The music video, which won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video in 1994, features Petty as a morgue assistant who takes home a beautiful dead woman (played by Kim Basinger). He then tries to bring her back to life by acting as if she were alive, putting her in front of a television set and then dressing her as a bride, sitting her at the dinner table and dancing with her with no effect. A scene in the video featuring the dead woman wearing a wedding dress in a room full of wax candles is loosely based on a passage from the Charles Dickens novel "Great Expectations". The plot also has similarities with the French movie "Cold Moon", itself inspired by a Charles Bukowski short story ("The Copulating Mermaid of Venice"). Later, Petty is shown carrying her to a rocky shore and gently releasing her into the sea. At the end of the video, Basinger, who is seen floating in the water, opens her eyes.