The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall

[00:00] The Wall is a multimedia project created by English rock band Pink Floyd, consisting of a live performance touring over 1980 and '81, a 1982 experimental film,

[00:15] a 2010 through 2013 revival tour, a 2015 concert film, and a 2016 opera. The plot of all the various adaptations center around a rock star named Pink In the midst of an emotional spiral Pink reflects on/hallucinates the events of his life

[00:33] that have led to that point, including vivid fabrication of the death of his father in World War 2, hazy memories of The Blitz, his relationship with his mother, creative dissatisfaction, a decaying marriage, and a job in the music industry where he is treated as a commodity

[00:47] to be used, all of which form the metaphorical bricks in the emotional wall I want to focus in mostly on the 1982 film, because it is, I think,

[00:59] The film was written by Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, directed by Alan Parker, with animation by Gerald Scarfe, and it is, well, it’s a pretty heavy film.

[01:12] It comes from a very dark place, emotionally speaking, there’s a lot of disturbing imagery. [phone ringing]

[01:25] ♪ When we grew up and went to school there were certain teachers ♪ ♪ who would hurt the children any way they could. ♪ It’s pretty abstract in its presentation, relying heavily on associative imagery

[01:38] rather than conventional narrative, and this is both a strength and a weakness of the film. Abstraction is, counter-intuitively, very efficient. It allows a movie to be about a lot of things simultaneously by letting symbols

[01:53] The movie pinballs between war, classism, police brutality, the criminalization of youth culture, Thatcherism, generational trauma, commodification of art, and the home-grown

[02:05] and it’s able to do this pretty fluidly. The film’s underlying anger is, true to form, often incoherent, struggling to vocalize

[02:18] and manifest the exact shape of the subject, falling back on abstract imagery in order to suggest an emotional truth where literalism is insufficient. This allows the film to create really powerful moments.

[02:32] A running motif is anti-war, expressed as a seething rage of betrayal, abandonment, Roger Waters’ father was a conscientious objector during World War 2,

[02:44] In 1943, however, he changed his mind and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Territorial Army in September of that year.

[02:56] In ‘Goodbye Blue Skies’ the Union Jack shatters into pieces. For all its bravado and blustre, English nationalism is just blood in the gutter.

[03:08] Soldiers sent to war don’t die for their country, they just die. The boys beat the Germans and came home just in time to build atom bombs. Symbols shift and merge and break apart, juxtaposed and contrasted in order to create an impression

[03:23] of their interconnected relationship in a way that is difficult to do using mere words and, core to the theme of the piece as a whole, no one specific thing is the load-bearing cause.

[03:36] There is no singular source of the sickness in society that isolates us from one another, that suppresses us, that brutalizes us, that exploits us. This abstraction, though, can also work against the film.

[03:51] A lot of the film’s imagery, almost forty years later, has an almost juvenile Makes-U-Think shallowness to it, worn down by a generation of trite commentary on the relationship between

[04:03] art and commerce, in no small part directly influenced by The Wall, that, y'know, cheapens The Wall simply by association. The lack of a concise resolution, the lack of a clear point at the end, which functions

[04:17] for some viewers as a powerfully disquieting denial of closure, also leaves the door open for symbols to take on meanings counter to their intended or desired use. A centerpiece moment in the film comes when Pink, suffering an overdose, is revived by

[04:32] his manager and record industry flunkies in order to be dressed and pushed out on stage. In this state Pink conceptualizes himself in an alter-ego, a fascist dictator indoctrinating teens,

[04:44] primed by a conformist education system, into hate and violence. This sequence, spanning the songs In The Flesh, Run Like Hell, and Waiting for the Worms, includes dramatization of hate crimes and sexual assault.

[04:58] The film’s imagery of crossed hammers, invented for the movie as a deliberately unsettling expression of contemporary fascism and its ability to utilize the banal, the blunt, the simplistic, was adopted in 1988 by actual neo-Nazi group the Hammerskins, a now fractured

[05:15] organization whose dispersed members remain active in other hate organizations to this day. The potent imagery, structured as a condemnation, was still adopted by people who saw the violence

[05:27] The character of Pink holds fears and resentments towards women that are emotionally challenging to watch expressed on screen and while a mature audience can certainly parse the difference

[05:42] between a character’s excuses and reality, the film’s lack of closure means there’s little guidance on what the audience is ultimately meant to take away from the depictions of Pink being devoured by a predatory, vaginal flower.

