The use of subtitles in R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" is a little more sophisticated, and is almost a parody of the idea of lip-synching/visualisation of lyrics. The video begins with the band sitting in a car, which pulls up to a traffic jam. The words at the beginning of the first verse,

When the day is long,
And the night,
The night is yours alone

appear at the bottom of the screen as Michael Stipe sings them. The visual narrative then switches to the passengers of other cars who are stuck in the jam, and the subtitles no longer imitate the lyrics, but rather voice the thoughts of these other people, all of who are hurting in some way. All of these people are alone in some way, and each case is different. The viewer has to guess why the passengers are hurting from a single line of subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

As the music moves into the middle section, Michael Stipe gets out of the car and walks around the stranded traffic, as do the rest of the band. The subtitles continue to voice people's thoughts as we hear the final verse, occasionally imitating the lyrics of the final verse and following chorus, before the song shifts into the coda section. The coda section is the section most clearly defined in the song in terms of instrumentation, which previously consisted of organ, acoustic guitar, bass, strings and quiet percussive clicks. This final section sees the first appearance of a full drum kit and electric guitar and is the obvious climax of the song. Even Michael Stipe's lyrical phrases are shorter in length, more repetitive, and the song seems to lose some of its hopelessness and becomes more assertive, more hopeful.

The final coda section is also the turning point in the visual narrative. Whereas we had previously seen individual shots of people sitting in cars, worrying and hurting, we now see everyone climb out of their cars as the camera slowly zooms out, some of whom we recognise from earlier shots in the promo clip. Just as the music asserts that things may not be as bad as they seem, the visuals seem to show all these individual people, united in their effort to walk away from their cars and their feelings of entrapment (the cars are probably a symbol for entrapment in a life these people are unhappy in).

It may be interesting to note that Michael Stipe doesn"t start lip-synching the lyrics until the beginning of the coda section. There may be many ways of interpreting this - though the subtitles relay intense personal feelings, there may be some amount of distancing between the characters and the viewer, which dissipates when Stipe actually starts to lip-synching the words. The lip-synching may also be interpreted as a call to the passengers to break out, to leave their old lives behind and walk away. There is also an idealistic nature to the end of the promo clip - in an ideal world people could just walk away and start a new life. It is possibly this idealism, combined with the grain of Stipe's almost "anguished" voice and the gentle instrumentation, which makes the song so poignant and so emotional. If everybody hurts, then surely we can all relate to the song's lyrics(and perhaps even the visuals), and it is probably this universality, which helped make the song an international hit.

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