Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Solara’ video analysis, directed by Nick Koenig

The video opens with a shot of futuristic silver-booted feet, beneath a silver skirt, sat upon a satin mattress. We discover in the next shot that the figure is a white-faced ‘high and dry’ Billy Corgan, in black dog collar and jumper, illuminated by cool blue light and looking like Nosferatu, or a deathly war lord. This is confirmed in the following shot of a drone flying in a large birdcage – the fin de siècle image of a trapped woman, recontextualised in this instance as a man on the liminal of a new female Aquarian age battling to ‘tear down the sun’, so as to chaperone in the future and a new androdgyny, evident in his lower attire. He longingly gazes upon a motivational picture depicting a modest suburban home with the legend ‘Dream’ inscribed upon it. Into the room enters three women, perhaps a trinity, in white makeup with torrid lips, dressed in beige velour loungewear, bearing a chain. Somewhat redolent of former band bassist, Darcy Wretzky, as has been suggested, they attach the chain to the fetish collar and listlessly lead him out of the room. This is intercut with an image of a topless muscular man, looking machismo in horror-movie-style Ice Hockey mask and incongruous feminine white fur sleeves, holding a stack of towels.

The focus of the video then returns to the enslaved singer/ war lord, as he is led into a room illuminated by orange and green fluorescent tubes. In the corner of the room is a plastic swivel chair beside a drip feed, redolent of a chemotherapy station for a cancer patient. The next shot reveals that the ‘Jason Voorhees’ figure is stood in a room surrounded by birdbaths spilling dry ice, surrounding a small fountain, redolent of the garden of a large stately home, maybe belonging to the lord, that tracks back to reveal more of the room. Corgan sits at the chair, whilst one of the three women holds her long nails aloft. Stitched onto their attire is the image of a stork, the universal symbol for a new-born child, beneath which are the words tragedy. A close up shot reveals that the drip is raspberry flavoured XXX-Treme ‘Trauma Vape’, simultaneously suggesting childhood pleasures, menstrual cycles, and hardcore sexual fetishes. The solution is sensuously injected intravenously into him. Meanwhile, a butler enters the room with the fountain, along with guitarist James Iha. The butler adjusts his sleeves, as if ready for work, before an extreme close-up on the water in the fountain. As if vicariously experiencing the lord’s trauma psychosomatically, the butler spits blood into the fountain, as the lord exhales vapour from his mouth, experiencing the trauma as a cool diffusion, like sub-zero weather. One of the guardians flicks the drip, seemingly to expedite the drips dispensation. Iha washes his hands in the fountain, perhaps anointing his hands in the war lord’s bloodshed, or his possible demise, as he gazes threateningly upon Corgan, whilst perhaps washing his hands of the lead’s pursuits.

We leave this room to see the prisoner escorted through a yellow room in which new bassist, Jeff Schroeder, dressed in a punk anorak, is sat on a canteen stall, above a lilac rug, before drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. He is dressed in a blue boiler suit and bowling shoes, looking like a convicted serial killer. The pair are playing an artisan ‘Connect-4’ game with black counters, rendering an innocuous family game sinister, and the object of the game redundant, seeing as neither makes any connections. Chamberlin watches Schroeder as he contemplates his next move. The punk connection is reinforced by a close-up of Schroeder’s footwear – Doc Martin’s – a zip-fronted version of the iconic footwear of the movement, with equally redundant eyelets. One of the guardians holds the drone aloft, like a pet bird, suspended from a wire attached to her ‘canary’ yellow nails - the aforementioned birds used in mines to test for noxious environments. A close-up of Schroeder’s jacket shows a crudely stitched patch depicting a version of Michaelangelo’s ‘Renaissance’ hands, with skeletal hands in gloves, throwing off their shackles. Another shot shows that Chamberlin’s boiler suit is emblazoned with a yellow-nailed hand, mirroring the hands of the guardians, surrounded by white feathers, perhaps signifying the freedom that Chamberlin’s dirty work will afford them. At this point, Corgan notices that the end of his chain has been dropped upon the floor, but clearly left intentionally. Like a silent movie star, he slowly comprehends the significance of this and quietly unhooks himself, whilst looking askance.

He shuffles out of the room into a dull blue room where a painted face woman is giving birth. Upon the wall is a picture that is difficult to make out, but seems to depict polite high society. A doctor in face-mask and surgical scrubs tends to the ‘bump’, whilst two stony-faced mimes, in traditional French attire, stand guard with machine guns. They are seemingly protecting the delivery from Corgan’s destructive influence, and the possible ‘tragedy’ the women’s tracksuits portend, such a disaster possibly a trigger for the war. A young black assistant with exaggerated white eyebrows, stands before the doctor, making notes on a clipboard, his facial hair suggesting that this role is his life’s work. The inclusion of a mime-delivery and not a real birth, suggests that this is representative of all women’s births, vis-á-vis the birth of the future. The expectant mother raises her head to reveal clown-faced make up in the style of the mimes. She is clearly of Asian descent. Maybe the symbolic child belongs to Iha and all the youth in Asia. A close-up on the assistant reveals that it is a transgender woman. The phantom child is delivered. A tear-streaked Corgan looks on, as if no stranger to grief. He tries to comprehend the significance of what he has witnessed. One of the mimes looks on, unblinking.

