Pink Floyd: The Wall
Pink is a rock star, one of several reasons behind his apparent depressive and detached emotional state. He is first seen in an unkempt hotel room, motionless and expressionless, watching television while the Vera Lynn recording of "The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot" plays. It is later revealed that Pink's father, a British soldier, was killed in action while defending the Anzio bridgehead during World War II, in Pink's infancy.
In a flashback, Pink is a young English boy growing up in the early 1950s. Throughout his childhood, Pink longs for a father figure. He discovers a scroll from "kind old King George" and other relics from his father's military service and death, placing a bullet on the track of an oncoming train. At school, he is caught writing poems in class and humiliated by the teacher. To the tune of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", Pink imagines a surrealistically oppressive school system in which children fall into a meat grinder. The children then rise in rebellion and destroy the school, carrying the Teacher away to an unknown fate. Pink is also negatively affected by his overprotective mother. Such traumatic experiences are represented as "bricks" in the metaphorical wall he constructs around himself that divides him from society.
As an adult, Pink eventually marries, but he and his wife soon grow apart. While he is in the United States on tour, Pink learns that his wife is having an affair. He turns to a willing groupie, whom he brings back to his hotel room only to trash it in a fit of violence, terrifying the groupie out of the room.
Pink slowly begins to lose his mind to metaphorical "worms". He shaves all his body hair and, while watching The Dam Busters on television, morphs into a neo-Nazi alter-ego. Pink's manager, along with the hotel manager and some paramedics, discover Pink unresponsive and inject him with drugs to enable him to perform.
Pink fantasises that he is a dictator and his concert is a neo-Nazi rally. His followers proceed to attack ethnic minorities, and Pink holds a rally in suburban London, singing "Waiting for the Worms". The scene is intercut with images of animated marching hammers that goose-step across ruins. Pink then stops hallucinating and screams "Stop!" He then takes refuge in the toilets at the concert venue, reciting poems.
In a climactic animated sequence, Pink, depicted as a small, almost inanimate rag doll, is on trial, and his sentence is "to be exposed before [his] peers." The judge gives the order to "tear down the wall". Following a prolonged silence, the wall is smashed.
Several children are seen cleaning up a pile of debris after an earlier riot, with a freeze-frame on one of the children emptying a Molotov cocktail.
dark, avant garde, depressing, psychological, dramatic, cult, violence, flashback, insanity, psychedelic, romantic, historical, prank