Noise — A Soliloquy for the Exhausted Mind

I read Noise once before I ever thought about putting a camera on it.

It didn’t feel like a script. It felt like someone standing in a room saying something uncomfortable out loud and refusing to soften it.

This Friday, Noise — A Soliloquy — my short film adaptation of Gary Santorella’s piece — premieres on the I Am Hologram YouTube channel.

At its core, the work circles a suspicion most of us carry but rarely admit: that we don’t really have anything to say. And even if we did, no one is truly listening. Our thoughts become our dress rehearsals while our conversations become tones without message. Social life becomes timing — waiting for a pause long enough to slip in something we hope sounds more clever than it is.

What stayed with me wasn’t the cynicism. It was the exhaustion underneath it. The mental drafts that evaporate by morning. The quiet scouting for where to test them — at work, at your local taproom, in some dark corner of the internet where the odds of finding a sympathetic ear feel slightly higher than zero.

The more I returned to it, the more I recognized myself in it.

There’s a turn in Noise that unsettles me more now than it did the first time through: the idea that these internal thought-noises don’t simply fade, they accumulate. They burrow deep in our being. Silence is not only uncomfortable, it’s suspicious. Eventually something has to be said — not because it matters, but because holding it in starts to feel worse than releasing it.

So we finally break our silence and weigh in.

Not to clarify, just to participate. Sometimes just to prove we were there on the right side of history.

The film leans into that interior spiral.

This is a one-act descent — a soliloquy unfolding inside the fatigued mind of someone who understands the trick and keeps performing it anyway. The frame holds. The image carries subtle damage that never quite settles. The voice sits exposed, without distraction, as if the room itself has stepped back and decided to watch.

I didn’t want to smooth the edges. The piece works because it’s uncomfortable. Because it asks the viewer to notice their own impulse to respond, to correct, to contribute.

We live in a moment where silence feels like absence and commentary feels like proof of existence. There is always another place to deposit a thought before it dissolves. We document, we react, we add our layer. The volume increases, but the weight of what’s being said doesn’t necessarily follow.

Noise — A Soliloquy is live on the I Am Hologram YouTube channel.

Watch it alone.

Then decide whether you were listening — or just waiting.

Watch the first 40 seconds here

Subscribe to Gary Santorella on Substack here

Next
Next

I Am Hologram releases “Dagmar’s Sorrow”