This movie has me crying from the 2nd song thru the end, w/ the exception of during the hammer segments before & including Run Like Hell. I identify w/ Pink to a degree and feel his pain & withdrawal so strongly and I feel like I suffer through his life with him.
Anyone else have similar reactions?
No. This might be embarrassing but the closest I came to crying was when his pet rat died lol.
shareI believe the film and the album emotionally touches many aspects of those who have experienced the similarities in the screenplay, music and lyrics of "The Wall".
it's almost as if the album and the film is written as a martyr of memoirs that many can relate to in their life.
I know I can relate.
the album and the film is 75% accurate in depicting the events of my life.
what about yours ?
While this movie hasn't actually made me lose any tears, it has produced many highly emotional moments, particularly when young Pink at the playground adopts the older man as a stand-in father, to the point where the adult has to eventually push him away.
But I have another emotional response to this movie, one that's not related to the story, stemming from the time when I watched a VHS copy with my best friend back in 1985 or thereabouts (we were both in our mid-teens).
I had seen the movie a few times prior, but my friend hadn't, so this was my moment to share it with him. I thought he would love it, but he totally and unexpectedly flipped out during the "Comfortably Numb" scene, where Pink was stretchered away while writhing about and hallucinating. The quick takes of the squirming maggots particularly set him off, and his reactions got so extreme and distressed (he was jumping around shouting "Stop it stop it stop it!") that I had to shut it off.
His response was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was as if some of the imagery had bypassed his rational and analytical thought processes to yank directly at the heart of his primal emotional center. He wasn't speaking properly, his face was crazed, and his motions were frantic and random. But after I turned off the movie, he recovered in about twenty minutes, and it was like it had never happened.
Unfortunately things went worse for my friend, and about ten years later he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It resulted in years of hardship, culminating with his eventual suicide in early 2012.
Considering that "The Wall" was inspired by the life of Syd Barrett -- who himself was believed to have suffered from schizophrenia -- I can't help but wonder how accurately (even if abstractly) the imagery and narrative was in portraying Pink's mental illness from a first-person perspective, and that it was resonating with my friend's own nascent condition in a way that was uniquely and intensely personal.
So now I can't watch "The Wall" without thinking about my friend, and what might've been going on in his head during his final days.