from issue 05
DECEMBER 12. POLISH DINER, SECOND AVENUE
Hi, Sam. How are you?
I’m good.
I saw your short film Untitled by Anonymous at the Downtown Film Festival back in November. Congrats. It's screening again soon, right?
Yeah. It's screening next week at a screening series called Sightlines curated by Natasha Gornik that will have a few other filmmakers.
Where is that?
Dixon Place. They asked me to do a Q&A, but I cancelled at the last minute.
You’re not going to the screening at all because you feel like if you do, you’ll have to do the Q&A?
I feel conflicted about narratives, spectacle and consumption.
At this moment I can't do that.
Let’s talk about the film and start from the beginning. Where did the idea for it come from?
The concept of the film was created in the editing room. The footage is from a casting call. I made an advertisement that read
LOOKING FOR UNCONVENTIONAL PERSONALITIES.
BOLD, OUTRAGEOUS, SHAMEFUL, DESPERATE, AND DEPRAVED. At the time I was collaborating with this artist Sexpays. We both have similar interests in docu-style films. We were experimenting. That was the whole point. Just go out there and see what happens.
What happened in this casting call?
We chose four different actors to meet us at a pay by the hour motel. The day before the casting call I wrote a monologue of confessions about experiences of mine and others who confided in me. I decided to have the actors confess the secrets to me during the audition. I needed to get these stories off my chest.
So it’s all non-fiction.
I told each actor to choose a monologue to read. After each person auditioned we would interview them to learn more about their lives. There is an excerpt at the very end with the actress who plays the Girl with Ripped Tights. She says
The concept of the film was created in the editing room. The footage is from a casting call. I made an advertisement that read
LOOKING FOR UNCONVENTIONAL PERSONALITIES.
BOLD, OUTRAGEOUS, SHAMEFUL, DESPERATE, AND DEPRAVED. At the time I was collaborating with this artist Sexpays. We both have similar interests in docu-style films. We were experimenting. That was the whole point. Just go out there and see what happens.
What happened in this casting call?
We chose four different actors to meet us at a pay by the hour motel. The day before the casting call I wrote a monologue of confessions about experiences of mine and others who confided in me. I decided to have the actors confess the secrets to me during the audition. I needed to get these stories off my chest.
So it’s all non-fiction.
I told each actor to choose a monologue to read. After each person auditioned we would interview them to learn more about their lives. There is an excerpt at the very end with the actress who plays the Girl with Ripped Tights. She says
That’s the only line we used from the interviews.
I really liked how in the film you interpolate the confessions with a news broadcast that’s playing in the background. What was your intention with that?
That happened by chance. The hotel television was playing porn so we switched to another channel. During post production I noticed the television audio had a few different signifiers. For one it felt like the voices that are constantly in our head. We are subjected to the 24/7 news cycle. I don’t know if you can relate to this but when you talk to an older relative on the phone all you hear is the news blasting in the background.
Right, because they have CNN or Fox News on 24/7. When and where did you film it?
March 18 2025. 39 West 27th Street. Room 106. Walk past the check in booth and go directly towards the back. Door on the right. Those were the directions we gave the actors. It was all very last minute. And there was a lot of risk involved. We had to sneak equipment and four different actors into a two person max capacity motel room surrounded by surveillance cameras.
KEW MOTEL
photograph by Samantha Sutcliffe
photograph by Samantha Sutcliffe
Well I won't ask you to describe the four characters because that would defeat the purpose of anonymity, wouldn’t it?
I was interested in swapping gender and identity to bury the truth. Like, what if a gay man confessed my secrets? Would anyone know they were mine?
You queered it, Sam [laughs]. I want you to delve more into the anonymity for me because I feel like we only brushed the tip of the iceberg.
In 2019 I began experimenting with anonymity to reject legacy. I thought, what if I published a few short stories under different names and no one knows it’s me? For the writer's bios I would use details from moments in my life that I know would be frowned upon. Details that you wouldn’t really be proud of like having an abortion at nineteen years old or working at a cheese factory. I think a lot about the illusion of biography. A series of accomplishments perfectly packaged and presented to the public. School brainwashes us to do this. You need achievements, letters of recommendation, masters degrees. It’s all bullshit. And it’s boring. So I used anonymity to create more flawed artists as a way to normalize imperfection.
What do the film’s characters represent? Do they each serve an individual purpose or are they part of a whole?
Part of a whole. They represent different versions of myself, the contradictions of being human. The ways in which our feelings change.
You talk a lot about the education system in the film and how the education system encourages and teaches sadomasochism.
I've been thinking a lot about sadomasochism, specifically the psychological conditions under which sadomasochism dynamics form. I went to a private Catholic all girls school. I was bullied by the mean girls and a lot of my teachers in high school were men. I’d get in trouble a lot. I’ve always had a problem with authority.
I DON’T LIKE WHEN PEOPLE TALK DOWN TO OTHERS AS A FORM OF CONTROL.
I think when you peel back the layers of all institutions, hell, even minute day to day interactions, there’s always a Dom and sub. And sometimes those roles can be interchangeable, but nevertheless they persist… like everything is S&M and maybe even everything is sex in a way.
