Headscratchers / The Wall

• This is a very minor nitpick, but why are there helicopter noises at the start of Happiest Days of Our Lives? Other than Rule of Cool?
  • You got me. But in The Movie they are replaced with the train sounds, which make sense in context, at least.
  • I think they put the sound as a segue from Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1) to Happiest Days of Our Lives, because it was supposed to represent Pink's father dying at war, but that's just my opinion. I'm sure The Other Wiki has some info on this.
  • The teacher was in the war. It gets more into this in a couple songs on The Final Cut.
  • Probably to illustrate the oppressiveness of the education system that Pink goes through, as the train Pink sees passing by him in the tunnel filled with putty-faced passengers in the movie with intercuts of the teacher saying, "Hey! Yes, you! Stand still, laddie!" is supposed to do the same.
  • To add to the above RE: the oppressiveness of the education system, the implication is that the teachers are literally flying around in helicopters above the students, as if they were riot police doing crowd control or an oppressive army or something.
• Other strange transitions: telephone sounds at the end of "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2," and airport sounds between "Goodbye Blue Sky" and "Empty Spaces." What do they mean?
  • The telephone sound effects are Pink trying to get through to his wife (out of guilt?) and failing. The airport sound effects might be Pink going from London (on the bad-ass Concorde, no doubt) to Los Angeles for a gig.
    • I always thought that the telephone sounds were a lead-in to Mother; where his mom is trying to find out where he is.
  • Whoever wrote the above idea just made me think of something: Pink's remembering all the "bricks in the wall." The empty dial tone represents every time he could have had some real dialogue (in hindsight) but which never went anywhere. He's calling out and getting no reply.
• This is more of a nitpick on the movie. After Pink tore down the wall, where did he go? Last we hear of him is during the wall's collapse he screams.
  • It's left up to you, the audience, to decide.
  • The Final Cut implies, at the very least, that he didn't kill himself.
  • The ambiguity is the point, as mentioned above, but since the point of The Wall was to distance Pink from humanity to prevent himself from feeling pain, the implication is that he's finally letting himself feel this pain, and thus express it, as part of his attempts at healing himself and rejoining humanity.
• "Mother should I run for president?" What president is he talking about? I would assume the president of the United States but since he's British he couldn't run for president even if he immigrated and got US citizenship because it's a law that any person running for president has to be born in the US. And the United Kingdom doesn't have a president, they have a Prime Minister.
  • I just kind of assumed that all of the questions that Pink asks his mom at the beginning of "Mother" were coming from a younger Pink, who probably didn't understand that he couldn't become president eventually. The POTUS tends to be looked at as someone with a lot of power (not without good reason) while most people can't even name the current English PM (unless they're from the UK).
  • Some level of poetic license must be granted here. This is still a song, after all, and there is a point where critiquing the "accuracy" of the lyrics risks becoming tediously pedantic and over-literal. Waters is going for the best term that expresses the idea that he's going for with this part of the lyric (childlike innocence/naivete and trust in political figures) while still fitting in with the rhyming scheme that he's working with (the following line is "Mother, should I trust the government?", with which "prime minister" wouldn't work at all). You just have to go with it on this one.
• Why is there an overturned truck in the end of the movie? Come to think about it, why is there even a literal wall in the movie?
  • It's called "The Wall." You really can't not have a wall in it! Kidding aside, though, it's an artifact of the original premise, which married concert footage with motion-picture segments.
  • To add to the above, the wall in the film isn't a literal wall, any more than, say, the shadow of Pink's wife turning into all those...things is meant to be taken literally. The wall in the film essentially serves the same function as the wall that gets built onstage during the live concerts: it's simply a visual representation of the central metaphor.
  • As to the question of the overturned truck (to be specific, it's actually a milk float), it's implied that the very last scene is taking place either after a bombing raid during the Blitz or else in the (potentially imagined) aftermath of Pink's (potentially imagined) fascist riot. The overturned milk float isn't the point; the point is that the community, led by the children, are all coming together to clear away the destruction that the overturned float is just one aspect of. Everything in the final scene is just serving to hammer home the overarching points of the album/movie about isolating yourself in response to trauma not being the best idea in the world as well as the need to identify and break cycles of violence and abuse (since the final image of the film is a boy who resembles the youngest Pink disassembling a Molotov cocktail).

---