Original video In July 1991, Vedder became acquainted with photographer
Chris Cuffaro. Vedder suggested Cuffaro film a
music video for the band. On Vedder's insistence,
Epic gave Cuffaro permission to use any song off
Ten. He chose "Jeremy", which was not intended to be released as a single at the time. Epic refused to fund the clip, forcing Cuffaro to finance it himself. Cuffaro raised the money by taking out a loan and selling all of his furniture and half his guitar collection. Cuffaro and his crew spent a day filming several scenes of a young actor, Eric Schubert, playing the part of Jeremy. The scenes with Pearl Jam were filmed in a warehouse on
Pico Boulevard in
Los Angeles,
California. A revolving platform was rigged at the center of the set, and the members of the band climbed on it individually to give the illusion of the song being performed as a crew member spun the giant turntable by hand. Vedder appeared with black gaffer's tape around his biceps as a mourning band for the real Jeremy.
Official video By the time Cuffaro finished his music video, Epic had warmed up to the idea of releasing "Jeremy" as a single. Music video director
Mark Pellington was brought in to handle the project. Pellington said that he "wasn't a huge fan of the band, but the lyrics intrigued me—I spoke to Eddie, and I really got connected to his passion." Pellington and Pearl Jam convened in
Kings Cross, London, England, in June 1992 to film a new version of the "Jeremy" music video. Working with veteran editor Bruce Ashley, Pellington's high-budget video incorporated rapid-fire editing and
juxtaposition of sound, still images, graphics and text elements with live action sequences to create a
collage effect. The classroom scenes were filmed at
Bayonne High School in
New Jersey. The video also featured many close-ups of Vedder performing the song, with the other members of Pearl Jam shown only briefly. Some of the stock imagery was similar to the original video, but when it came to the band, Pellington focused on Vedder. Vedder thus serves as the video's narrator. Ament said, "It was mostly Mark and Ed's vision. In fact, I think it would have been a better video if the rest of the band wasn't in it. I know some of us were having a hard time with the movie-type video that Mark made, because our two previous videos were made live." The video premiered on August 1, 1992, The success of the "Jeremy" video helped catapult Pearl Jam to fame. Pellington stated, "I think that video tapped into something that has always been around and will always be around. You're always going to have peer pressure, you're always going to have adolescent rage, you're always going to have dysfunctional families." The video won four
MTV Video Music Awards in 1993, including
Best Video of the Year,
Best Group Video,
Best Metal/Hard Rock Video, and
Best Direction.
Synopsis Jeremy is shown at school being alienated from, and taunted by, his classmates, running shirtless through a forest, and screaming at his parents at a dinner table. Only Jeremy is shown moving in the video; all of the other characters depicted are almost always frozen in a series of stationary tableaus. Shots of words depicting others' presumed descriptions of Jeremy—such as
problem,
peer,
harmless, and
bored—frequently appear onscreen. Included are three
biblical allusions: "the
serpent was subtil", from
Genesis , "the
unclean spirit entered", a reversal of
Mark , and , referencing the concept of
original sin. As the song becomes more dense and frenetic, Jeremy's behavior becomes increasingly agitated. Strobe lighting adds to the anxious atmosphere. Jeremy is shown standing, arms raised in a V (as described in the lyrics at the beginning of the song), in front of a wall of billowing flames. He is later shown staring at the camera while wrapped in an
American flag, surrounded by fire. He then stands shirtless in an artificial forest, surrounded by various drawings. He becomes aggravated, breaks off a branch, and swings it at various trees in anger, all while lights flash around his body. The final scene of the video shows Jeremy striding into class shirtless, tossing an apple to the teacher, and standing before his classmates. He reaches down and draws back his arm as he takes a gun out of his pocket. (The gun only appears onscreen in the unedited version of the video.) The edited version cuts to an extreme close-up of Jeremy's face as he puts the barrel of the gun in his mouth, closes his eyes, and pulls the trigger. After a flash of light, the screen turns black. The next shot is a pan across the classroom, showing Jeremy's blood-spattered classmates, all completely still, recoiling in horror. The video ends on a shot of a dangling blackboard, on which all the harsh terms and phrases seen earlier are scrawled.
Controversy Pellington's original video shows Jeremy putting the gun in his mouth at the climax. However, this ran afoul of MTV restrictions on violent imagery. As such, the weapon was cropped out of the shot by zooming in on the upper part of Jeremy's face. Pellington himself dismissed this interpretation of the video. After "Jeremy", Pearl Jam backed away from making music videos. "Ten years from now," Ament said, "I don't want people to remember our songs as videos." The band did not release another video until 1998's "
Do the Evolution", which is entirely animated. In 1996, a shooting occurred at Frontier Junior High School in
Moses Lake, Washington, that left three dead and a fourth injured. The prosecutors for the case said the shooter,
Barry Loukaitis, was influenced by the edited version of the music video. The video was included in
MuchMusic's list of the 12 most controversial videos, due to its subject of
suicide, and in light of school shootings. The uncensored version of the video was remastered in high definition and released on Pearl Jam's official
YouTube channel on June 5, 2020, to mark National Gun Violence Awareness Day. The remastered version also features a new audio track, remixed by Brendan O'Brien for the 2009 reissue of
Ten. This version was shown as part of VH1 Classic's retrospective
Pearl Jam Ten Revisited, which coincided with the album's rerelease. ==Live performances==