[05:56] And part of that is rooted in the film’s emotional rawness, the dark place of the psyche where thoughts and fears and beliefs are not rational but are deeply potent Pink intellectually understands that his own self-destruction and alienation drove his wife away,

[06:13] but emotionally still conceptualizes her as a consuming predator. It doesn’t all make sense or resolve or coalesce because we don’t all make sense.

[06:25] Everyone is the illusion of order constructed, brick by brick, out of chaos. So, while The Wall is far from flawless and certainly not for everyone, there are still, I feel, deep emotional truths in there, a human story about the contradiction of being,

[06:42] the self-amplifying spiral of isolation, and the fragility and hypocrisy of power. be it the concert or the film, and I think the album definitely feels less than whole as a result.

[06:58] The movie also adds ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’, which is a song that It’s a really potent encapsulation of how Waters feels about the system that killed his father.

[07:11] ♪ And that’s how the high command took my daddy from me ♪♪ And this is a movie that Doug Walker, a man whose bread and butter is getting irrationally

[07:28] angry at movies for 9 year olds, decided to riff in the form of a parody recreation. ♪ Good old Pink Floyd made a movie devoid of even the slightest bit of subtlety. ♪

[07:45] Okay, so... what is this? I’m going to have to say a bunch of unkind things, and there’s really no way around that,

[07:59] because the observable facts are just, prima facia, unkind. [Dracula voice] Well, maybe it’s the other way alound, I don’t know, I’ve got a high school education! ♪ This is pandering like hell ♪♪

[08:13] [Dan] Basically it’s impossible to engage with something like The Wall, even sarcastically or disingenuously, without leaving a lot of yourself on the table as a result. What you fixate on, what you think is silly, why you think it’s silly,

[08:25] And that’s not to say that you need to love The Wall or even like The Wall or, you know, you’re a phoney or a poser or shallow if you don’t,

[08:38] it’s just that defending that position is going to demand emotional honesty. For most critics that’s not a problem, but... we’ll see. The Nostalgia Critic, AKA The Critic, AKA That Guy With The Glasses is the brainchild

[08:53] of Doug Walker, an aspiring filmmaker from the suburbs of Chicago who, in 2008, stumbled into an early online video success with the then-nascent genre of angry reviews. The basic format, more or less unchanged in 13 years, involves a recap of the plot of a film

[09:09] interspersed with one-liners and skits, usually with the comedy predicated on slapstick reactions of either extreme confusion or extreme anger or both. "Never leave the cave without it."

[09:22] "They gave him a bat credit card?" "They had the BALLS to give one of THE GREATEST SUPER HEROES OF ALL TIME A BAT CREDIT CARD?!"

[09:38] In September 2019 they published Nostalgia Critic’s The Wall, a 40 minute musical review featuring musician Corey Taylor, his son Griff Taylor, and the collaborative works The reception was… not good.

[09:53] ♪ All in all it’s just not very funny at all ♪♪ "No exaggeration, I’m not being facetious, I’m not trying to be a dick. "When I first tried to watch Doug Walker’s The Wall, um, this is what happened to my computer,

[10:13] This review has become somewhat notorious online because there is something ♪ The art-house ego-trip had fallen and slipped to the bargain big for $3.93 ♪♪

[10:31] There is a tremendous amount of effort on display, but it’s also really lazy, The priority really seems to be in doing a lot, doing everything, And this is what’s confusing.

[10:48] There’s so much going on, so many collaborations, so many moving parts, that it clearly took time and energy and passion, an energy and passion that needs to be maintained on some level

[11:02] but there’s no evidence, whatsoever, of what was actually driving that. You don’t just make something like this on accident in an afternoon.

