What Shall We Do Now? - The Film

The Film

The song was featured in the film version of The Wall, coupled with an animated sequence by Gerald Scarfe. The animation — described by Roger Waters in the DVD commentary as "The fucking flowers!" — starts with the image of two flowers caressing each other. Synchronized to the music, the flowers both have sex (taking the shape of a human couple doing so) with the male flower at one point is shaped like a penis, and the final form of the female flower is of a vulva, having a fight, and ultimately ending with the "female" flower consuming and destroying the "male" flower, a clear reference to the troubled relationship Pink had with his wife.

The flower sequence ends as soon as the first lyrics ("What shall we use...") are sung. The female flower, now transformed into a pterodactyl-like creature, flies into the distance as a row of residential and commercial buildings appears. These, however, turn out to be a wall of many post-war goods such as cars, electronics, appliances, etc. which slowly surrounds a "sea of faces". As the song speeds up and launches into "Shall we buy a new guitar?/Shall we drive a more powerful car?...", the animation becomes extremely morbid — heads of people caught in the wall screaming (the screaming face, seen later in "Waiting for the Worms"), flowers turn into barbed wire, a baby suffers a metamorphosis and turns into a reptile-headed creature and then into a Neo-Nazi stormtrooper, who smashes the head of a sitting-by dark-skinned man with a club and finally, the wall breaks through a church and the rubble turns into a casino-like temple, which produces more and more (albeit neon) bricks. The image of Pink is contorted and transformed into an array of objects relating to the materialistic nature of Pink's wall: a naked woman, ice cream, an MP-40, a hypodermic needle, a black Fender Precision Bass guitar, and a BMW M1. The sequence ends as the ground rises into the form of a fist who becomes a hammer (a hammer that would reappear in the animated sequence of "Waiting for the Worms").