Years ago a professor at SMU held a showing of The Wall in the common area of my dorm and afterwards opened the room to discussion of the movie.
What was interesting to me was that all the replies were based on the album that preexisted the movie and not on the movie and I pointed this out, suggesting that maybe when they made the movie they wanted it to say something on its own, to stand on its own.
I pointed out that the movie did not really show the womanizing aspect of the song but instead showed the lyrics to be those of a man betrayed. Then I dropped a big one about the fascism in the movie, further suggesting that it was trying to warn that when a coming generation decides their parent’s generation is corrupt they will blindly turn to the things that their parents said were bad and decide that those must be good. In the movie that was fascism.
The professor not only found the analysis scary but was willing to say so plainly.
In real life the radicals in the West may represent that.
They hate capitalism which they arguably associate with their parents which has given them lives of prosperity and love socialism. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
But who really are these radicals in the West? They are not, to borrow from Mel Brooks, dumb scum who are so poor that they don’t even have their own language, just these outrageous accents … no, they are the pampered indoctrinated, educated and maleducated, whose outrageous accent is a language of radicalism that is entirely of their own collective making (the language alone would enforce conformity to some measure).
The sympathy and empathy that they wear on their sleeves are too often those where people assume suffering and injustice by proxy. Those who have never suffered claim the suffering of those who have … and they use it as an excuse to engage in an ideology that the folks who once may have suffered were probably too poor, too focused on making a living, to even bother to entertain.
Excellent reply. I especially liked the word ‘maleducated’.