I always assumed Comfortably Numb was about heroin and the swollen hands were from “tying off” to get a vein.
As has been cited though, it is about something else, at least officially.
I dunno if he was “getting high”. More like going through a mental breakdown.
Drugs were involved in that (there is a scene of a younger Pink with a huge chunk of hash), but it wasn’t clear to me that he was actively high during his ‘episode’, so much as just generally fucked up in the head. The majority of the movie/album is an explaination as to how he got that way.
Maybe we’re doing it wrong! I sense a GQ thread in the making.*
- but not by me
if you had to blow up and hang onto that pig then your hands might get swollen.
You may be correct- certainly, Pink is a screwed up young man in every possible way. And he still would be if he were totally sober.
But my take (and the movie seemed to bear this out) is that Pink’s handlers found him passed out in his hotel room(PROBABLY on drugs), and they got their doctor to give him an injection of some kind of stimulant, just to get him on his feet and awake enough to get to the arena for his show.
There is nothing in the movie that states whether he was high or not. They seem to leave that point deliberately obscure. Certainly, after he is injected by the doc, he has more active hallucinations, eventually imagining himself as a nazi.
His state of withdrawal before they burst in on him may be exacerbated by drugs - or may not be. Certainly, it is the Rock Star Way™ to OD on drugs, but they don’t, say, show him injecting or snorting. Just watching TV after wrecking his hotel room … the only drug he is shown with actually consuming prior to exploding with insanity at the groupie, is a bottle. Other drugs (pills) he uses later in making his insane collage on the floor, but he isn’t shown popping 'em.
Interestingly, I learned later that the old B&W WW2 movie Pink is shown obsessively watching was called The Dam Busters - about a mission to blow up what amounts to … a huge wall! 
Figuring out what’s up with Pink is complicated by the fact that as a character, he’s derived mostly from Roger Waters, who rarely used a drug harder than alcohol, and a little bit from Syd Barrett, who … well, we all know the deal with Syd. So I’m inclined to think that Pink’s mental state is mostly due to a mix of depression, burnout, Oedipal rage and narcissism, without recreational drugs really entering into it. Things like the smashed hotel room collage, however, definitely feel more akin to Syd Barrett’s issues than Roger Waters’.
Woah! I knew that was the movie (which contains the inspiration for Luke’s trench run I believe) but never thought of that before. Ahh, the many onion-like layers of Pink Floyd . . .
This is based on a actual event. I think it was Waters, possibly in the same Jim Ladd Innerview, who mentioned having been given a shot “to keep [him] going through the show” and how it made him feel detached from the audience, IIRC.
I was surprised to see the filmakers used a clip where the movie characters called the (unfortunately named) squadron mascot dog by name (again, IIRC). Like using Gomer Pyle’s “Su-prise! Su-prise! Su-Prise!” sample in the album, the band may not have known those would get a different reaction over here in the states.
Useless SD pedantry: The trench run comes more from 633 Squadron, but The Dam Busters is also an influence on SW.
Addendum: I read, but could not tell where, that the reason Pink is watching all those old WWII movies is he is looking for his father, or at least, looking for some connection to him, being lost in the war.
Waters really never seemed to handle losing his own father in WWII. From the subtly of DSotM, through The Wall, to the sublime “Gunner’s Dream” to the completely unsubtle “Fletcher memorial Home” in The Final Cut, Waters has been drawing a lot of writing inspiration from his father.
Maybe I’m giving too much credit to the moviemakers for subtlety … but what I took from that scene was that the casual racism in the midst of what was supposed to be an affective emotional scene was deliberate - a pointed undercutting of nostalgia.
The choice of subject for the scene - the pointless death of an innocent dog in a car accident - was I think the sort of scene that Pink would have remembered from childhood, as a kid tormented by the loss of his father. Not that the death of a dog equates to the loss of a father, but the latter woukd, I think, make a child more vulnerable to sadness caused by the former.
That would make sense - all those heroic young men in uniforms would clearly have an effect on a man who never got over the death of his father in war. Though I do think that the choice of this specific movie “makes sense” on a number of levels - not least of which, that it is a movie about the quest to blow up what amounts to a giant wall, which of course is also, in another sense, what The Wall is about.
I think you’re right. The use of that scene was no accident. It also resonates with the racism of Pink’s fascist alter-ego (“That one looks Jewish! And that one’s a coon!”).
…Woah! :eek:
Heh, I didn’t pick up on that. Good one.
Hey, Roger! People mistake you for making masturbation references because we all know what a wanker you are! 
I second Malthus’s comment. I never looked at it that way, but it makes sense. (I think I spent all my thought energy trying to figure out what movie it was, rather than appreciate how that scene fit the narrative. I haven’t seen *The Wall *nor The Dam Busters since I learned that was the movie in The Wall.)
Ha! Listening to Innerview there were times I wanted to slap him and his pomposity. I also wanted to ask him if he thought we (especially, England) should have fought WWII. I got the impression his answer would have been ‘no’.
Interesting trivia: Roger Waters’ real first name is George. Conversely, Syd Barrett’s real first name was Roger.
OK y’all got me thinking in all sorts of ways about an album I’ve listened to about a trillion times. Music that got me through my adolescence (mostly) intact.
I’ve always thought the phrase “swollen hand blues” went hand in hand with “propping up my mortal remains” as the degredation of body and soul of the hard life of the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle. The symptomens of the immenient collapse and mental breakdown of Pink.
I always thought swollen hand blues referred to missing a vein when shooting up. It hurts real bad and your hands swell up. But “ when I was child I had a fever, my hands felt just like two balloons.” Seems it was a sickness
Upon the release of The Wall, after listening just a few times, I knew that “swollen hand blues” in Nobody Home was a reference to “my hands felt just like two balloons” in Comfortably Numb. So, when I heard that Jim Ladd interview on the radio, my teenage self felt extremely embarrassed for Mr. Ladd.
As I recall, the lyrics to Comfortably Numb refer to an episode of food poisoning for which Waters was injected with a strong sedative (“There’ll be no more “AHHH-AH-AH!” but you may feel a little sick”). He doesn’t seem to like doctors. The only song he wrote on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is titled “Take Up Thy Stethescope and Walk.”
About the facist references in “In the Flesh part 2” (“Get ‘em up against the wall”), there’s a somewhat interesting coincidence to the start of Clapton’s diatribe against foreigners in Birmingham in 1976, just a few years before the release of The Wall:
Floyd: “Are there any queers in the theater tonight?”
Clapton: “Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight?”
I think (seven years later) it’s more than just undercutting the nostalgia - one of the big things eating at Pink’s psyche is the hypocrisy and cruelty of his parents generation, who spent a lot of time slapping themselves on the back for defeating the Nazis, while still practicing all sorts of deplorable racism and colonialism themselves. The dog with the terrible slur for a name, in the middle of a heroic WWII movie, is nicely emblematic of that.