[11:15] This would have taken weeks, if not months, to coordinate. The collaborations with Satellite City and Rob Scallon needed to be arranged, Corey Taylor and his son needed to come out to Chicago, the final version of The Trial probably took

[11:30] eighty hours just to render, not even including blocking and animating. Then there’s writing, recording, props, costumes, all of which you can cut a lot of corners on,

[11:42] and make no mistake the corners here are extremely cut, but there’s a floor. Certain things are still going to take all week no matter how half you ass them. So on some level you have to care, you have to care a lot to commit to this amount of work.

[12:00] And that passion, you know, it can come from just really loving The Wall, or just really hating The Wall, or feeling like you have a lot of stuff to say about it,

[12:14] In the middle Doug does an ad for the companion album, that they were selling – for money – that Doug describes as a love letter to Pink Floyd and their music, and it’s just…

[12:26] "This is just such a love letter to Pink Floyd’s music and The Wall, ...so hollow as a pitch because the product, the thing that we’re watching and listening to,

[12:40] is extremely clearly not a love letter to Pink Floyd, and is dominated by someone who, based on the words being said, doesn’t seem to know much about Pink Floyd at all in the first place,

[12:54] ♪ it’s us vs. them, I don’t even know who us or them are, ♪ Doug doesn’t seem to understand The Wall on even a surface level, and... really just doesn’t

[13:10] appear to care much about The Wall one way or another, sort of? There is at no point any sense that Doug has any personal relationship to the material.

[13:23] Based off the depth of Doug’s commentary it reads very much like the opinions of someone who watched The Wall for the first time after already committing to do a full recreation, and then didn’t particularly enjoy it, and wasn’t really able to digest it because

[13:39] the whole viewing went through the filter of looking for ideas for the recreation. The commentary is extremely shallow while also being deeply petty and mean,

[13:51] but then also the longer you go into the review the further it drifts from even being about The Wall and the more it becomes a showcase for Doug’s own unrelated opinions. There’s no clear sense of what viewpoints the various characters are supposed to represent,

[14:06] The Critic is used to voice multiple different stances, being both critic, audience surrogate, but then all of those are caked in various layers of sarcasm

[14:20] that make it really difficult to parse what the message is actually supposed to be. The commentary, when it’s not completely off topic, waffles between faint praise like

[14:33] “well, I guess the song is kinda rad” and really performatively cruel stuff, like None of it feels like the kind of good-natured ribbing you’d get from actually invested fans

[14:45] What’s missing, at the core, is any sense of motivation. "Well, yeah, the movie did."

[14:58] "Hell, I didn’t even sing a song." "Well, the movie ended on such an open vagueness that it only makes sense the review end on such an open vagueness."

[15:10] You get to the end and have no idea why this was the form this product should take. Why make a straight reproduction of pretty much 50% of the entire film? Why put this much effort into a video about a subject

[15:27] that you just don’t seem to have any substantive opinions on at all? And why put all this effort into this concept for this specific movie? "A little full of itself, but good music and imagination."

[15:42] And having these questions afterwards is very bizarre when you’re talking about a review, something that is, theoretically at least, predicated entirely on, And this is where we need to accept the reality that this isn’t really a review,

[15:59] it’s not a parody, it’s not a commentary, and it’s not a spoof. It’s honestly closer to fanfiction, in a way? Doug wants to be a filmmaker, he wants to make art, but he can’t, because he’s a

[16:15] fundamentally incurious person who isn’t much interested in what other people think or feel, and all his ideas boil down to “what if Batman met Mario?” that all comedy in, one way or another, is based on misery."

[16:33] [dramatic music] [Doug] "With little to no dialogue, quickly identifiable characters, and nothing but chases. People see it as classic because it’s so minimal, and yet so interesting.

[16:49] ‘Fury Road’ is the same way." [Dan] He is YouTube’s own home grown Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen, "Hey, so you invited me up here, whatcha wanna to do?"

[17:04] "You invited me up here to literally watch TV?" "I’m a successful musician with millions, how can you expect me to be happy?!" It has that same heady mix of incompetence and ego that is absolutely intoxicating to talk about.

