Pink Floyd Lyrics, Themes & Meanings: Is There Anybody Out There? (Wall film)

Is There Anybody Out There? 2:30
(written by Waters, Ezrin)

Lyrics:
Is there anybody out there? (5x)

Pink scrabbles and pounds at the wall of his own making on his own mental landscape before we return to his destroyed hotel room (during the finger-picked guitar part) where he has carefully arranged the debris of his destructive rage into a pattern, even a kind of art. This meticulous, almost obsessive, arrangement of items is an actual phenomenon among certain types of schizophrenic persons.

The music lapses and Pink enters the washroom to shave. His now-distorted mind takes the concept to ridiculous lengths, and he ends up shaving his chest and eyebrows as well, in a bloody scene that is one of the most difficult to watch in the film.

Gerald Scarfe: "There is no gratuitous blood in the movie, the horrors depicted are necessary for a true depiction of increasing psychosis." [BD 31]

Many people have commented on the fact that the character Pink in The Wall seems to be a merging of Syd Barrett's personality and Roger Waters' history. The idea that much of Syd comes across on some level of the music seems to be borne out by the fact that in acting out the part of Pink, Bob Geldof unconsciously raised Syd's spectre with vivid intensity, to the surprise of friends of Syd who went to see the film upon its release. June Bolan, who was very close to Syd during the Piper era, gives her testimony.

June Bolan: "I was absolutely shell-shocked: it was so close to Syd I couldn't bear it. When he was looking in that bathroom mirror and shaving himself, I just had tears, and was sitting rigid in the cinema, because it was ever so close to home; I could feel for Syd totally." [Schaffner 249]

TRACK LISTING