need sleep, food, a seat, or a job. And let's not forget the infamous 1979 Who concert trampling, an inspiration for--or foreshadowing--a similar stampede in THE WALL.

And that's the rub, for by far the most interesting aspect of the non-animated stuff in THE WALL is the whole bit of mixing lysergic 'horror' rock stadium mentality with Naziism-meets-Stalinism (double hammers, hold the sickle) militant pageantry. It's interesting in that respect that the only time Pink isn't a total asshole--the only time he seems at peace--is when he starts leading his little rock-and-roll Nazi rallies, lifting children, kissing young mums on the forehead, and singling out unwanted minorities for persecution from his lofty podium. Smiling, hugging, saluting his gathered throngs and otherwise firing up the engine of mobilized violence, he looks finally happy. Hey, Teacher! Dig those  KKK-Nazi-Inquisitor-witch hats!

Perhaps THE WALL then is acid cinema for those who've had a bad trip of the sort where they become a terrified, bug-eyed witness to the ugly souls of men. Compare Munch's "The Scream" with the agonized face on the WALL poster (below), and you realize the intended connection-  each a howling (open mouth = oral phase-trapped, still yowling for an absent teat, according to art therapists) witness to the hungry hungry terror that is humanity's clockwork march into self-obliteration, screaming, ever screaming for a war nurse who has five hundred more screaming patients to go before she gets to you).  If you're an acid dealer you need to avoid falling into this 'eternal now of horror' zone because it's your job to be the nurse, of sorts. The de fact triage doctor, to whom is brought brain-damaged idiots who didn't follow your strict dosage advice, thinking themselves cowboys of the beyond. But no one maybe tells you--the dealer--how much is too much when you test your shit out initially, so you kind of have to take too much just to find out how much is too much to take.  When you deal acid you deal in little perforated cards divided into 100 little perforated squares. Those squares are then each sometimes halved or even quartered-- resulting in the tiniest of measurements. Sometimes eve one full hit (single square) is a lot, even for an 'experienced' person like you. Sometimes it's not enough, even for a novice. There's no way to tell how strong or clean it is without plunging in. You are your own experimental subject and, like in a Roger Corman movie, that can sometimes leave you running up and down the halls attacking people making animal noises.

I've only had the problem around five or sixty times, but they burned holes in my soul I doubt even death will heal.

But I assure you: if you can make it through that hell (hopefully the liquor stores are open), the big Pink Munch scream overload, when when you finally come down, or up, you have the thousand yard stare. And only then do Buddha and Jesus write your name down in their date planners. Except they'll never call you, because you cheated. You brought your ego along, like contraband. 

THE WALL is thus a self-glorifying 'bad trip' acid movie,  for those who know the pain of having taken far too much of it, or any addicts of anything, or agoraphobes, longing for the "comfortably numb" feeling of being left alone to watch old war movies on TV all night, instead of having to go to the show. Oh to hide in the comfort of the dark, fumbling desperately for any full or half-empty bottle without cigarettes in it, still unable to ever fully dim the sensory overload in full, but taking gladly the devil's bargain of avoiding the eternal scream of the real for the temporary relief of the imaginary 

Whatever else you want to call it --insipid, self-pitying, grandiose, gloomy, depressing pretentious, self-aggrandizing --THE WALL is an undeniably effective work of both post-paisley propaganda. In uniting the doom-bent punks, posers and metalheads with the hippies and acid lovers, Waters essentially united the whole of your freshman dorm floor's potsmokers in solidarity over a single double album's opened joint rolling gatefold. Waters probably could have mobilized them all into an army--what Craig Finn calls a 'unified scene'--and incited the Matt Munizes of the world to rise up and kill their teachers and burn their math books, this time for real. Except you know, it's hard organizing the stoned to anything except maybe pool for a keg.

Roger didn't even get that far. Instead he believed his own press agent, bickered with the rest of the band and finally left the Floyd altogether, presuming it would collapse into dust without him. He's better off. Maybe. Can fiddle around and occasionally issue strange solo albums (likely destined for the cut-out bins, but so are we all) and putting on strange multi-media Wall performances in Europe). It's gone from being the emblematic pinnacle of self-indulgent moping and grandiose anarchy and become establishment and rich with synergy and trippy nostalgia. but it's still relevant and powerful. Like Margot Channing, that response may be maudlin and full of self pity--but it's magnificent.

If you don't like THE WALL, maybe it's not because it reminds you of Matt Muniz or your past rock glory and boozy drift into oblivion, maybe it just reminds you that even frosty remoteness is just another pose, that a 'reachable remote' is an oxymoron, that as fast as you might flip between channels, between analog rock concerts and HD WW2 documentaries, no remote reaches far enough to turn off that fat old sun in the sky / that's falling / right down on your shaved-ass head. So grit those teeth, son. This huts you more than it does me.