[17:19] So much of the actual content is predicated on readings of the material that are just wildly wrong, and yet so absolutely confident in their delivery. Doug decided to accuse an eighty minute movie of being too long and padded, and then

[17:35] didn’t even flinch as he sandwiched that between a rant about people being mean to him on Twitter and an eight minute argument with a busty nightmare squirrel. And it’s that element, that deeply misplaced sense of confidence that really just makes

[17:50] Like The Room it’s a deeply cynical product made by a fundamentally untalented man, bored by the idea of personal growth, building so many layers of self-protective irony

[18:03] "No." Doug is utilizing The Wall as a showcase for his own ideas, his own lyricism, his own jokes, This video is him strutting his stuff as a filmmaker.

[18:18] So while some of it is about The Wall, for the most part the further you get into it This is a bit of a struggle to describe, which is why I’m kinda repeating myself over and over,

[18:31] ♪Waiting for the point. ♪♪ A bunch of it is just disconnected Weird Al style parody songs about things that grind

[18:44] Doug’s gears, and the parts that are about The Wall are, more often than not, so off base that you would believe the entire thing was recreated from decades old memories if it weren’t for the granular details that are included.

[18:59] It is not Doug Walker’s review of The Wall, it’s just Doug Walker’s version of The Wall. ♪ Is this quite what you expected to see? ♪♪

[19:12] Doug’s parody of Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 is an immediate standout to people that they didn’t find on rotten.com ♪ we need more victimization ♪

[19:27] [Dracula voice] there are no good teachers, not one, not even by accident! Restyled as ‘We Need More Victimization’ the song is simultaneously a criticism calling The Wall whiney, engaging in bizarre whataboutism, and a thinly veiled rant about online culture war

[19:46] nonsense, a subject that will crop up a few times throughout the video. Most of the substance of this is contained in Doug’s inexplicable Dracula impression.

[19:59] "I know it looks like they want to teach you something, but they don’t!" "They just want to eat you up because we’re evil bloodsucking vampire things!"

[20:11] Doug’s argument here is that everyone thinks school sucks, that that opinion isn’t special or noteworthy or substantive, that The Wall is just dunking on school because it’s a popular opinion with teenagers, and, the bizarre whataboutism of pointing out funding issues

[20:29] with the American public education system, while throwing in some stale jabs about school teaching algebra instead of car maintenance. "How to fix a car, pay your taxes, ace an interview, perform first aid, manage your insurance,

[20:45] We pay other people to do those things. ♪ oh our education system’s broke ♪

[20:57] [Dracula voice] "Well, maybe it’s the other way alound, I don’t know, I’ve got a high school education! ♪ This is pandering like hell ♪ ♪ L-O-L so school sucks, grow a damn pair of balls. ♪♪

[21:12] Now, at the surface level here it just needs to be said, Doug is transparently imposing his own experience of school in 1980s, 1990s suburban Illinois on Waters’ experiences in Primary School in the 1950s and 60s. In England.

[21:28] So just at a very fundamental level this doesn’t work because it’s a complete non-sequitur. It’s a response to Another Brick In The Wall that’s so off topic, that misses the mark by such a wide mile, that it’s clear he just wasn’t paying attention.

[21:44] More than that, though, what interests me here is the way that this version Like, let’s talk about the grim cowardice of “school helps you get a job.” "you’re more likely to get a job when you’re older!"

[22:00] Like, okay, let me back up a bit and illustrate the problem here. The roots of public education are split between two major motivators, the first being philosophical, The philosophical argument is that knowledge is inherently valuable, and it is a moral

[22:16] good for society to educate everyone, that a society with a widespread familiarity with the physical sciences, mathematics, ethics, literature, and the arts is a more inventive society, and a more ethical society.

[22:29] The industrial argument is that school should exist to prepare you to work. This is rooted in the real history of much of public education, as early efforts to expand public education were driven by industrialists whose growing empires needed more specialized

[22:46] laborers to do the work of middle management, which mostly means accounting. The idea, from their perspective, was you could convince the government to teach everyone the reading, writing, and arithmetic needed to do the job, which would make it easier

[23:01] and drive down the price of math and literacy based labour. This second argument has had a lot of power and influence over the shape of education

[23:13] in the last two centuries, and is still alive and well today. There is a tremendous amount of ongoing debate in education circles about the balance between raw theory and the pragmatic modern reality of labour.

