"Can you hear me now?:" Part two of my analysis on Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"

The grave of Jeremy Wade Delle, whose life, death, and story greatly inspired Pearl Jam's song "Jeremy."

NOTE: This blog is a followup to the one I published at the end of January 2014, entitled "Speak Up, Jeremy: A Comprehensive Analysis of Pearl Jam's "Jeremy." That blog was more or less an initial reaction blog combined with some research I did on my own time to form a more formal, structured analysis of a music video. It was done for my high school course Critical Lenses. Now, for this assignment - assigned about a month later - we are revisiting the song after learning numerous "new" terms from which we can propose a deeper, more thoughtful analysis than just our initial thoughts and opinions. For the record, this is a more formal assignment than the last, which the class, including myself, was given complete free-range of what we could do. With this essay, however, we're a little gridlocked in the regard that we had a list of terms we needed to explore, define, and utilize in this essay, which explains for why this essay sort of panders a bit more to an unseen rubric than it does to my normal, fly-by-the-tips-of-my-fingers style writing.

At one point in time (hopefully soon, but my hectic schedule may say otherwise), I plan to compile a folder on this blog that houses all of my writing assignments for Critical Lenses, regardless of how big or small. Some will be lengthy paragraphs, while others will be more formal, structured essays.

On a final note, I find it imperative to read my preceding blog before touching this one, to understand where I stand with the song, how I view it, and what I took away from it. Here it is, http://stevepulaski.blogspot.com/2014/01/speak-up-jeremy-attempt-at.html

I now present you with "Can you hear me now?:" Part two of my analysis on Pearl Jam's "Jeremy."

"Can you hear me now?:" Part two of my analysis on Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"

By: Steve Pulaski

                Pearl Jam’s song “Jeremy” is just direct enough to illustrate a point but also bears lyrics and a music video just ambiguous enough to allow for outside interpretation and extensive analysis to take place. The song tells the story of a young boy named Jeremy, who lives in your average, upper-middle class suburban town, but while he has two parents and a plentiful community, he still feels bored and neglected. The music video shows his alienation and how he responds to these sheltering feelings of isolation through introverted activities before finally taking his life in front of a classroom full of students. The music video for Pearl Jam’s song “Jeremy” annihilates its viewer with pervasive visuals and extremely intense lyricism, but one of its strongest, most consistent themes is how neglecting and turning a blind eye to a child will leave them cold, numb, and almost entirely anti-social.

                Visually, Pearl Jam’s music video for “Jeremy” is quite a marvel, with constant use of quick-cuts, hardened symbolism, and sporadic title-cards with basic adjectives punctuating shots of Eddie Vedder shouting the lyrics of the song against a blood-red backdrop of what appears to be Hell. The color immediately takes prominence, with a dark color-scheme of red, black, and green hitting the screen, effectively illustrating an ugliness to the video that only puts one off. Then there are the camera angles that find themselves germane to the content and the symbolism the video tries to include. For example, scenes depicting Jeremy’s fantasies of running through the woods, effectively existing in his own world, show Jeremy in a position of power simply because the camera is positioned at a low-angle where the camera is looking up at him rather than at eye-level. This denotes power, simply because we feel small compared to him, while he feels in total control. Furthermore, shots of Jeremy in the classroom have a more hardened hecticness to them than others, as they show Jeremy hunched over his desk at school, fiercely scribbling and illustrating his dreams and visions on a piece of paper, while the class keeps their eyes front most of the time, only occasionally using their energy to pick on the boy for his isolationist attitude in school. This is where the video’s director and editor Mark Pellington employ quick-shots and frequent close-ups of Jeremy’s face illustrating frustration and crippling loneliness. He is a time-bomb with no time-clock strapped to him. He is the victim of two parents that don’t pay any attention to him (going off Vedder’s lyrics of “Daddy didn't give attention. Oh, to the fact that mommy didn't care.”) and a classroom of kids that pick on him and treat him as insignificant. Because of this, Jeremy created his own world to combat the boredom and incredibly disinteresting real-world. On a final note, Pellington also includes numerous scenes where the lighting and the color seems oddly misplaced or at least depicted in an offputting way. For example, frequent scenes show almost extreme close-ups of Jeremy’s face with a single lamp swaying back and forth to either show a shot of his face in an overexposed light or one that collectively makes it purposefully underlit to obscure it. While this, like practically every individual shot and scene in the music video, can be interpreted in its own unique way, Pellington seems to employ it for the fact that it does indeed provide discomfort on behalf of the audience. It also does an effective job at illustrating chaos and, as a result, makes the video feel like a pressure-cooker about to explode – much like how Jeremy himself behaves. The visual scheme in the video, in summation, does its best to illustrate themes of isolation and affluent boredom simply by showing both Jeremy’s moments of happiness and freedom and his moments of exhaustion and frustration through unique filming techniques on part of Pellington's editing and incredibly distinct style of filming.