The lord steps from the room and opens a windowed door into purple light. The strobing light is emanating from a dilapidated room in which a group of reclining figures ‘tan’ themselves under ultraviolet light.  Redolent of the vanguard in style, their blue lips and safety goggles glow fluorescent under an artificial ‘sun’. The flashing illuminates another motivational picture inscribed with the word ‘opportunity’ and the caption ‘You Never Know Whats On The Other side’ and also depicting the same shack, and maybe he never will. One of the bathers, douses their face with a white liquid, maybe the highly fluorinated water that runs through our water systems and calcifies our pineals – our gland of perception. As Corgan leaves, a toy dancing bunny gyrates upon a plinth, its significance elusive, but with connotations of playfulness, innocence and new life. A catatonic bather gawks into nothingness – his future perhaps empty of anything authentic. The camera returns to Corgan, who escapes through an industrial corridor past what appears to be a dancing janitor - a reference to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit music video - through a space filled with next generation gyrating red plastic toys. He climbs up a staircase, illuminated by red light, conventionally representing danger.

He emerges with bleary nocturnal eyes from a cheap wooden home, similar to the one depicted in the photograph, albeit larger, into blinding daylight. Upon the wall is another image of the stork. The house is situated in a suburban American street. He removes a flyer, with ‘freedom’ written across it, from a car’s window screen that has a sticker with the words ‘safety okay’ printed upon it and a tick of approval. A white car drives past with an executioner rising from the sunroof. He turns threateningly to the lord, as if he is his next job. Another executioner chops a bush with a sword, as if to jokingly suggest that he is not hear to kill him, but just to do the gardening. An old woman watering the bush points to him, initially suggesting that he is the ‘victim’. However, Corgan follows her finger, which leads him down the street, along which he passes an aging overweight sad clown, sat upon an inflatable in his front garden, perhaps depressed from constantly entertaining people - maybe his troubled child - as a girl, most likely his daughter, plays upon a blanket. A close shot reveals that she is wearing a ‘Hannibal – the cannibal - Lecter’ mask, as she is playing with charred and disfigured dolls – innocence once again incongruously juxtaposed with evil, or the monster outside negative influences will make her. Like an executioner, she decapitates one of the figures, perhaps representing one of her tormentors. Further down the street, a man in children’s dog face-paint leads three overgrown boys along the street on reigns. The two younger boys are dressed in innocent baby blue, whilst the middle older boy is wearing ‘corrupted’ red. The overprotective father holds them back, as if protecting them from their fate, when it is he painted as the dog, the children’s ‘pet’, who is really being led by them. He glowers at the war lord, whose clutches they might be falling into. He walks innocuously across a lawn, upon which a Gothically painted pre-pubescent girl hula hoops, innocence contrasted with sub-cultural corruption, whilst a picture-perfect father, or older brother, sun bathes in ‘real’ sunlight, covered in ants, suggesting sticky confection, a potential plaything for the lord, or the magazine perfect false icon of an American suburb. Corgan saunters along past a lawn barbecue, attended by figures looking like glam metal stalwarts ‘Kiss’. They look equally imposing. They are barbecuing a red snapper, perhaps evoking the jazz electronica experimentalist, with whom he may want to collaborate, as well as the most commonly caught fish in America and a symbol of recreational lifestyle. A similarly garbed child plays on the grass obliviously, already converted to the dark side. A young woman holds a glass of milk aloft, as if mourning innocent youth - only missing her cookies - followed by the rest of the party, one of whom is the spitting image of metal washout, Alice Cooper. Another figure, in a yellow hockey mask, is sat before some bins, this one more conventionally tough and not as cleanly idealistic, perhaps unwilling to be superseded just yet.

The lord finally arrives at his picture-perfect destination, seemingly to enter his simple and modest idyll, but, as we all know, idylls are not real. As he enters the premises, haloed with a saintly penumbra, clearly fantastical, he discovers his trinity of jailers knowingly waiting for him, as if trapped in an infinite loop. After all, he’s nothing but a vessel inhabiting his own mental eversion. Clearly his escape was too easy and he has been trapped. It seems that there is no exit for Corgan, or at least not yet, until the women deign it safe to do so (perhaps when his ash will become a new time for the new generation of ancient arrivals, who are already ‘here but [from the] past’.)