[23:27] There’s tons of people who will argue that we should really have two school tracks, so that the students who just aren’t that interested in math and Shakespeare, who think algebra is useless, can go watch Amazon training videos for a couple years

[23:42] The criticism, which Waters is directly engaging with in Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, is that this arrangement, school as a pipeline to industry, means that what is taught in

[23:55] school and how it is taught will be dictated by industrialists, by corporations. The school system, then, becomes nothing but a systematic reshaping of children

[24:07] into ideal workers: obedient, compliant, and narrowly trained in only what is needed for the job. It is a reduction of people to exploitable labour, to uniform bricks in a wall.

[24:19] It is critical of the fundamental ordering of society. Why should these institutions, rampant with abuse and steered by corporate ghouls, Why, especially, should they be given so much power over children?

[24:34] There is the autobiographical element, placed in the specifics of English primary school in the 1950s and 60s, and the ways that those experiences shaped Waters into the adult he became,

[24:48] which then serves as a means to criticize the existence of the system itself, because the abuses he suffered, the physical violence of beating children who failed in the rote recitation of number tables, were systematized, and took place within a system that was

[25:05] This continues to resonate with people to this day because regardless of whether or not corporal punishment has been abolished and more idealistic pedagogies have prevailed,

[25:18] institutionalized school is still an institution and will never be an unalloyed good. It will always be vulnerable to corruption, to abuse, to manipulation, and the question

[25:31] of whose agenda is served by the structure and material must remain an eternal debate. So, yeah, I feel confident saying that Doug’s argument here just isn’t very well formed,

[25:44] it’s unclear, shallow, and doesn’t actually engage with the question. "Wait time out, is this really a World War 2 reference?" ooooh."

[26:00] Following “We Need More Victimization” is an extended skit where Doug, "No, no, it’s just meant to look weird and creepy.

[26:13] The Critic is positioned as the rube, his defences are clearly meant to be hollow and weak. The problem is that the accusations he’s sarcastically defending the movie against

[26:26] only hold weight based on Doug’s own shallow misreading of everything else up to this point. In The Wall, Pink, as a child, hiding in a train tunnel, sees schoolchildren as faceless blobs

[26:39] crowded into cattle cars, and envisions himself, too, becoming faceless. which is effectively just the intro to 'Another Brick in the Wall Part 2', during which the faceless children are fed into a meat grinder.

[26:54] So the more immediate imagery is a slaughterhouse. Is that, in part or by extension, also a Holocaust reference? Because much of the album and movie are about the after effects of that war.

[27:12] It’s not an abstract concept that’s just being name-dropped for aesthetic symmetry, it’s a real event that people lived through, and The Wall is in no small part a reflection on growing up in the shadow of that and reflecting on the value of it,

[27:28] The statement is that the inhumanity of the system, its goals and methods, are ultimately homoousian, of the same stuff,

[27:40] as the inhumanity that leads a system to load humans into cattle cars. That comparison is only inappropriate if, one, you think the message is simply “school sucks”,

[27:52] and two, you’ve been ignoring the role of World War 2 within the film up to this point. "Oh come on, they’re just saying school sucks, they’re not making any connections to that. Now let’s go on to the next song that talks about the horrors of World War 2- ah crap."

[28:07] I don’t know." As those of you familiar with The Wall may have noticed, this is all out of order because Doug’s joke is a setup for his version of Goodbye Blue Sky, retooled as So Long, Weird Song.

[28:25] ♪ D-d-d-d-doesn’t this seem too heavy? ♪ Originally this is all the other way around. Goodbye Blue Sky leads into the train tunnel which segues into Another Brick in the Wall part 2.

[28:40] The reason that matters is because originally the imagery of Goodbye Blue Sky Gerald Scarfe’s powerful visualization of the War and specifically The Blitz as a psychological force

[28:53] that scarred the collective psyche of the people as deeply as it scarred the land Like, I cannot stress this enough, Goodbye Blue Sky is

[29:06] one of the most potent pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever seen. It is ruinously effective at using its imagery to convey the sheer scale of damage and waste It’s grim, and haunting, and very important as a foundation for what follows.

