The stage started out with a half-built wall of white bricks, onto which was projected a series of images that complemented the music. The wall was built up more and more over the course of the first act, making the projections more and more prominent, until the musicians were entirely hidden from view by the start of the second act. They played "Hey You" from behind the wall, and it was riveting --- despite or probably because of the fact that I couldn't see them at all. And at the end, as the music rose to a scream and we all chanted "Tear down the wall!", they actually did, tumbling it over onto the front of the stage so that we could reunite for the finale. It was spectacular, in every sense of the word.
It was also the first time that I think I fully realized the scope of the piece. I hadn't listened to it in a while, certainly not in its entirety, and it was amazing to see it in something like the way it was originally intended. It also drove home more viscerally than ever before how darkly bitter and cynical the whole thing is. The music, and particularly the images, express Pink's disillusionment and alienation so powerfully, speaking of the dissatisfaction with modern life post-World War Two, and with the Vietnam-era politics in which it was composed. Some of those themes were a bit more subtle in the original version, I think, but here they were right in the forefront. Projected onto the wall were images of fallen soldiers and civilians from all the wars of the twentieth and (now, tragically) twenty-first centuries. Stark black-and-white images of warplanes dropping bombs gave way to warplanes dropping dollar signs, crosses, stars and crescents, stars of David, and the Shell logo. A series of pictures of soldiers, capitalist pigs (literally), and dictators showed them wearing white iPod earphones, accompanies by the words "iProtect," "iLead," and "iTeach;" a picture of a graveyard was labeled "iPay." The music asked, "Mother, should I trust the government?" Waters answered with black script on the white wall: "No fucking way."
I wonder how many people in the audience really understood, or wanted to understand, these connections. Waters certainly does; there's a very interesting statement on his website about why he decided to do this tour now and how he sees this piece engaging with today's world. But the pot-smoking drunkards in tour t-shirts, yelling lyrics and cheering at every fascist image? Not so much. If only could see the irony. How depressing.
But it was also, unexpectedly, incredibly moving. One series of videos showed children being reunited with their soldier parents, and one of these in particular moved me to tears. The video showed a little blond girl, maybe eight or nine years old, in a pink shirt with bangle bracelets on her wrists. She looks out expectantly, somewhere to the left of the camera, fidgeting on her chair as children do. Suddenly she sees what she's looking for. The camera stays on her face as she clasps her hands over her mouth and trembles with pent-up emotion, smiling, then crying out, then finally dissolving into tears as her uniformed father picks her up and hugs her. I can't get her image out of my head today, but I'm thankful for it, for its naked display of something so terribly and unabashedly human.
Because in the end, after all, The Wall is a story of hope. Pink tears down the wall and faces the world --- maybe not because he really wants to, but because he has to. True, it's an ugly and sometimes unloving world, but it's also a world where good things can happen. More importantly, it's the only one we've got.
Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all
Together we stand, divided we fall
Roger Waters
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Shoutout to David, who got the tickets, and to Bob, who first introduced me to the wonderful experience of Pink Floyd.
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