I've been trying to separate sexuality from sadomasochism. For instance ballet is sadomasochism. I’m in control. I'm the sadist and I'm the masochist. And it's self-sufficient. So it's beautiful, right?
Like when you’re aware of it you can establish agency and with agency comes control.
Totally. Sadomasochism within this new artwork comes to life through the release of the work. I want to humiliate those who’ve been sadistic towards me. I’m having a switch moment. Years ago I had sex with someone much older who worked at my school. It was a short lived sadomasochistic relationship that fueled my writing, which I published under a pseudonym because I didn’t want my identity to influence the reader. Years later everyone is getting Me Too’d. It’s 2020 and I’m thirty years old in an open relationship and strangers are writing on the internet that I’m being groomed. That my boyfriend is cheating on me. It was absurd. For complete strangers to speak on behalf of my personal relationships. Telephone Tag. And this became a huge problem for me because I realized if I ever wrote about my own experiences people would take my stories, fiction or not, and project their own fucked up narrative onto it and I would lose my agency. During this time I started collecting hate comments on social media from cancellation campaigns. And I compiled them into a video called Crybully that exposes the usernames of people who are doxing others. So Untitled by Anonymous functions as confession and Crybully functions as the consequence.
I’m curious… you don’t want to do Q&A's for the film, but we’re doing this interview right now. What makes this different?
I don't want to make a spectacle in front of a live audience unless it’s part of a performance. But I’m not ready for that. I’m shy and I don’t necessarily want to be seen as much as I want to be heard. And I don’t like to walk into a scenario involving my art where I’m not in control. Like what if someone is offended and I have to be confronted by that in front of an audience? I would have to compromise my art. I’d feel pressured to apologize. I have a lot of empathy but I’m too self aware and don’t want to censor myself anymore.
I think of this Dennis Cooper quote pretty often - something he said in an interview with our mutual friend Lily Lady - he says, “I’M NOT A SADIST... PEOPLE USED TO THINK I WAS... I DON’T KNOW WHY THEY DON’T ASSUME THAT I COULD BE LIKE THE BOY CHARACTERS. BECAUSE I ACTUALLY AM MORE LIKE THEM, IN SOME WAY.” And I think that’s something really cool about transgressive literature and art; you don't know the vantage point of the person who's making it. But also, who the hell cares if Dennis Cooper, for example, is writing from the POV of a sadistic fantasy? I personally don’t need any justification… That being said, I understand your hesitation to share and being afraid to make something that people could interpret in a certain way.
Yep. It's scary.
There are more consequences now than before in this panopticon of being in an art scene, especially in conjunction with the Internet. When something's online, people can look at it over and over and over again forever. And the more they look at it, the more they concoct different interpretations of it.
YES, SO MANY CONSPIRACIES ARE FORMED. FICTION IS BORN.
I don't know if it was like that back then. Like you still got the book deal. Right?
Exactly.
Yeah. I think it’s really hard to be your true self because of all the judgement and consequences. Going back to anonymity… a name can cause both pride and shame.
I wrote an article this year where I shared a mildly controversial opinion. And when the magazine shared quotes from the article on their Instagram grid, the comments were like, calling me greasy and fat, calling me names, really egregious shit. I had to be like “Riley, stop looking”. It was my first experience with that. I had to remind myself that they’re Internet randos and I got great feedback from people whose opinions matter to me. But yeah, like you’re saying about sanitization, this is the type of shit that deters people now.
People who leave comments like that about strangers on social media are fucking losers. The words people write when they troll others should be compiled into a permanent record that comes up on a background check. How can I fucking expose these people? This comes back to me being sadistic.
100%. I’m gonna dox you, bitch.
And also why are they spending time online projecting hate? Who's it for? It’s hate. It's for them. It's pathetic.
Right, it's for them.
I’m being a sadist but, y'all are pathetic. I can't be scared anymore. I'm gonna dox you, bitch.
There’s a lot of things in my past where I was perceived in more of a perpetrator role, where I did do some bad things, I was accused of some bad things I didn’t do, etc., and it’s taken me up until very recently to be like fuck it I'm not going to mince my words in my writing, even if someone's going to read it and be like, “see, that’s an admission of guilt.” You know what I mean?
Totally. The work suffers when we edit it for others. A lot of people are censoring themselves.
They’re scared that exploring darker sides of themselves and humanity will come across as an admission of perpetratordom or victimhood.
Yeah. As if we are all perfect. When I was younger I had a lot of shame around my sexuality. Catholic guilt. Some of the monologue from the film comes from a fictional story I wrote in 2018 that was originally published under a pseudonym. Bunny, the actress who plays Girl with Gap in her Tooth, reads a monologue from the story. The first line of the story goes I get off on a still of a girl handcuffed to a toilet. In reference to the Sasha Gray porn.
I know the one.
You know in 2018 I witnessed something really fucked up. And there was no way to prove what I had just seen. At that time I had been mixing lithium with ketamine and I started to question my reality. I was in a hypomanic state and one of my teachers suggested I read Kathy Ackers’s Blood and Guts in High School. What healed me was being able to create fiction out of traumatic experiences, rather than pathologizing and being treated with pharmaceuticals or making a spectacle on the internet.
