Before I get to the first part of "Tigers," I'd like to address the non-Floyd song vaguely heard in the background of the movie's opening section. It's called "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot," by Vera Lynn (see "Vera" later in this analysis; you can also click here to listen to Vera's rendition of this song in full). The lyrics are as follows: "Christmas comes but once a year for every girl and boy/ The laughter and the joy/ They find in each new toy./ I tell you of the little boy who lives across the way/ This fella's Christmas is just another day..."
At this point, the vacuum cleaner whirs into electric life and "When the Tigers Broke Free, Part 1" begins. After the song ends and we get that wonderful close-up of the Mickey Mouse watch, Vera's song continues with : "He's the little boy that Santa Claus forgot/ And goodness knows, he didn't want a lot./ He sent a note to Santa, what he wanted was a drum/ This broken little heart when he woke and he hadn't come/ In the streets, yes he..." Once again, the vacuum drowns out the song. From the outset, Waters sets up a few brilliant parallels that will recur throughout the movie (and album). The very title of Vera's song, "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot," is steeped with ideas of anticipation and disappointment, of longing for something and being (seemingly) overlooked.
The connections with Pink are fairly obvious when viewing Vera's song in this light of hollow expectations. Maybe the little boy of Vera's song received nothing because Santa does not exist in reality. I know this seems a bit oversimplified, but perhaps the point is that placing your faith and hope in the unseen and the unreal is as futile as, say, expecting to be born into a loving world, a stable country, and a loving family complete with two parents. If anything, "The Wall" is a postmodern requiem for both former and present times, lamenting the pass of a pre-war era that will never be again while grieving the state of the post-World War II world. Correspondingly, Vera's song becomes less a charming song about a down-on-his-luck kid and more a dirge concerning the uncertainties of life during and after the War. In a sense, her message is the very first message one would learn in a highly fragmented, postmodern world: there is no certainty. Accordingly, Pink's life is bookmarked by post-war fragmentation and uncertainty, both literally and symbolically. The artistic "first chapter" of Pink's life (i.e. the opening of the movie) is Vera's song about the futility of hope while the real "first chapter" finds Pink fatherless. Even more interesting is the vacuum cleaner that interrupts Vera's song in order to segue into "When the Tigers Broke Free, Part 1." The vacuum is both the object that obstructs Pinks thoughts in the present as well as the physical embodiment of the void around which Pink's entire life is based. Therefore it is only fitting that Waters, known for his fascination with cycles (as evidenced throughout most, if not all, of Pink Floyd's albums), leads us from Pink/the-little-boy-that-Santa-Claus-Forgot to the vacuum/void before taking us to the main root of this abyss…the absent father.

The connections with Pink are fairly obvious when viewing Vera's song in this light of hollow expectations. Maybe the little boy of Vera's song received nothing because Santa does not exist in reality. I know this seems a bit oversimplified, but perhaps the point is that placing your faith and hope in the unseen and the unreal is as futile as, say, expecting to be born into a loving world, a stable country, and a loving family complete with two parents. If anything, "The Wall" is a postmodern requiem for both former and present times, lamenting the pass of a pre-war era that will never be again while grieving the state of the post-World War II world. Correspondingly, Vera's song becomes less a charming song about a down-on-his-luck kid and more a dirge concerning the uncertainties of life during and after the War. In a sense, her message is the very first message one would learn in a highly fragmented, postmodern world: there is no certainty. Accordingly, Pink's life is bookmarked by post-war fragmentation and uncertainty, both literally and symbolically. The artistic "first chapter" of Pink's life (i.e. the opening of the movie) is Vera's song about the futility of hope while the real "first chapter" finds Pink fatherless. Even more interesting is the vacuum cleaner that interrupts Vera's song in order to segue into "When the Tigers Broke Free, Part 1." The vacuum is both the object that obstructs Pinks thoughts in the present as well as the physical embodiment of the void around which Pink's entire life is based. Therefore it is only fitting that Waters, known for his fascination with cycles (as evidenced throughout most, if not all, of Pink Floyd's albums), leads us from Pink/the-little-boy-that-Santa-Claus-Forgot to the vacuum/void before taking us to the main root of this abyss…the absent father.