[29:24] In ‘So Long, Weird Song’ Doug asks if “World War 2 with monsters” is too silly for a movie that also complains about how High School bites.” ♪ D-d-d-d-doesn’t this seem too heavy? ♪

[29:39] ♪ Is World War 2 with monsters too silly? ♪ ♪ Oh Roger Waters did you ever wonder why these images of slaughter made it in a film ♪ ♪ that also sings about how high school bites? ♪♪

[29:54] Which, of course, again, is predicated on that actually being the message, and indulges in a deeply misplaced level of literalism by describing the sequence as “World War 2 with monsters” as though this were a direct-to-video Pacific Rim sequel.

[30:11] Now, this kind of literalism is a pretty regular part of Doug’s normal bit, It’s one thing when it’s aimed at corporate franchise schlock aimed at kids, but it’s just really obviously misplaced and inappropriate when applied to a deeply earnest piece of art

[30:28] that is overtly symbolic, unapologetically symbolic in its attempt to communicate what this real event, that really happened, felt like to live through. He also calls the song “Oscar bait”, which is funny because it’s both literally wrong,

[30:44] and also because it’s such a deep insult that it’s really revealing. ♪ So long Oscar bait song. ♪

[30:57] ♪ Smoke a bong and it’ll feel less wrong. ♪♪ Now, I actually don’t think Doug was literally calling the song “Oscar bait”, I don’t think he thinks they were specifically playing towards the Academy, but I do think that

[31:11] he thinks The Wall is spiritually Oscar bait, which is to say insincere. The capstone here, for me, is the replacement animation, which is, first of all, just visually awful and cheap in a way that would be considered sub-par for 2007,

[31:27] and second, is just so petty and mean that this is what makes it very funny when Doug calls his album a “love letter to Pink Floyd”. The imperial eagle is labeled Ego, and the frightened ones are labeled self-content?

[31:45] I honestly can’t tell if that’s supposed to be content or content because neither I think he’s saying ego is the destroyer of self-content?

[31:57] Like, Roger Waters’ dissatisfaction is not the result of any real problems, but is a product of his own... ego? That would parse, because the lyrics of the song do directly address Roger Waters, and

[32:12] later a cloud labeled “my problems” grows flowers of pity and then blasts another cloud labeled “other people’s problems.” [acoustic guitar]

[32:26] ♪ ooooooh oooooh ooooooh oooooooh ♪♪ I dunno, I think it’s one thing to describe The Wall as whiney or juvenile, to say

[32:41] in effect that it encapsulates a really teenage mindset, but it’s quite another to accuse the creators of being disingenuous, ego-tripping fakes who milk imaginary problems for pity.

[32:54] I don’t think you can make that accusation and then turn around and insist that you liked it fine, and made a love letter to its creative vision. really don’t think very highly of at all.

[33:09] ♪ That’s why I watch, despite it being so whiny, ya see. ♪♪ ♪ So long Oscar bait song ♪♪

[33:26] ♪ You’re not Oscar bound ♪♪ The song Comfortably Numb, retooled as Comfortably Dumb, It’s not really about The Wall but it’s kinda about Doug’s relationship to The Wall,

[33:44] and to media in general, and it’s probably the most honest song Doug put into the project, Nominally it’s about the pacing of the film, and Doug reiterates once again that he thinks

[33:57] Roger Waters’ opinions are the illegitimate whining of a millionaire, but it’s also Doug saying he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t care to. The movie is challenging and he just doesn’t have any interest in engaging with it on its own terms.

[34:12] ♪ I just don’t understand, is this now how I am? ♪

[34:24] ♪ I have become comfortably dumb. ♪♪ And, you know what, I’m not going to disagree.

