We Don't Need No Education

Pink Floyd: Another Brick in the Wall

The plot of this video is following Pink Floyd's childhood though his school. In this video he depicts how schools abuse, mold and manipulate children into what they want. In the video, the molded children are depicted as deformed and expressionless by the masks in which they wear. They are not freed until they take that mask off and express themselves in their own way. In the video, however, the children erupt into chaos destroying everything including their teachers. It is not until the end that it is revealed that the more chaos was merely a dream by the Pink and we are flashed back to the classroom from which he came.  

In this scene from the music video, a student is in a tunnel as a train passes by. In this train, there are children hanging out the windows with identical masks on their faces reaching out for help. Through editing, these scenes are shuffled quickly with a focused shot of the boy, surrounded by darkness, looking back at them leaving the viewer puzzled as to whats inside the train. I believe the train is representing the return journey to the school where they are forced to become these faceless bodies.

In this scene, the children are walking on a conveyor belt to a hole at the end. As the camera moves down, we see that the hole is a meat grinder that is pumping out what remains of the children.  I believe this represents the final product in which this school wants. The children are forced to become these expressionless zombies only later to be thrown in with the rest and literally become nothing more than a pile of meat. 

In this scene, the children have broken free from their captures control and total chaos ensues. They start tearing down the school brick by brick. In this rather important scene, a wall is shown in the middle followed by two figures on the right, who are breaking it down with sledgehammers. These figures are shrouded with smoke, while on the other side, it is relatively clear. The wall is a very important symbol to the artist throughout the full film. The wall symbolizes a mental wall that Pink built in order to isolate himself from the world due to traumatic events in his life such as: the death of his father, over protection from his mother, and abusive from his teachers. In this scene the figures are trying to breakout of the haze. They do manage to tear it down, but in the end it is shown that it was only a dream indicating that Pink's wall is still up leaving him locked away in his own mind.