The movie Pink Floyd The Wall is an interesting fusion of rock and roll music and cinema. It was a groundbreaking movie in its day. At the time it was revolutionary to combine these two mediums, before the prolific expansion of MTV and prevalence of a music video following. Thus the product of this fusion of mediums is an amazing and complex amalgam of music, lyrics and images. Seeking to understand the complex assault of symbols this movie mounts against the viewer is a daunting task, and in this essay I will only scratch the surface of what this work is trying to say. To best understand the film, one must see the experience of The Wall as a shamanic journey of the hero of the film, Pink, to a supernatural and mythical landscape (inside the wall). It is here that he encounters events and spirits and interacts with them. By understanding the movie The Wall as a shamanic journey, one can apply various theories about religion to better understand the phenomena of Pink’s journey.

Being a religious experience, this shamanic journey reveals not only insights into personal religious experience, but also insights into how society can shape those experiences. The theories of Freud and Levi-Strauss reveal the most about individual factors, while the theories of Durkheim and Marx provide the best explanations of societal factors. In the end, I hope to illustrate the main themes of Pink’s experiences as well as share my own interpretation of The Wall.

            There are several aspects of the film that suggest that Pink’s experience is shamanic voyage. The film characterizes Pink as possessing several traits that would predispose him as a shaman. Pink is a rock star, and as such he possesses the artistic creativity, charisma and ability to perform dramatically that a shaman possesses. From the lyrics of a song, the audience learns that Pink has also suffered from severe childhood illness, a factor associated with shamanic ability. In addition to these predisposing factors, Pink is currently engaging in the use of mind altering drugs (in the film there are examples of cannabis, hash, and heroin consumption).

The images and characters that accompany Pink in the film are very surreal, and at times psychedelic, which is what one might expect from a shamanic vision. Likewise, they way in which the hero Pink interacts with these spirits (which are paralleled by people and parts of his own personality back in the natural world) in this supernatural world is essentially the same as in other shamanic traditions such as the Cuna. It is the culmination of these factors that leads to the conclusion that what Pink is experiencing in the film is a shamanic experience.

Now that it is established that Pink is experiencing a shamanic vision, an evaluation of the substance of the vision can be carried out, using various interpretative theories. The first theory to apply to this voyage is that of Freud and his psychodynamic model. Using the lens of Freud, we see that the central driving force behind Pink’s experience is his relationship with his mother and his lack of a father. In the opening scenes of the movie, we see the death of Pink’s father in WWII. The film progresses to a scene showing Pink (as a young boy) and his mother in a church, praying near a plaque dedicated to the men lost in the war. Lyrics of a song hang in the background: "daddy what d'ya leave behind for me?"; the answer being his mother. Clearly this is the foundation of the oedipal complex forming in the young Pink. This complex further develops during the songs “Mother” and “Thin Ice”, where we learn through the lyrics that Pink's mother has projected not only her fears and insecurities upon Pink but also transferred her needs for companionship. Thus Pink’s mother offers him what he desires through the oedipal complex in exchange for accepting her oppressive motherly protectiveness. Pink is also active in the development of this complex, taking on the role of his father, illustrated during a scene where he finds and puts on his father’s war uniform, thus becoming his father.

Using this foundation we can see how the oedipal complex has lead Pink into a world of inner dementia, the world of the shaman and spirits. Freud directly addresses this phenomenon in his book Totem and Taboo: "Sprits and demons, … are only projections of man's own emotional impulses. He turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental processes again outside himself." (115) Thus, according to Freud, the shamanic world is a creation of Pink’s subconscious mind, a neurotic supernatural landscape peopled with spirits that embody Pink’s psychological conflicts.

            Freud has allowed us to understand a potential mechanism of causation for Pink's experience. The realization of this causative mechanism leads to an examination of the potential function of Pink's voyage. Levi-Strauss provides us with an interesting framework to explain the function of the experience. He suggests, in his writings about the shamanic narratives of the Cuna Indians, that shamanic voyages are a form of naturalistic psychotherapy. Since Pink's psychic conflicts are a product of Freudian complexes, it is only natural to assume that Pink is in need of psychotherapy.

Levi-Straus summarizes the similarities between shamanic voyages and psychotherapy as follows: "in both cases the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistance which have remained unconscious, owing … to their repression" (324). Thus, by bringing to a conscious level the conflicts of one’s psyche, in Pink’s case his oedipal complex, the participant is able to manipulate them in order to resolve them. This resolution is done through the manipulation of symbols representing the conflicts.

In the film, this manipulation of symbols occurs climatically during the trial scene. In this scene, Pink is confronted with the major conflicts of his life, personified as grotesque cartoons of his mother (oedipal complex), school headmaster (failure to find a father figure), and wife (failed marriage). The film reaches its end, and the conflicts their resolution, as Pink is expelled from the supernatural world of inside the wall and is forced to deal with these conflicts as they exist in the real world and not as inside his head. Thus, like psychotherapy, Pink's shamanic voyage is an exploration of symbols, where he as the participant attempts to understand and resolve his psychological conflicts.   

            The experience of The Wall speaks not only of personal factors that influence religious experience but also of the contribution that society makes in the formation of them. The film, and subsequently Pinks shamanic experience, can conversely say something about society. It is here, at the interplay of society and religion, that we can apply the theories of Durkheim and Marx.

