canyouseethewords.tumblr.com
“Diegetic: (of sound in a movie, television program, etc.) occurring
within the context of the story and able to be heard by the characters."
Oxford Languages
Music, in a film, typically serves a few purposes. Most of the time, it seeks to expand a soundscape, to add into the growing narrative presented to a viewer. Cinematic media as we currently view it has the standard of privileged viewing: we see each necessary element of the known story from the point of view of a character or cast who grant us the privilege of watching events as they occur. Lights and music are–for the most part–not diegetic, and we as viewers are so used to this Hollywood standard of creation that it isn’t defamiliarizing. So what happens when a piece of media doesn’t have that manufactured element? When everything the audience sees is barely enough for the full picture? When the world is too big to capture? EverymanHYBRID, a found-footage ARG that took place between 2010-2018, challenges these assumptions and more with its innovative use of diegetic music for storytelling, puzzle-crafting, and, at times, intense foreshadowing.
EverymanHYBRID (or EMH) is an unfiction project crafted by Vincent Caffarello, Jeffrey Koval Jr., and Evan Jennings. Branching from the then-new Marble Hornets, the series takes a broader scope in functioning as a fully-blown Alternate Reality Game complete with hidden codes, treasure hunts across the East Coast, and audience participation globally. But what does sound have to do with it?
In contrast to other found-footage projects of the time, EverymanHYBRID does not stray from some of the more R-rated elements that YouTube was still tentative on at the time of release. With the intense violence presented throughout alongside consistent swearing from members of the cast, monetization was never at the forefront of the creators’ minds. Part of this departure from the marketable YouTube form allowed the consistent use of music, varying by genre and context. At the start of the series, Koval contributes a great deal of the soundtrack, with narrative elements causing Caffarello’s character and others to take over as years go by. Aside from the unique soundscape, though, the music is used for larger purposes, often playing into the audience’s tendencies to pick apart every element presented within. And it’s not for bad reason.
SECTION ONE: DIEGETIC, UNKNOWN
On March 31, 2012, a video was uploaded to the EverymanHYBRID channel entitled “Dead end with a Pulse.” In it, Vinny and Jeff discuss leads they have on the unfolding mystery throughout the series–a mysterious doctor and patients that bear a resemblance to supernatural elements infesting their day-to-day. For the first time in months, they come upon a lead that may be a step in the right direction, and Vinny instructs Jeff to give the news to Evan, who has been absent occasionally in recent entries. Evan’s behavior, becoming more and more erratic, has not entirely been revealed as influenced in any way, but a keen-eyed viewer would’ve been more than a bit on-edge when Jeff approaches the back of his house. The radio of Jeff’s car warbles lyrics from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Brendan’s Death Song:”
“Well if I die before I get it done, will you decide?
Take my words and turn them into signs that will survive.”
The clip changes before any more lyrics are heard, before the song’s chorus (“Like I said, you know I’m almost dead, you know I’m almost gone.”) has a chance to make itself heard, but the music’s intentionality is clear. This example is one of the most pertinent where the music is played by the characters, but its lyricism and foreshadowing is only available to the audience. In the following scene and coming months, Jeff is kidnapped, then slowly tortured and killed, for the crime of having figured out the mystery and catching up to the entity behind his friends’ and family’s torment. The song, diegetically presented, has narrative foreshadowing to a degree that is nearly obvious, but almost only retrospectively. At least, to a typical audience. But the standard EverymanHYBRID has created prompts deeper investigation. This example isn’t the only time this work uses diegetic audio to clue the audience in on a narrative element the characters do not yet know, but it is certainly the most poignant. It isn’t the only audio quirk of this episode, however, and was largely overlooked by original audiences due to the following scene…
SECTION TWO: DIEGETIC, KNOWN
Part of EverymanHYBRID’s charm, unmistakably, is its charismatic and masochistic villain, an entity named HABIT, who possesses the character of Evan throughout the series, warping his choices and actions until serious questions of morality and personhood are raised. HABIT engages with the ARG audience on a scale above the main cast of characters, encouraging challenges online and, at times, hiding clues in tangential blogs and videos to be discovered. HABIT’s relationship with the metatextual narrative of the series becomes more apparent in the later years, but in 2012, during one of his first proper appearances, “I Can’t Decide” by the Scissor Sisters is heard when Jeff approaches Evan within his house.
