David Bowie’s vision of the dictator as the prototype of the rock star finds its cinematic expression in the character of Pink in Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall. If Bowie in his cocaine-addled delirium thought he could make a good Hitler, Pink, portrayed by Bob Geldof, puts flesh to the idea. The parallels are manifold: drugs, isolation, paranoia, psychosis, severe emotional pain. Just like Bowie’s LA period, The Wall portrays its protagonist’s slow descent into madness, his entrapment in a locus terribilis. Even the aesthetic decisions are similar. Both the Thin White Duke and Pink in his fascist persona (mask) resort to austere monochromatic attire: black, white and some red.

Like any fascist leader, before taking the stage Pink kisses and holds babies and shakes the hands of hysterical mothers. Upon reaching the podium his body language is unmistakable: he is firm and in full rapport with his audience, but his voice is not a politician’s, its the liberating (or enslaving?) scream of a rock star. Roger Waters came to his idea of a fascist rocker during a specially hard time in his life, the road that led to this conclusion was not aesthetic as in the case of Bowie, but resulted from the kind of relationship that a star establishes with his audience. Waters felt that the Animals tour, which had taken the band out of a relatively small music scene and started an era of arena concerts, had disconnected him from his audience.

“For some time Waters had been musing on the strong parallels between fascist dictators of old and the kind of stadium experience that rock bands generate.”¹ In time, the rift between the band and the audience produced deep feelings of hatred towards the public, which by then he had begun to regard as a herd ready to fulfill the orders and wishes of a leader. The emotional decomposition of Pink, portrayed in the putrefaction of his body during one of the most intense scenes of the film, results in the appearance, the birth so to speak, of the fascist rock star. For Waters these kind of “fascist feelings develop from [feelings of] isolation.”²

The film version of The Wall brings to light the sovereign lineage of the rock star. In it we can see the transformation of the celebrity, once a dandy-commodity, into a dictator-commodity that reveals pop culture as a locus terribilis of sorts. This circumstance is particularly evident when Pink demands of his audience that they identify and discriminate people based on their race, sexual orientation or religion; the antechamber to a concentration camp:

Are there any queers in the audience tonight? Get ’em up against the wall (Chorus: against the wall). There’s one in the spotlight, he don’t look right. Have him up against the wall (against the wall) And that one looks Jewish. And that one’s a coon. Who let all this riffraff into the room? There’s one smoking a joint, and that one’s got spots. If I had my way, I’d have all of you shot.³

The audience’s reaction is collective frenzy and thundering applause, not unlike a Trump rally, another terrible place. The dictator/rock star, like any other sovereign, knows how to exempt himself from the violence provoked by his spectacle, which is always directed towards the “other.” He is perpetually within and without the circle, the paradeisos, he has created for his audience.

With Bowie and Pink a new type of sovereign becomes evident, one hidden behind the scenes since the Regency: a plastic dictator who is simultaneously a consumer good. This new sovereign must not necessarily be a political figure. Like every celebrity—starting with Beau Brummell—he is a fashion arbiter and autocrat, a lifestyle dictator. The origin of this transformation lies in the character of object and commodity that the celebrity acquired during the 19th century (0.19, 2.8, 2.10, 2.11, 2.12). The man turned into “a piece of boudoir furniture” of Balzac announces his appearance. The formula of this transformation could be summarized thus: whoever disappears as a life-form from the polis, reappears as consumer good in the market.

The analogy between political leader and star-celebrity is made plain: if the sovereign governs the political locus terribilis, the celebrity serves as sovereign of the locus terribilis emerged from the media establishment. Despite its apolitical nature, this transformation tells us something important about the political and economic structures of the West. Whereas in leftist regimes, in the absence of a thriving market economy, sociopolitical power must necessarily be exercised through the cult to a single sovereign figure (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceaușescu, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-Un…), in democratic regimes the same power is transferred to the market, where it is disseminated throughout the commodities and, more importantly, throughout the celebrities, which are nothing but human-commodities (2.10). The celebrity is the hidden point of union between the so-called democratic and totalitarian states (0.10).

Apart from the dictator-star, The Wall inquires into other facets of sovereignty. England is a huge machinery that sends its young to their deaths; the school a sausage factory that derives its meat from students. The schoolmaster—a petty dictator abused by his elderly mother—would seem an echo of Hébert, Alfred Jarry’s teacher and inspiration for Ubu Roi (1.18). The overtly anal nature of the trial to which Pink is subjected at the end of the film is reminiscent of Jarry’s eschatological humor flavored with Kafka’s legal claustrophobia. In fact, The Wall can be seen as an inverted image of Before the Law (0.9). While in Kafka’s parable the man from the country remains paralyzed by the openness of the gates of the law, the stretch of wall that surrounds Pink during his trial is the perfect invitation to break through the threshold, to abandon the locus terribilis once and for all.

Paradoxically, it is the judge-anus, psychological incarnation of justice and sovereignty, who not only pronounces Pink guilty but gives the perplexing verdict:

Since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fear, I sentence you to be exposed before you peers. Tear down the wall! Tear down the wall!⁴

The terrible place is a sovereignly ordained sentence, but it can also be a protection from the brutal certainties of the real world.

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1. Cliff Jones, Echoes, The Stories Behind Every Pink Floyd Song. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 8. ↩︎
3. Pink Floyd – The Wall. Dir: Alan Parker. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1982 ↩︎
4. Ibid., 8. ↩︎