Sinéad O'Connor is a spirited woman. Through five studio albums and more, she has marked her soul across dozens of songs about God, religion, politics, people, and family. She writes in whatever style suits her message. The lyrical Fire On Babylon is an emblazoned song about an emotionally abusive mother. Sinéad sings, "She took my father from my life / Took my sister and brothers / I watched her torturing my child." At the end of the song she almost screams, "Fire!"
Gondry takes Sinéad's story and in a way completes it, examining its themes. The imagery in the video is a bit complicated, and some remains difficult to decipher (like the burning cake scene). But it deserves examination. And as a chronicler of Michel Gondry's work, we'll make an attempt.
First, the entire video consists of two 'worlds:' really just two representations of the same house. To escape her mother's abuse, the girl in the video (whose alter ego is Sinéad O'Connor - she also occasionally acts as narrator), hides away in her bedroom.
The gateway between the two worlds is the girl's bed located at the end of her hallway-like room. To enter the other world/house, the wall alongside her bed rotates like some secret passageway in an old mansion. Similarly, the entire house and lawn rotate into the earth, revealing an identical, yet decaying, version of the house on the other side. In the second house, everything is a shell of the real world.
To accomplish all of this imagery, Gondry uses: changes in lighting and decor (shadows and creepier wallpaper are prevalent in the second world), film projections (to represent different realities and eliminate some costs), models (to accentuate the rotted perfection of Babylon), and editing (to draw parallels between images).
The film projections get tricky. In one sequence, Gondry uses a technique where he projects film of a happy family onto the lawn. Actually the film was projected onto a pane of glass set in front of the camera to capture the effect (although this is speculation.) The same effect was used in Hyperballad.
Another element of the video is the mechanical motif. Various scenes in the video give the impression that the world is fake, merely controlled by the machinery which lie underground. Through editing, a parallel is drawn between the table-top world and a saw-type machine located in the house's garage.
A second mechanism in the form of a room-size scouring machine is also used in the video. The machine becomes a symbol of the mother's abuse. Throughout the video, it hounds the girl/Sinéad character in the bad house. At the end, Sinéad takes on the machine in full jousting armor, and kills it, setting it aflame. The bad house then goes up in flames, with the girl (and her brother) rejoicing. A quick edit shows the reality: the lights of police cars flare across the real house.