“Don't wanna be a bad guy/I'm just a loner, baby
And now you've gotten in my way
I can't decide/Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven/Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why/My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified/Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride”
HABIT, unlike Jeff, is fully aware of the lyrics he is playing, and uses them to taunt the audience as well as the characters, a hallmark of his presentation throughout. As the series becomes more metatexual in its later years, this element is used frequently to convey Evan and Vinny’s lack of control, but HABIT always knows exactly what he is relaying with the music he presents. In combination with the series’ use of non-diegetic cameras in HABIT’s taunting of Evan, the music comes to reflect this frustration and lack of narrative control with the twisting of lyrics in songs (such as Frank Sinatra’s renditions of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “The Best Is Yet To Come”). The diegetic audio combined with an introspective and dramatically ironic read of the work accessed exclusively by the villain and the audience creates a unique and tense textual landscape. Especially in a work so riddled with clues and puzzles, having an element of narrative development that only one member of a self-referential work has access to is a masterfully crafted method of storytelling.
In contrast to much of typical media’s use of non-diegetic sound, EverymanHYBRID makes good use of audio that characters actively play to convey elements of narrative progression and foreshadowing. The tone of the series drastically changes when Jeff dies, not only due to the plot, but also with the music shifting toward the tastes of Vinny and Evan, being both pop-y and on the heavier rock/metal side accordingly. The absence of Jeff’s presence shifts the entire series’ soundscape, and it’s all done through diegetic, in-universe elements. The accomplishment may seem simple–and in premise, it is–but the foundation set to accomplish such a feat is intricate and long-in-the-making.
SECTION THREE: NON-DIEGETIC, KNOWN + UNKNOWN
Non-diegetic sound in EverymanHYBRID is few and far between, although there are a couple moments of slowed, pitched audio in some entries. “Did You See the Words” by Animal Collective appears this way in “Finding Fairmount,” which gains textual relevance when one examines the other reference to that song throughout the series: Damsel’s blog. Canyouseethewords.tumblr.com posted many YouTube links to songs throughout the years– in between posts of varying poetic obfuscation. Some directly contributed to plot, but much of it simply sets a tone for the character and her personality. Music posted on the blog doesn’t exactly fit the bill of non-diegetic, since it is directly posted by a character, but the blog itself contains a manufactured element absent from much of EverymanHYBRID, since it is directly responsive to an audience but not in real-time. However, the music’s meanings are known to Damsel, who exhibits behavior that (like HABIT) conveys a bit more understanding of the world’s scope in comparison to the main three EverymanHYBRID characters. The only true non-diegetic music comes in the form of the previously mentioned slowed segments, unless you count edited-in soundtracks such as HABIT’s use of “That’s Life” in the video “Next.”
There is, however, use of some tried-and-true non-diegetic influence through camera static. A common motif throughout found-footage series, EverymanHYBRID utilizes the precedent set by Marble Hornets to convey supernatural influence through the use of altering camera feedback: pitching audio, employing visual noise, and playing ear-splitting static in moments of conflict. There is often an implied reaction for the characters in moments of intense conflict, as participants will often report headaches or ears ringing, but the camera static itself remains both a rich narrative tool and also a non-diegetic audio cue for the audience alone. Characters have a delayed reaction to the interference – by the time they are aware of the disruption in playback, they have already experienced the event depicted. Take, for instance, the first perceived supernatural occurrence of the series’s background villain in “Episode 6 - Healthy Eating.” Within EverymanHYBRID’s earliest videos, there is both a fabricated villain and a real supernatural occurrence, and the audio stuttering and video playback in this segment clues the audience in on the reality of the situation even before the characters realize its importance. Viewers are given the opportunity to compare the standards of interaction set by projects within this new genre–camera distortion and static typically mean trouble–and raise them against the characters’ insistence that things are not in fact supernatural. The audience requires no distance to see these events as fictional, but the characters, living in the moment, are prone to justification.
—
That’s cool, I guess. Why does it matter?
EverymanHYBRID, at the end of the day, breaks its barriers as unfiction, if briefly. In the sixty-eighth video of the series, entitled “Le premier cours,” Vinny and Evan come to a realization about their narrative: they weren’t ever in control. The creature HABIT has been altering their memories, their realities, even the space they inhabit. In a brief moment of lucidity from Evan, Vinny gets to sit down with his friend and try to wrap his head around the clues falling into place before them:
Vinny: It's all one house – it doesn't make more sense than teleporting, or being thrown from one place or another.
