Screenshot from Ellie Thatcher’s “The Quiet Wing” (screencaps by author)
For me, 2026 is best represented by Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” music video, specifically Reagan’s nightmare sequence: haunting puppet mountains, representative of the people who run our world, towering over us with their sharp teeth, ready to crunch my body for their 7:00 dinner. Only Genesis’ puppets of power have now been radically amplified by social media and an insatiable consumerist culture, both of which contribute to our desensitisation and loss of individuality. Like this music video, I find myself lost in this maze of hypocrisy, disorientation, and hate, leaving me and many others IN this “Land of Confusion” with Reagan’s dog whistle of “Make America Great Again’ updated and expanded at a surreal rate. In times like these, I am thankful for art like Ellie Thatcher’s The Quiet Wing, an 8-minute stop-motion short that perfectly embodies this amplification of the techno-fascist era we are currently seeping further and further into.
The Quiet Wing begins with a stage performance straight out of a Greek play, with masked figures watching an unnamed protagonist’s performance titled “Songs for the Afterhours,” The name alone sets an eerie mood—after all, if Scorsese’s After Hours taught us anything, it’s that weird shit goes down with the sun! “Songs for the Afterhours,” though, is muffled by the noise of human conversation layered with machinery, immediately establishing that we are in a surreal world where the human and the industrial collide. This combo is further emphasized by the uncanny humanoid forms of the protagonist and other characters, which resemble post-war German Expressionist art. Our protagonist specifically appears straight out of a Walter Jacob or Otto Dix painting. Her face is human, yet morphed by her skin that looks like copper or some other heavy metal. It’s as if she’s covered in a film of grit as a result of an industrialized world, like the machinery is within the bloodstream.
A friend and our protagonist in Ellie Thatcher’s “The Quiet Wing”
As she performs her muted song, another figure passes the stage, the only one who strikes the artist. This encounter drags us into our protagonist’s psyche, featuring a metallic duck doctor hitting an alarm. Maybe this signifies the end of her performance? Who’s to say?! Behind our doctor, two figures, their flesh unprotected, muscles popping through their open bodies, walk back and forth as if in a cuckoo clock-like repetition. The two bodies are in an endless cycle, arguably stripped of their autonomy, lurking behind our main character’s drive. This dream projection transitions back to our protagonist, who is now sitting with a friend, who, with their geometric features and sunken face, echoes another German expressionist painter, Conrad Felixmüller. The protagonist questions why no one is seated anymore to see her performances. Her friend responds, “These people need something louder than their own heads.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini said it best when describing the escalating consumerism crisis in the 70s: “We are being dragged into the underworld.” Both The Quiet Wing as a whole and her friend’s line in particular reflect this underworld brilliantly. For the 21st-century baby, art is not stimulating enough for our electric brains. The plebeian is no longer satisfied with poetry from the heart…turn on Love Island as background noise for the TikTok time. Disengage with your fellow person and immerse yourself in the world within the metal void. Without this overstimulation, we can hear our thoughts, and no one wants to do that! I mean, what’s worse than silence!? Through this line, we can grasp that Thatcher’s insane, imaginative world is similar to ours, one in which many of our heads are currently uninspired, exhausted, and overwhelmed with white noise.
In “The Quiet Wing” underworld
With her art muted by an uncaring ear, our protagonist brushes past this disappointment to tell her friend of a figure. A shadow, who has been following her for months. This figure surpasses time as we know it, with the ability to declare what she will wear, do, etc. I believe this masked figure represents the consumerist creature eating away at our culture. This haunting presence arguably ‘knows’ us better than we know ourselves, like an algorithm, with an ability to tell us what we like, what we wear, how to think, until eventually it does our work for us. The protagonist, like so many of us, is trapped, questioning whether her actions are truly her own as this shadow looms. If another knows our future when we live in ignorance, why not let it decide our fate for us? She explains this fear by describing letters she has been receiving, certain that this figure and these invasive notes share the same source. Her friend offers her some insight as to who this mystery figure might be:
“There’s a lunatic that lingers outside the lobby, always shouting jumbo about the voice, the voice being the plague…perhaps they’re associated together.”
