Words by Chris Greenspon, Features Writer, Bermudez Projects
“F**k if I know.” That’s what Andy Morahan said when Rolling Stone asked him what Axl Rose meant by the symbolism in a trio of bizarre Guns N’ Roses videos he directed.
When asked if I liked Guns N’ Roses enough to analyze this trilogy for The Review, I had roughly the same retort, but what was found was a lot more consistency than even the videos’ director seemed to notice.
The first two videos, Don’t Cry and November Rain, released in 1991 and 1992, hold together pretty well, stylistically. It’s the third, 1993’s Estranged, that didn’t go over so well with the fans. Here’s our take on why that was.
It begins, as we might expect, with a baby, on a bed of velvet. Don’t Cry is laden with erratic imagery: protagonist Axl Rose struggling in water and trudging through blizzards in a pseudo Civil War uniform, Axl’s real-life girlfriend at the time, Stephanie Seymour, hitting her head on a wall after wrestling a handgun from him, and cuts between the recurring rooftop concert threaded through vignettes of Rose’s relationship and life falling apart.
The first two thirds are pretty moody, featuring a picnic at a cemetery, a car driving off a cliff, but the narrative smash cuts into the third act via a mental breakdown for Rose in an all white hospital room, contrasting the preceding grittiness. The video wraps with Rose describing a tortured, green caveman (Axl) to a therapist, and it closes with the baby (Axl, once again) emerging from a baptismal font.
November Rain is the follow-up to Don’t Cry. It’s sweeter, funnier, and more straightforward. It probably wouldn’t reel you in the same way Don’t Cry did with its violent cuts and extreme settings, but by now you’ve had a chance to get invested in Rose’s character, and November Rain brilliantly expands on Don’t Cry’s production design.
It opens with a pill-popping scene that fades into a concert at the gilded Orpheum Theatre. This establishes a sense of the present, and an immediate contrast to the punk world of Don’t Cry. A candle flickering out and a bloody tear on a statue of Christ means that “nothin’ lasts forever,” as frontman Axl Rose whisks us back in time, to his wedding (filmed at St. Brendan’s on Van Ness). It’s a silly affair: Seymour is back in a ruffly dress, showing a lot of leg, Rose looks like a French dandy, and best man Slash loses the ring (!). Then she dies. Why?
The funeral scenes look like the same cemetery from Don’t Cry, and the image of Seymour’s bouquet landing on her own coffin makes for a unified story. There’s some character arcing too, because this installment isn’t all about Axl, but he still suffers in spite of his development into a less reckless person.
1993’s Estranged might be the most concise as far as symbolism, but it doesn’t live up to the ability of this medium to carry a narrative through disparate, abstract imagery. Where Don’t Cry cycled through images to create consistency, Estranged makes stops at various places for far too long, and then mostly abandons them. Rose’s mansion makes its third appearance in the trilogy, possibly to save money. A playground has been set up in the front yard. At the start of the video, Rose’s house is stormed by a swat team (to save Axl from himself?), then we spend a few minutes at a stadium for a Guns N’ Roses concert, before returning to the house, which is now bursting with white-clad rehab’ers escorting Axl into a white limousine. Enter the dolphins.
Since leaving the stadium, Axl has been thinking of water. He showered in his clothes, his house was bathed in a watery visual effect, and now dolphins are appearing everywhere: on the trunk of his limo, in the gutters of Sunset Boulevard, flying out of billboards. He dives off of a freight liner and swims with actual dolphins before finally being rescued by his bandmates in a chopper, leaving his signature Converse high-top sinking to the bottom of the sea. A nice close to a strange journey.
Estranged was lopsided, focusing on sequences that didn’t engender much investment in Axl’s journey, and featured a bloated large-scale concert that made the song feel boring. The introduction of the dolphin midway through Estranged makes sense after all of the water visuals, but it’s use as a persistent symbol in a hard rock video is kind of weird.
Estranged misses the gloomy, romantic tones of its predecessors and replaces the guns and roses with some kind of inside joke about dolphins.
Why?
“F**k if I know.”
Guns N’ Roses is currently on tour and will perform at Dodger Stadium on August 18.
