Adoration of the Lightning

In 1998, the Smashing Pumpkins released a music video for their latest single, Ava Adore. Like many of the great music videos of the era, it’s visually engaging, conceptually enticing, and thematically unrelated to the song it tracks. Too Like the Lightning is a science fiction novel written twenty years later, and despite the laws of time and causality, it explains the Pumpkins’ music video far better than the music itself.

On its surface, Too Like the Lightning is a presentation from a convict named Mycroft Canner. For reasons which are only partially explained, Mycroft is involved with almost every powerful organization on 25th-century Earth. They’re seemingly omnipresent thanks to the availability of extremely fast, cheap, and distributed air travel. This allows them to be the readers’ guide across disjoint environments, effortlessly hopping between radically different social settings as events unfold. In Ava Adore, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan serves exactly this role as the camera trucks between film sets. He cheekily draws attention to his duty by pantomiming a linkage between two of the sets, but just like Mycroft, his presence in each is totally ancillary.

That isn’t to say either narrator is meek, though: both have a rock-star tendency to eat up the entire frame. Mycroft breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader and taking diversions on morality and history. The modern music video is already an absurdly narcissistic medium, but Corgan ups the self-awareness by only selectively mouthing his own recorded vocals.

Then again, neither guide is completely in control of the storytelling, as evidenced by their ignorance of external commentary. Mycroft’s words have been lightly amended by an unidentified editor. Ava Adore’s camera reveals the crew and equipment in the act of recording the video. These flourishes add an ironic dimension to both works, making each feel even more convoluted.

Audiences have another reason to mistrust their guides: fear. Corgan’s menace is overt through his vampiric costume, inhuman movement, and animal snarling. Mycroft only hints at their own sordid past, preferring to let others reveal the gory details toward the end of the novel. It’s simultaneously compelling and repulsive to be guided by a ghoul, and both works have that conflicted aura.

Despite the shared themes¹, I’m not suggesting that author Ada Palmer constructed their 400-page novel around a four-minute music video. The book has far more depth than one could cram into that format. Besides, there’s probably no inner logic to the video in the first place; it seems more likely that the artistic direction was largely aesthetic. Coincidental though my post-hoc analysis may be, I haven’t been able to shake it. Maybe it’s because Too Like the Lightning has yet to receive any expression in a visual medium. Maybe I got caught up in building a personal pneumonic for the book. Or maybe I just like the idea of a music video sourcing from a novel. Whatever the reason, I’m happy to pretend that Too Like the Lightning inspired Ava Adore.