[34:39] I don’t know if it works as self-deprecating humour because I don’t think it’s comedically true, Going into the ad break there’s a changeover. So, okay, up to this point Corey Taylor, the frontman for nu metal band Slipknot,

[34:55] has been playing the equivalent role of Pink. As they transition Corey is replaced with Doug, so Doug plays Pink for the equivalents This is part of a running gag, being that the actual rock musician doesn’t get to

[35:10] sing a song until the very end at which point he plays the Spongebob Squarepants theme, and also probably just a logistical extension of only getting Corey out for a day or two The other thing that’s going on, which is far more trivial but bothers me so much,

[35:28] is that the exterior shot is overwhelmingly blue, and I’m not sure if this is a stylistic choice or a mistake, that they just forgot to set the white balance properly and just left it.

[35:40] After the ad break, which consists of an uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honey and Doug’s own tie-in recreation of the entire album The Wall,

[35:53] we get this. [Music: ‘In The Flesh’]

[36:11] ♪ Well I’m that nameless foe, ha! ♪♪ No, okay, so, mm, where do I start with this? ♪ I got some weird news for you sunshine. ♪

[36:25] ♪ This was dissin’ Thatcher’s administration ♪ ♪ But it’s vague enough to put anyone you feel ♪ ♪ Politician, showman, just put their face here! ♪♪

[36:39] No, it really wasn’t. It really, it really, really wasn’t that vague.

[36:51] ♪ That one looks Jewish, and that one’s a coon! ♪♪ ♪ Get ‘em up against the wall! ♪ Not even a teeny tiny bit vague.

[37:06] [Doug singing] ♪ That one’s looking stressed, he wants to feel oppressed. ♪ ♪ Post! ♪♪ Okay, so this whole segment is just Doug venting about people being mean to him on Twitter.

[37:19] It is completely disconnected from The Wall, not even a tiny bit about the movie, it’s just Doug using the veil of alter ego to express an otherwise authentically held belief. And that’s honestly a charitable reading of it.

[37:34] Because otherwise you’re saying that a criticism of Thatcherism, the policies of austerity, of rigid enforcement of Christian norms, the violent suppression of political dissent,

[37:48] of a rising home-grown fascist movement, criticisms that pre-date the AIDS crisis but would hold true well into the 80s as governments decided it was unofficial policy that AIDS was a divine

[38:02] punishment and a solution to their “gay crisis,” you’re saying that all that isn’t substantively different from people yelling at each other on the internet over Batman movies.

[38:16] ♪ that one looks like he really wants to be outraged! ♪ ♪ Now with social media you have the stage! ♪ So, yeah, I think the most charitable read is that Doug’s just talking about himself.

[38:35] Hashtag! [cheering] and this is maybe where I risk a controversial opinion.

[38:50] Common among reactions to this video is to say that while the review as a whole is really bad, the animation at the end is really good, it’s the best part, and anyone who is criticizing the review should, you know, be kind to Fennah, the animator who put it all together,

[39:05] So what happens is Corey enters the Channel Awesome office and is about to confront Doug "Or is it just a misguided ego trip into self-indulgent world that we all live in, pardon!

[39:23] It’s Sullivan Croft." Um, I was, uh, is Lucy Lacemaker there? [crosstalk] "S-sullivan, have you found her yet?"

[39:38] Now, I’ve done all the research to piece all this together so that I can summarize it, but on first viewing I had zero clue what was going on.

[39:51] I don’t know who this is, but it’s clearly a reference that the video expects me to get, there’s clearly some sort of backstory to these characters, it’s not just an abstraction, and just to really add to the confusion the whole thing is this mumblecore overlapping ramble,

[40:09] because you can’t understand what they’re even saying. "You’re not exactly giving creation all of its credit, it’s not like you just shit And then this thing shows up and the barely intelligible dialogue just keeps going

[40:29] until the whole thing segues into The Trial where it honestly doesn’t get much easier to understand. ♪ Lazy. ♪ ♪ Constantly ???????????????? Lazy ♪♪

[40:46] Now, before we get into this any further, yes, there’s a lot of technical competency on display. Modelling is hard, texturing is hard, rigging is hard, animation is hard, hair simulations are hard,

[40:59] all of this represents hours and hours and hours and hours of work. Okay. So, Fennah is a YouTube animator who makes a series called Satellite City which is, I guess,

[41:13] a skit show with a combination of live action and CG animation and way, way, way too much lore for a series with an average episode runtime of 130 seconds.