Evan: No. What the fuck, how the fuck do you come to that fucking conclusion?
Vinny: Because I don't exist.
Evan: What?
Vinny: Evan, we are fiction.
Evan: What the fuck does that mean?
Vinny: Our lives were written for us.
Evan: You can't just say shit like that, you don't fucking know-
Vinny: I know. I know it.
Evan: What do you mean you know it?
Vinny: Something just clicked. Right? It clicked. Now I know.
(EverymanHYBRID, “Le premier cours”)
The issue with many unfiction projects, particularly when it comes to their believability, is the idea that characters, if they had the agency allowed by actualized people, wouldn’t partake in as much of the narrative as is being displayed. There exists, then, an incentive to draw characters back to the spotlight. In the original Marble Hornets, Jay is forced to continue filming and posting for fear of his safety, when his apartment is lit on fire. In classic unfiction works like Dracula, the format of the media is laid out to be continued through conflict, as it is a character’s musings to a journal or log. When it comes to the unfiction series–the most commonly known use of the term in a modern fiction landscape– much of the drive for characters continuing to document has to come from the format they’re reporting on. In earlier blogs this could be a righteous dedication to the truth and creating documentation of events as they occur, but when it comes to the more-involved, filmed media, the fallback is often levied on characters’ obsessions. In the early years of EverymanHYBRID, this was well-established by Vinny’s desire to “keep [the audience] updated” on the events occurring. Despite pushback from others, Vinny sought to document all he could, because he felt he owed it to the viewers; that his audience deserved the truth as he discovered it.
When his actions become more and more morally grey, this drive is lost, but the posting remains. He, similar to Marble Hornets’ Jay Merrick before him, clings to the camera as a lifeline, though perhaps not as neurotically. For Vinny, the camera represents a reality, a tie to real, individual people who can respond and interpret and discuss events as they occur. It is that detail that makes the realization of his falsity so crushing. A character who, through years of searching, has finally found the truth to be just as fabricated as every riddle before it. And in the end, he’s resolved about it. Evan, battling between consciousnesses, is reluctant and combative. Vinny is not. And suddenly, the clues make sense.
Aside from the music, there are a few non-diegetic narrative elements unique to EverymanHYBRID. The channel contains a number of “hidden” videos, which are fully visible on YouTube, but not available to characters within the context of the story. When a viewer goes out of their way to mail a disc of the videos to Jeff, it is revealed that these “hidden” videos are entirely non-diegetic, as they don’t even play properly to the characters, instead showing a black screen and static. Combining this element of storytelling with the near-entirely diegetic soundscape presents a world of self-referential and intertextual elements, with characters innately driven to continue documenting by features out of their control. This, at the end of the day, is a perfect setup for the audience to begin questioning authenticity.
With the interactivity of EverymanHYBRID, there is an easy critique of the characters in “why don’t you just stop filming?” Especially toward the start, characters like Jeff were actively speaking out against the documentation of their lives. Toward the end, documentation is near-irrelevant, with the introduction of a third-party documenter in the form of HABIT’s creature. But in the middle, in the segments where Vinny has his realizations about the nature of his house, life, and memories, there is little keeping him posting, other than his nature. And this nature is perfectly illustrated by his simple statement: “Evan, we are fiction.” He couldn’t stop filming, because at the end of the day, he is a character in a “found footage” show. In perhaps the most fascinating component to this realization, he continues on his path. Whereas someone like Evan–or Jeff, if he was still alive–would’ve let this revelation guide their path; Vinny, the Everyman, does not. He knows the truth, and that is it.
The sound of EverymanHYBRID, its diegetic and acknowledged nature, creates the perfect backdrop for a narrative that is ultimately about storytelling. The foreshadowing presented with “Brendan’s Death Song,” the overt threats in “I Can’t Decide,” the eerie finality in “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” all roads lead to one destination: what we are watching is already written, and there is nothing we, nor the characters can do about it. The Everyman morality play, which provides many of the building blocks for EverymanHYBRID’s storyline, was written centuries before the series. Every moment of unreality, every time a character tries and fails to silence the plot laying out before them, pays off in the simple and final realization of the reality of a story being told. In the end, it’s all a descent toward the inevitable, and the music throughout the series does a masterful job at crafting this realization for both the characters and audience.
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