                Moving on to the aural techniques the “Jeremy” video utilizes, Pearl Jam is a hard-rock/grunge band through-and-through and, being that “Jeremy” adheres to Pearl Jam’s long-standing musical techniques, the song confidently makes its presents known and makes its impact even harsher just by the way Vedder sings the lyrics of the song. The song doesn’t have a formal chorus, unlike most songs of any genre, and the closest thing it has is the constantly-repeated line by Vedder, “Jeremy spoke in class today,” referring to the inevitable fate of Jeremy when he shot himself before a packed class of students. Vedder’s lyrics are enhanced not only by his persistent shouting but the array of instrumentation such as heavy guitars and loud, booming drums, making their presence just as much as Vedder is making his own. Vedder is consistent with his tone of voice, in the regard that he wants to make his vocals the only ones heard, but also finds himself drowned out by the presence of the exhaustive instruments in the background. “Jeremy’s” melody stays consistent with that of most heavy rock songs, in the regard that the song’s vocals are easily-noticeable and often expressed loudly whereas the instruments are also cranked up. Except for specific lines (IE: “Jeremy spoke in class today” and “Daddy didn’t give him attention” when he kicks his vocals into a louder, fiercer gear), Vedder’s vocals stay the same throughout the entire song. The only way to accurately summarize Vedder’s approach to this material and this music from an aural standpoint is boisterous, possibly adhering to the thoughts that Jeremy himself has. Picture yourself as a young child, with no one to really turn to, no one to rely on, no immediate close friends, and your only world is a fantasy one you cook up yourself and can rarely access and immerse yourself in without being burdened. Thoughts, feelings, and emotions that Jeremy may not be able to accurately process are likely screaming to him in his head, like a helpless schizophrenic man, fighting to get out or at least be intercepted by someone who can acutely process them in a meaningful way. Jeremy doesn’t have that one person or soul to turn to, and Vedder illustrates that with such a loud and direct sound-scheme that the song and video concoct.

                Finally, there are the elements of basic literary additions and techniques that can be explored in the music video, anything from the increasingly subtle to the forcefully blatant subtext to the inclusions of allusions or imagination figments stuffed inside the song and its video. For starters, there’s the persistent reference and image of Jeremy standing on a mountaintop with his arms positioned in a “V” that either finds itself mentioned in the song or included in the video. This could represent “victory” in a small sense, possibly meaning that Jeremy has found what he wants to do in the vein of making himself victorious over his peers. However, it most likely refers to the fact that in his own world he has found a way to make himself heard; he has found a way to make his presence a significant one rather than a lonely face in the crowd of grade-school students who don’t really know, care about, or respect him as not only an individual but a human being. Pervasive symbolism such as Jeremy draped in the American Flag (is Jeremy “America’s child?”) and shots of children standing in unison with one another, bearing the same outfits and operating with a haunting, military precision with their conformist action turns up. While all of it sticks out in a significant way, the kind that takes place in Jeremy’s dreams stands out the most being that it shows a numb, helpless individual with no one to turn to, relying on his own wits in the tumultuous game of life. Moving on to the figurative language aspect, as well as sensory details, being that this is a music video, these things are able to have a life of their own and are not simply confined to words on a piece of paper. For instance, Vedder is constantly using figurative language to illustrate Jeremy's own world, such as, "King Jeremy the wicked ruled his world," showing the only time he felt any power was when he left the drudgery of his suburban landscape. The sensory details come in all throughout the music video, providing for more of a sensory experience. First, you have the video's inherent loudness, then you have its dark, dreary color scheme, then you have visuals that, at times, look like they're recorded off of a very old VHS print (take the forest scenes for example that seem to have a weird fuzziness to the green shrubs and trees), and, finally, you just have numerous title cards and quick-cuts thrown in for good measure. In total, you have numerous things coming at you, working for your eyes, ears, and mind in a way that almost seems like an overload. Finally, when it comes down to the tone and the point of view of the video, it's already established that Vedder's tone is darker and more depressing, obviously to give light to "Jeremy"'s dark and depressing subject matter, and its point-of-view is in the third person given the regard that we're outsiders looking in on Jeremy's life and not told the story from his perspective. We're told from an observational classmate, presumably, who recalls getting in a fight with the kid and commenting about  how he "seemed a harmless little fuck" throughout their time together. In the end, the way "Jeremy" expresses its central theme of capturing the alienation of this kid who went on to take his life in his own classroom, is through the use of common literary techniques such as symbolism, figurative language, and providing viewers with a somewhat disturbing sensory experience.

    In summation, "Jeremy" is a special music video in many regards, one of the reasons is for its ability to be interpreted and viewed in numerous different lights. But at its core, it's a depressing and often haunting tale of how consistent neglection and absent, careless parents can lead to the destruction and the increasing boredom and numbness in a young teenager's head. Through its constant use of potent visuals, incredibly direct and blatant aural scheme, and its careful use of literary expressionism, Eddie Vedder, Mark Pellington, and the band Pearl Jam has concocted a video that appropriately illustrates this kind of alienation in a very explicit form.