In Durkheim's view, the force that drives religious experience comes from society. That is to say, religion, and religious experience, is the result of direct input of societal factors. We can see how several areas of Pink’s vision reflect the society he is a product of. Reflections of the post-war British society that Pink grew up in are seen in the characters that populate Pink's supernatural world, the most outstanding of them being the school headmaster, the hammer leader, and the faceless beings/ragdolls. Each of these represents an aspect of the dominant value in British society of conformity.

 The school headmaster appears in the film along with the now famous lyrics of “Another Brick in the Wall”: "we don’t need no education … no dark sarcasm in the classroom … we don’t need no thought control". This is clearly an expression of Pink’s reaction to what he felt was an oppressive childhood, and the attempts of the British society to force conformity. This forced conformity is climaxed at the end of this scene when the school children are turned into faceless ragdolls and ground into a uniform sausage by a machine made of hammers.

In a reaction to this forced conformity, Pink transforms himself into the hammer leader, an alter ego of his rockstar self, who, not willing to conform himself, turns into an instrument of conformity, the hammer. This is a reflection of how society uses those with unconforming charisma to lead the masses to conformity, once again, a strong post-war British value. However, in the end, Pink himself is reduced to the apathetic faceless ragdoll of his school days, confirming in the end the strong and final value of                conformity. So, as suggested by Durkheim, strong societal values can have a hefty influence on religious experience.

This repressive value of conformity leads into Marx's views on religion. Marx, in his essay “On the Jewish Question”, puts forth the idea that religion can be used as a stepping stone towards emancipation from a repressive state or ideology. He likens the process to a snake losing its skin, each time removing the mask of a current ideology to see its true face. In the case of The Wall, Pink sees his society for what it is; a fascistic and conformity centered society. This process of using religious vision to emancipate one’s self is summarized by Marx: "Religion is precisely the recognition of man by detour through an intermediary." (45) It follows that Pink is using his vision as a ladder to escape the pit of repression, but must discard it to reach the desired goal, and at the end of the film he does indeed discard the vision when he tears down the wall.  

In my view, the film The Wall is a story of a man, Pink, who is suffering from severe depression. He is at a stage in his life where his marriage has failed, he is dissatisfied with his career and wishes only to withdraw into a fantasy world inside his head, inside the wall. This fantasy world takes the form of a shamanic voyage where he attempts to come to grips with himself and the current state of his life. His crisis has lead him to ask the fundamental question of "who am I, and why?" Pink seeks to answer this question through his shamanic quest. Like on any other quest, he encounters many obstacles and creatures in his pursuit, and finds not one answer but many.

This quest can best be understood as a series of questions and answers, beginning with the regression of Pink into a child and ending in the death of the old Pink and the rebirth of the new. The first question Pink asks himself in the quest is: "Is what I have become a result of not having a father?" To answer this question, Pink travels to the death of his father as well as his own birth and childhood. Several scenes show Pink as a young boy searching for his father; at a playground, at a railway station, and finally in the trenches of a battlefield. The search yields the answer that the absence of a father is "just another brick in the wall". Pink continues to ask: "Is what I have become a result of having an overprotective mother?" Once again he comes to the conclusion that it too is "just another brick in the wall".

Next Pink asks "was it society, was it school?" To answer this question he returns to his days as a schoolboy and sees that his teachers were just as oppressed by society as he was. This is illustrated by the scene when the school headmaster’s wife forces him to swallow a hard piece of meat, with the overlay of the school headmaster beating a boy at school. Once again Pink answers: "all in all they are all just bricks in the wall".

The boy Pink then visits himself as he currently sits: a depressed, drug using rock star, and at this point Pink realizes that the wall is complete and he has achieved a state where he is "comfortably numb". Pink has settled on an answer to his overall question, that he is one of the faceless masses. This answer does not hold for long though, for he is dragged off by his handlers (agent, doctor and roadies) to a concert. He is transformed from the faceless being into the hammer leader as the limousine takes him to his concert, providing him with a new answer to his question: it is you who has made you what you are - an agent of an oppressive society.

The scene that follows shows the death of the three alter egos of Pink. The scene is played out on a soccer pitch, three bodies hang from the goal as the young boy Pink walks across the field. These three lifeless bodies are those of the faceless Pink, the depressed Pink, and the hammer leader Pink. Following this scene is the final act of the movie - the trial. It is here that, in Pink's mind, the evidence of his quest must be weighed and a sentence passed. Once again we see his school headmaster (a puppet), his wife (a flame haired monster) and his mother (a vagina-like flower and the wall) representing parts of his life that he attributes to his current depression. The verdict of the trial, the answer to Pink’s question, and the solution to his crisis, is nothing more than to tear down the wall. The answer to who he is lies not in the isolation of his mind but in his life in the real world.

In the process of trying to understand Pink’s experience in The Wall, it has been seen that we must apply theoretical systems of explanation to make sense of the chaotic onslaught that this movie undertakes against the senses. This application of theories provides an ordered scheme in which to place the various symbols presented in the film. Ironically, this is the same process that the hero Pink was undertaking in the film. He, like myself, has tried to understand the complexities of experience and life by placing them in a symbolic framework that gives structure and meaning to the madness of reality. It is interesting that the fantastic visions Pink used to understand his life are akin to the theories we use as anthropologists to understand the complexities of religious experience.