This review may contain spoilers.

*I should note a couple things. Firstly, I’m not talking about the whole film in this entry, I’m focusing on one character and a recurring motif that relates to said character. Secondly, this is an extremely spoiler heavy entry on both the film as well as a Pink Floyd album. If you haven’t seen the film or listened to the album, you probably won’t get anything out of this besides a ruined experience and someone else’s perspective from the internet stuck in your head. So do yourself a favour by watching and listening first before reading this. Who knows? You might see it differently from how I do.*

“Together we stand, divided we fall”

I want to take this time to talk about Pink Floyd, specifically the second half of The Wall. It opens up after the album’s protagonist (solely referred to as Pink in one song, and therefore will be referred to as such from this point on) has completely isolated himself from everyone else around him after completing work on his metaphorical wall. However, he still cries out for somebody to hear him and help him, even though “the wall was too high … no matter how he tried, he could not break free”. This is Hey You, the fourteenth track on the album as well as the song that Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) claims as his own in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. I know this is not a novel concept or anything, but reading more into it, I found this really fascinating: in Baumbach’s film, revolving around a family struggling as the parents are divorcing, Eisenberg’s Walt is no more different than Pink, making Walt able to relate to the cry for help that is Floyd’s song.

Looking at them as far as their prior history is concerned, both have familial issues. In Pink’s case, he has no real father figure and was raised by a single, overprotective mother whom he looks back at with disdain. Walt, on the other end, is struggling to adapt to his parent’s divorce, therefore feeling the need to side with his father, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) instead of his mother, Joan (Laura Linney), looking at her with similar disdain. While both family issues are vastly different, they share a lot of similar characteristics. Both loathe their mother at one point or another and even if for different reasons (Pink felt too sheltered and Walt doesn’t approve of his mother’s affairs with other men), both mothers seem to be looking out for the best interests of their sons. Another interesting common factor the two characters share is that both of their fathers have never really been there for either of them. For Pink, his father was killed during the war when he was very young (see Another Brick in the Wall - Part 1). For Walt, it is revealed closer to the end that his father was never all that prominent in his life. For example, when Walt is in counseling, he tells a story about seeing the Squid and Whale exhibit at a young age and being scared. The thing to point out here is that while his mother was there and comforting him, he cannot remember where his father was at the time.

Additionally, Walt wants to be like Bernard and it clearly shows when he plagiarizes a lot of his father's ideas about Metamorphosis when discussing it with a classmate and calls This Side of Paradise "minor Fitzgerald" in the same way Bernard calls A Tale of Two Cities "minor Dickens". He does this solely to feel equal to his father who is implied to think rather lowly of him, especially when he was younger. For instance, when Bernard is in the hospital, he says that Walt was a very emotional kid when he was younger in a rather patronizing tone. Basically, Walt believes if he comes off as more thoughtful in his literary readings, Bernard would play a bigger part in his life. The idolizing of patriarchal figures is also apparent in Pink's life as well. While he doesn't outright steal his father's ideas and pass them off as his own, Pink does admire and idolize his father whom he never knew through having an anti war stance found in Bring the Boys Back Home. While he admires his father's courage, he believes that if the war never happened, Pink's father would be a bigger part of his life.

Another thing I had noticed, speaking of Walt's discussions on literature with Bernard, there's a scene where Bernard is asking why schools teach the worst books from great authors. The reason why I bring this up, and I know it's a bit of a stretch, but it kind of parallels perfectly with the anti-organized education theme of Another Brick in the Wall - Part 2. In the song, Pink recalls his abusive teachers, symbolizing organization, order and routine to the extreme, therefore not allowing the students to branch out and experience more. Bernard's comments also represent that order in a less extreme fashion. Basically, he's saying that the routine of making students read the worst work of great writers is preventing students from seeing why these writers are hailed with their superior work and encourages Walt to experience more from these authors he's studying.

Anyway, back to Walt.

Where the two also share similarities is in their views of women. I've already discussed how both characters feel about their mothers, but both of them also view women as either backstabbers or objects to be used as they please. Now before I go any further, I should say that I'm not condoning or justifying their actions, but merely examining their characteristics. Of course the biggest instance of betrayal that Walt feels is in his mother having an affair during her marriage with Bernard, but there is one other moment in the film. In the third act, Walt walks in on Bernard and one of his students, Lili (Anna Paquin) during an intimate moment which stuns Walt. This shock doesn't come from seeing his dad with another woman or about to have sex, but from feeling like Bernard stole her from Walt as Baumbach clearly hints at him being romantically interested in her. In Pink's case, he finds this betrayal in his wife. At the very end of Young Lust, there's a moment where he calls home to check up on her and a man answers the phone each time, implying that she is cheating on him. Despite being rather traditional, they (hypocritically) also see women as merely objects. In the case of Pink, he sleeps around with a lot of different women, which is depicted in the rest of Young Lust and One of My Turns, and Walt constantly looks at other women and flirts with Bernard's student while being in a relationship with a classmate, Sophie (Halley Feiffer) at that point. Both of them have an extremely shallow and misogynistic view on women and it shows in their maturity levels.

Through all of these similarities is where the biggest one stands: both of them lose touch of themselves as well as the people surrounding them. Both of them become more reserved as time goes on and both share a seldom but strong temper. One of My Turns begins with a prostitute trying to start a conversation with a non-responsive Pink until he finally blows up by trashing his apartment and scaring her off. For Walt, he becomes more quiet around most, but with the ones he is close with, he either comes off as distant at the least or blows up at the most. He never opens up to anyone until he has to see a councillor near the end of the film, bottling up his emotions until he finally explodes at certain people including his brother, Frank (Owen Kline) and Joan, among others. This also shows how they have both lost touch of themselves, abandoning any sense of personal happiness due to their issues. They both feel alone with their thoughts that they just continue to dwell on internally until it all comes out in anger and frustration all while refusing to open up due to insecurity and feeling like nobody will understand.

In losing touch with everything, the two of them isolate themselves, and this is where Hey You comes in. On the album and in the film, it plays as a cry for help by both of the characters. Walt claims to have written the song when performing it for his parents and in the talent show before getting caught and sent to counseling. Pink sings it in order to get the attention of somebody or anybody to at least talk to him. They both come to realize that they are struggling to cope with their issues and clearly realize they need help before it’s too late, leading both to realize they need to tear down the walls that divide them from everyone else. For both of them, their walls represent fear, isolation and insecurity and while both are eventually torn down internally, how they are torn down is where the two really differ. For Pink, it’s unsure how he really tore it down, but from The Trial, we at least know that he comes to terms with his internal demons and feels that he deserves to be “exposed before [his] peers”. For Walt, he realizes who was really there for him the whole time when discussing his experience at the Squid and Whale exhibit. After coming to terms with himself, he tears down his wall by visiting the same Squid and Whale exhibit that scared him so much as a kid, symbolizing him facing his fears and insecurities, therefore opening himself up again.

As I said earlier, this isn’t a novel concept as I’m sure someone has already discussed this at one point or another. That said, I found this to be the most interesting and thought provoking of them all. Walt claiming that he wrote Hey You makes quite a bit of sense as he sees a lot of himself, for better and worse, in the protagonist of the album the song came from. This adds a lot of tragedy to an already depressing film while also making Walt complex, incredibly flawed and therefore human.