[41:26] So the characters in The Trial are all characters from Satellite City, and it’s- it's just not good. Kinda the real change of pace is that it’s not good in ways that are new to the review so far.

[41:40] more or less in isolation rest of the video. The track on the album is called Fennah’s The Trial, the credits say it’s produced by Fennah, and so it does seem like Fennah wrote and produced all of it,

[41:53] Which makes sense because the opinions are bad, but they’re a different kind of bad. The entire song is sung in-universe from the viewpoint of these characters who feel that

[42:07] The Wall falls short because all the animated monsters in the movie don't get enough screen time or development, and then another character comes in and says that, you know, I guess we can give it a pass because it wasn’t trying to tell a story.

[42:21] ♪This film's not bound by characters It's a visual affair ♪ ♪ It never aimed to tell a story rather, a sprawling canvas of emotion, visual splendor ♪♪

[42:36] That’s just a really weak, disingenuous argument being filtered through a character in order to scrub it of any meaning or ownership, because

[42:50] It’s also just wrong at a very basic level. It’s not conventionally told, and it’s a little loose, but it’s very comprehensible.

[43:04] The animated monsters at the end of the movie aren’t under-developed in the slightest, because they’re extensions and representations of characters They are a psychosexual visualization of those literal characters and the ideas those characters

[43:23] represent: parents, the state, the education system, intimate partners. The problem with using Fennah’s horny edgelord steampunk furry OCs If there’s even an attempt at using them in a metaphorical fashion then that’s lost

[43:39] They’re not present in any meaningful capacity through the rest of the review, they don’t represent anything substantive, and they are, for the most part, awful over-baked designs

[43:52] ♪ fills me with the urge to decapitate! ♪♪ So you’re going to have this over-designed horny rat thing lecture about how The Wall

[44:04] is all style over substance, devoid of intellectual development, then alien big titty goth girlfriend "And when I heard you were reviewing the much-to- be-desired Wall I figured I’d find my own tuppence.

[44:18] Style over substance, showcasing a bunch of weird creatures and worlds, ♪ Lazy. ♪ ♪ Constantly ???????????????? Lazy ♪

[44:35] It’s embarrassing. It’s poor criticism and it’s not even an appropriate parallel to the segment

[44:47] If this were actually a coherent work this isn’t where you would put the movie on trial, This is where you would take all the other ideas from the rest of the review, consolidate

[45:00] them in one place, interrogate them, and interrogate what they say about their author. So, no, I don’t think this is the “good part” of the review, because it’s still a tremendous amount of effort put into modelling, texturing, and rigging a fundamentally bad concept.

[45:15] Creatively it seems to have started from the ending, the chant of Tear Down The Wall, taken from the original and recontextualized to mean tear down The Wall, the movie, and working

[45:29] backwards from that is a bunch of stuff just hammered into place because if you’re doing a full recreation then you’ve gotta put something in there. And of course, afterwards, the whole review ends with a lazy lampshade of the fact that

[45:46] "Okay! "Fair enough." And the resolution of the gag that Corey Taylor hasn’t done anything yet

[45:58] ♪ Spongebob Squarepants! ♪♪ Kinda the buckwild thing here is that if there were less effort put into this, if the substance was otherwise exactly the same but there wasn’t a companion album on sale for money,

[46:14] there wasn’t an entire end-to-end abridged recreation, if there were just one or two songs and then I don’t think this would compel people in the way it does.

[46:28] There’s an effort on display that is its own form of earnestness, and it just all falls flat, because it’s just no good. And simultaneous to that it’s pissing on a really earnest piece of art

[46:44] And to see this all played out against the backdrop of a movie from a band that is decades and decades and decades old, well outside Doug’s normal wheelhouse, with no clear

[46:58] indication of why this particular movie, this album, is something that Doug feel is worth this much effort, it’s a baffling product.

[47:10] It’s long running character Hat!Dan, the Dan With a Hat! Oh, I guess I liked it fine. yeah!

[47:24] [gunshots]