Music Video Analysis - Everybody Hurts REM

1. Music Video Narrative Analysis
REM – Everybody Hurts

The video begins on a road, making it seem that you are a
car travelling on it; therefore immediately making the
audience feel like the message of the song may be aimed
at them as they are made to feel a part of the video. This
songs’ message acts like advice to the audience, and the
video gets that advice across by showing that ‘You’re not
alone’ and that there is a lot of people just like you in the
world.

‘When the day is long’, are the lyrics that open the scene of a
group of people inside a car. I think that a car journey has
been used to symbolize the ‘long days’ that the band is
describing.
The next set of lyrics; ‘and the night is yours alone’, is
contradicted by what we see in the video which is a traffic
jam, suggesting that even when you feel alone, there are a lot
of people who will always be in the same position as you.

‘When you’re sure you’ve had enough’ is visually
accompanied by the sight of a young boy with his
hands against the window with the words ‘They’re all
stuck’ at the bottom of the screen. This suggests that
this writing we see on screen that doesn’t match the
lyrics are the thoughts of the person who we see. So in
this case, the boy seems ‘stuck’ himself, however he is
also thinking that everybody is in the same position as
him; supporting the message of the song.

This shot shows an upset woman with the ‘thought’ that
nobody can see her. The lyrics ‘everybody cries’ applies to
what we see, as if to tell the woman and the audience that it
is okay to cry because ‘everybody cries’.

‘Everybody hurts’ is the next set of lyrics
showing a young boy thinking ‘They’re
going to miss me’, this suggests that it is
okay to ‘hurt’ because a lot of people do
even though they don’t show it.

The audience hears ‘Hold on’, and we are greeted with a low
angle of a boy ripping pages out of a book, alongside the
words ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy’ written on
the screen. I believe that this means that if you ‘Hold On’
when you’re sad, you’ll eventually be happy again. Basically I
believe that it suggests that joy is always around the corner,
this is associated with what we see on the screen as the boy
is sat on the edge of a bridge, so if he ‘Holds On’, he will
remain happy.

2. On the screen, we see a young boy wishing that his dad
would stop singing, even though the audience will have
grasped of the message that ‘Everybody Hurts’,
therefore showing that the boy is one of the many
people who struggle in everyday life. The lyrics for this
scene still apply to this boy’s story of him wanting his
dad to stop singing, and the lyrics tell us ‘When you
think you’ve had enough of this life’, telling the audience that the boy wishes that
he had a different life.

Throughout the music video, each shot shows each individual story of the people
stuck in the traffic jam. I believe this to have been a clever way to express
narrative because even though each individual’s story is different that is making
them ‘hurt’. However the message of the song is that even though everybody is
different, ‘everybody hurts’ in the same way, proving that you are never alone so
everybody needs to stick together.