One of the most interesting things to me, cinematically, at this point are the numerous extreme close-ups during "the Little Boy that Santa Clause Forgot" and "When the Tigers Broke Free, Part 1." The movie opens with a gorgeous long shot of the hotel hallway, very ghostlike and almost sterile in its absolute barren whiteness. The shot also is evocative of the birth canal leading to the womb/room that Pink currently occupies. Yet from here, the viewer is treated to one close-up after another, from Pink's father lighting his lantern with Lions matches (perhaps suggesting the noble cause and hearts of the Allied forces) to Pink in his hotel room with a cigarette burned down to his fingers. Every scratch on the glass of Pink's Mickey Mouse watch
is visible (the watch serving as a reminder of the childhood he never had) as is every hair on his arm. The effect is both intimate and unnerving; we feel a certain closeness with Pink's father as he lights his lantern and a cigarette, utterly alone in a cocoon of darkness as sounds of bombs and guns fire sporadically all around him; yet at the same time, we feel a sense of paranoid scrutiny as the camera details every pore and hair of Pink's arm. In an instant we become both the rabid media / fans obsessively observing every facet of Pink's life as well as Pink himself under the world's microscopic eye as a result of his fame.

We've already noted one of the main autobiographical touches Roger incorporated into Pink's character - that of the father killed in the battle of Anzio during the Second World War - and will later come across even more evidence to suggest that Pink is, to some degree, based on Waters himself. But along with setting up the Pink / Waters parallel with the "Tiger" lyrics, this opening extreme close up also introduces another real life model for the fictional rock star: Pink Floyd's original frontman, Syd Barrett. This shot of a totally catatonic Pink sitting in his hotel room, oblivious to the world around him - oblivious, even, to the cigarette that has burned down to his fingers - recalls an actual incident that Floyd drummer Nick Mason recounts in his book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. " During their Fall of 1967 tour of the United States following the release of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Mason notes that Barrett was becoming more and more erratic, catatonic at times, and that on one occassion "at the Hollywood Hawaiian, a typical LA motel, with floodlit cactuses and garish decor, Roger found Syd asleep in a chair with the cigarette burning through his fingers." Wheras Roger's life provided a basis for the fictional Pink's childhood, we'll find time and again that the adult Pink's mental freefall from reality at times closely mirrors Syd's legendary fall from grace.
Another shot which has many fans guessing is the transition between Pink's father and Pink in which a young boy (presumably Pink) runs across an open rugby field with only a goal post breaking the horizon. I've received many e-mails specifically addressing this one shot alone, a few even speculating that the goalpost, resembling the letter H, foreshadows Pink's drug addiction, particularly heroin. While this is quite possible, I believe that the shot is used to set up the contrast between Pink's psychological stages at many points during his story. The young child running across a playing field as well as the quick cut to the Mickey Mouse watch both denote a certain childlike innocence that Pink seems to keep trying to revisit throughout the narrative.
The field is
open and limitless save for the goal posts, alluding to the infinite possibilities of life before birth and during childhood. Yet as every scratch and blemish on Pink's watch shows, one's past childhood is etched and unattainable, especially for Pink whose innocence was marred far too early by the loss of his father. Like the watch, Pink's mental landscape is quite different in later, parallel scenes when the older Pink sits in a chair watching television surrounded by a hostile, barbed landscape. Even the childlike innocence of the child on the rugby field is underscored by his very solitude. He is the only visibly living being in the landscape. Viewed in this light, the scene might not only foreshadow Pink's drug dependence but also his alienation as a child as the result of losing his father in the war. As such, the sequence creates both a visual and thematic chain of events, starting with Pink's father engulfed by the darkness of war leading to Pink's pre and after-birth isolation eventually spawning thedrugged-out, unresponsive man who is so mentally fragmented that he doesn't even notice that his cigarette has burned down to his fingers let alone the maid's knock athis door.
The field is

