the HOUSE in a LIGHTNING STORM
You may ask: why am I like this? Back in the old days, we watched Top of the Pops with dinner on trays in the living room, and coming in at #3 was an operatic short film with BIKERS and GHOSTS and a MASSIVE BALLGOWN. I was six, and on the cusp of a phase of my life in which I would take out ghost books from the library, be unable to sleep, over and over and over. I was haunted, and I was hooked. At the time we lived in a big old house, a four story Victorian with tiles in the hall and a proper bannister. Cut down for radio, it nevetheless still demands a monumental five minutes of airtime.
One of the first things I remember doing on the internet was finding out what this song was - maybe at the age of 10 or 11 - with some help from my dad whose memory was better for who the singer might have been. Then we painstakingly downloaded a clip on RealPlayer, a process which took most of the afternoon. This was far enough in the past that I went on to get Dion's All the Way...A Decade of Song & Video (2001) so I could see it again. The person I am now is forever in their soul running down the corridor in a blimp of tragic satin. This song demands nothing less.
I play a game called Music League with friends - each week there is a theme, and you must anonymously put forth a song. The most votes win! For Halloween, the theme was haunted houses and I could think of nothing else. But the song is not spooky - only the video - and the video is not epilepsy safe.
So here is the film in accessible form, and a tribute to the love song of all time.
No silly, I don't mean love for the man. My god, have you seen her house??
the HOUSE in a LIGHTNING STORM
He walks in heroic slo-mo to his bike. He looks at the weather...but heads out anyway
The classic iconography of the creepy stately home with oil paintings is immediately set in a modern time, with the juxtaposition of a photograph. The appropriate heterosexual union. also damn, for a sexy dead biker how did they find such an unappealing chap? are the straights ok
Fortunately, she is already in the perfect location and outfit for the emotions she is about to encounter. May we all be so lucky.
The biker is doomed to die when lightning hits a tree, causing him to skid into the conflagration, blazing hotter than lust and desire!
For accessibility reasons, I cannot tell a lie and hide the prominent moment in the video with the wedding ring, but I choose to believe her cruel husband is away and that’s why she was with her biker man candy in secret.
FYI this song was actually written about the scene in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s corpse and dances with it on the moors (a scene which does not actually exist in the novel, Steinman just remembers it and imagines it was in there. isn’t that wonderful?). This is like when I listen to Lana Del Rey and think
WIND shows off the drapery and gauzy furnishings to its best advantage, clattering the photo to the floor and breaking the glass...there is a strong-jawed shadow behind the curtains...
There were not only
I think this is a very Phantom of the Opera image — Steinman was approached by Lloyd Webber to write lyrics for Phantom and I dearly wish he'd done it.
Classic beefcake novel cover iconography, as our heroine takes not a moment of shock before making out with the entity in the shape of her husband. We've all been there.
I always put that on my wishlist when I move house, a corridor i can run down in moments of high emotion.
Menaced by memories in the video portrait gallery
Her spiralling dance around the gallery turns into a waltz but when she reaches to kiss him, he is gone.
1996 was also the year my family went to Eurodisney, visiting the Haunted Mansion and its jawdropping haunted ballroom, the same haunted ballroom I entered and have never left. There's something about ghostly dancing which is just the
The shadow moves across the hallway, fog pooling at his feet, only visible as he passes by each mirror in turn...he loiters on the stair
Gusts of WIND blow her picturesquely to the floor
He makes her a present of a fancy hairbrush in a box. There probably is gothic potential in the hairbrush as the object of spectral return and erotic memory, though I’m not sure this story finds it. This is followed by some lustful grinding, appropriately tepid in response to a gift of this calibre. I’m pretty sure my mum had that faux-Victorian silver hairbrush, it was the 90s.
I’m joking about but I genuinely think this is one of THE great music videos — the cinematography, the mood, and the special effects, which are understated but really evocative. I love the re-occurring long corridor as a space where the motorcycle comes inside, this is a great shot.
Interspersed with these parts are close ups of the singer, all of which are very glossy and well-put-together; she’s having a tidy nervous breakdown, not one hair out of place
She gets up off the floor. Crikey there’s going to be some cleaning up in the morning. Don't worry about it, this place must have help. She goes up the staircase where he was stood, and down the corridor — finding a single candle, mysteriously out of place.
In many ways, I’m finding the process of capping the film more eerie than the experience of watching it as an adult, I think its use of image is really strong — the classic ghost, but also repurposed in a very a distinctive way. The biker, in particular, is a Steinman motif.
(But was this song, the greatest love song of all time, the song of the millennium, surely was based in some real grief for a lost woman or Meatloaf? No. No it was not. Steinman has said he was never been stomped on literally. Figuratively, I am stomped on every day ... anyway, that is the way I feel sometimes. I've never had my heart broken the way you are talking about. I've never been dumped... but probably because I don't allow myself to be dumped.
Isn't that beautiful? I think it's marvellous. A body of work consumed by huge emotion, based on nothing but dreaming for a love too brilliant to ever be found in waking hours.)
She can run down as many unmapped and unmappable corridors as her castle contains — but they lead only ever to one destination.
The original version of the song, recorded by Pandora's Box, has a more ragged rock vocal & a guitar solo — some people prefer it, and I think that’s a respectable opinion. Vocalist Elaine Caswell describes Pandora's Box as four women; three that existed and Deliria Wilde who was somewhat mythical, someone Steinman kind of created
. She collapsed 5 times during the recording and coughed up blood which is BRINGING! THE! ENERGY! And I LOVE the Marengiesque introductory monologue, EXTREMELY relatable.
STOP ME BEFORE I DREAM AGAIN!
The video, by enfant terrible Ken Russel, features a fetish orgy in a graveyard with pythons. Interestingly, in that film, the female protagonist is the one to have the motorcycle crash, followed by lurid near-death visions, starring the dancers from CATS. The church refused permission for a scene where a motorcyclist would cycle up the steps of the tower, ride out of the steeple into air, and then EXPLODE. What I’m saying is the Celine Dion romance could use a bit more of that energy.
Well the Pandora’s Box music video is also pretty flashy so let’s cut away to see what that looks like.
Boy oh boy! Back to Celine.
There’s also a shot of the biker reflected in a rippling rain puddle I can’t capture, simple practical effects. In many ways this song is just peak Steinman, not merely as musician but as auteur.
In all my life, only one death in music has made me sob
As the song winds down, she returns to her room and the shattered photograph. This is the clearest view of the biker’s face in the film, as if he has moved from abstraction, entity, and from false fantasy-memory to true
She wanders down the corridor of autumn leaves...the window at the end flickers prominently, just to finish you off before the song ends if you're still hanging on.
I love him/ But when the night is over / He is gone / The mirror’s just a mirror.
She holds the picture and sways side to side, as the face draws back from the window and disappears.
And at long last, the sun rises