This line’s imagery is so interesting. The lunatic warns about a potential voice that is a plague on the culture. What could the plague or voice be? Well, based on what has been discussed, within a culture of endless white noise, this plague is an infection of absurdity that derives from our screens. An internet culture that pollutes our minds and rips us of our humanity, all existing within this hooded figure that follows our protagonist. The friend continues, “You pour your heart in songs, they spill theirs on the floor.” ‘They’ is a reference to this plague of a weighed-down, poisoned culture, throwing up regurgitated information until it has lost its value and tears at the soul. Take a current example: the AI scripts that now flood social media. Similar to the ‘spilling’ described, these replicas of supposed advice create a ripple effect of uninspired language and encourage no thought, resulting in hundreds of the same exact videos with the same exact cadence, same action, and same message. All this to say, this creeping plague on our protagonist is also following us. Our heart poured into our music, while the metallic box drags us into the underworld, with a path of repackaged human thought. The individual and art in this world are becoming scarce.
The masked shadow
Thatcher’s film continues by following these two characters through a series of Kafkaesque travels within the corridors of their anxiety and fear. Some of my favorite imagery includes babies, resembling the Draags from René Laloux’ s Fantastic Planet; our protagonist watching herself as a paper clone through a window; and a large foyer resembling a room in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. This sequence of events highlights Thatcher’s multimedia skills as she combines her two-dimensional animation layered in front of her three-dimensional dense dystopia. Our protagonist’s friend, now seemingly becoming our narrator, projects himself onto religious icon paintings and is suffocated by a TV, its bright modernity clashing against his post-war expressionist style. Eventually, this friend receives a final and most important call from a figure, wearing a Rothschild-like mask, which furthers the oppressive environment and invites the terrifying whiff of uncertainty of Eyes Wide Shut! The caller says:
“Follow the stream that runs behind the district…it leads to the tall building standing alone…she’s here, waiting for the formation to rise. You were fortunate enough to see her perform in her flesh body. But, this will be even more grand, in fact monumental, the perfect voice.’’
These final lines lead us to our end: a limitless, fuzzy maze filled with fascistic architecture and a return to our masked shadow, who creeps back into his darkness, signifying that the story is to begin again. We are back to our protagonist, who now performs, observed by our shadow as she was in the beginning, solidifying her fears and loss of autonomy. Her performance is an eternal rerun for our entertainment. And, if the art is now mindless and unconscious, it’s safe to say our protagonist is now in the underworld.
Unlike our entrapped protagonist, Thatcher’s film is a brilliant use of our autonomous right and the importance of creating art during these times. With a hypnotizing use of character design, an immense understanding of layering stop motion, and eerily lingering music, reminiscent of Lynch’s Lost Highway, with a side of Fellini-esque dream narration, Thatcher’s creativity exceeds the bounds of one theme. Still, Thatcher took me into an underworld, a monoculture driven by the plague that is our loss of identity. Once we do not question this, we will exist in the underworld Pasolini described. Or, maybe we already are! Regardless, this movie is a must-watch, and its imagination leads you into a labyrinth of inspirational artistry. I guarantee it will not disappoint.
Francesca Krikorian (she/her) is a film/visual art student at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently working with Filthy Dreams as our social media intern. Her work ranges from highlighting marginalized voices through her 2022 short Hija Callada, to screenplays that tell the story of Ramon Novarro and the construction of his Heterosexual Latin Lover persona through media advertisement. Film analysis on young filmmakers’ work is something she is extremely passionate about, a goal Mincing Movies aims to achieve. She also paints, with art that is a mash of Otto Dix’s disorienting depictions of the body combined with her own alien-like storytelling. So, if you are in need of a fresh new lens portrayal of your fellow human, make sure to check out artof.frann on Instagram!