What are your literary influences?
Definitely Kathy Acker, but some of her books are too romantic, Like Great Expectations. Too much cunt talk. I like cunt talk if it's coming from Henry Miller. But I'm rereading Literal Madness, which is so so good. I love that Acker treated literature as an art form. Deconstructing. And I love David Wojnarcowicz.
I ask about literary influences because watching the film was actually a very literary experience. The live action of the film feels like a device to intensify the intimacy of the writing.
Right, totally. When I first showed this piece in a workshop I was told it was similar to an Andy Warhol film. Anti-Film. It's very low budget, only took $100 to make.
Yeah. And you filmed it on a camcorder?
Yeah, Hi-8 Tape.
Looks awesome.
All you need is a good story.
I keep thinking about the multiple references to the pandemic in the film, because it enmeshes so well with it all, as a form of sadomasochism - sadomasochism divorced from sex - that we consented to culturally. Global public health crisis aside, it was a time of governmental and social control, and there were ways to obey and disobey that had consequences.
That’s interesting. I never really thought about it that way. Social control really became contagious. I read an interview recently in Cultured Magazine between Jamieson Webster and Mindy Seu who wrote A Sexual History of the Internet and Webster refers to our relationship online as a non-consensual BDSM dynamic. The monologue in the film is a reflection of my experiences over the last five years. The news station audio from the motel television that references outdoor dining is a coincidence that really speaks to how we continue to frame our lives. Pre this post that. It’s stagnant.. I’ve noticed more and more people are speaking out against cancel culture. Like finally after years. What took people so long? I hope we can all move on.
Exactly.
Yeah. I think it’s really hard to be your true self because of all the judgement and consequences. Going back to anonymity… a name can cause both pride and shame.
I wrote an article this year where I shared a mildly controversial opinion. And when the magazine shared quotes from the article on their Instagram grid, the comments were like, calling me greasy and fat, calling me names, really egregious shit. I had to be like “Riley, stop looking”. It was my first experience with that. I had to remind myself that they’re Internet randos and I got great feedback from people whose opinions matter to me. But yeah, like you’re saying about sanitization, this is the type of shit that deters people now.
People who leave comments like that about strangers on social media are fucking losers. The words people write when they troll others should be compiled into a permanent record that comes up on a background check. How can I fucking expose these people? This comes back to me being sadistic.
100%. I’m gonna dox you, bitch.
And also why are they spending time online projecting hate? Who's it for? It’s hate. It's for them. It's pathetic.
Right, it's for them.
I’m being a sadist but, y'all are pathetic. I can't be scared anymore. I'm gonna dox you, bitch.
There’s a lot of things in my past where I was perceived in more of a perpetrator role, where I did do some bad things, I was accused of some bad things I didn’t do, etc., and it’s taken me up until very recently to be like fuck it I'm not going to mince my words in my writing, even if someone's going to read it and be like, “see, that’s an admission of guilt.” You know what I mean?
Totally. The work suffers when we edit it for others. A lot of people are censoring themselves.
They’re scared that exploring darker sides of themselves and humanity will come across as an admission of perpetratordom or victimhood.
Yeah. As if we are all perfect. When I was younger I had a lot of shame around my sexuality. Catholic guilt. Some of the monologue from the film comes from a fictional story I wrote in 2018 that was originally published under a pseudonym. Bunny, the actress who plays Girl with Gap in her Tooth, reads a monologue from the story. The first line of the story goes I get off on a still of a girl handcuffed to a toilet. In reference to the Sasha Gray porn.
I know the one.
You know in 2018 I witnessed something really fucked up. And there was no way to prove what I had just seen. At that time I had been mixing lithium with ketamine and I started to question my reality. I was in a hypomanic state and one of my teachers suggested I read Kathy Ackers’s Blood and Guts in High School. What healed me was being able to create fiction out of traumatic experiences, rather than pathologizing and being treated with pharmaceuticals or making a spectacle on the internet.
What are your literary influences?
Definitely Kathy Acker, but some of her books are too romantic, Like Great Expectations. Too much cunt talk. I like cunt talk if it's coming from Henry Miller. But I'm rereading Literal Madness, which is so so good. I love that Acker treated literature as an art form. Deconstructing. And I love David Wojnarcowicz.
I ask about literary influences because watching the film was actually a very literary experience. The live action of the film feels like a device to intensify the intimacy of the writing.
Right, totally. When I first showed this piece in a workshop I was told it was similar to an Andy Warhol film. Anti-Film. It's very low budget, only took $100 to make.
Yeah. And you filmed it on a camcorder?
Yeah, Hi-8 Tape.
Looks awesome.
All you need is a good story.
I keep thinking about the multiple references to the pandemic in the film, because it enmeshes so well with it all, as a form of sadomasochism - sadomasochism divorced from sex - that we consented to culturally. Global public health crisis aside, it was a time of governmental and social control, and there were ways to obey and disobey that had consequences.
That’s interesting. I never really thought about it that way. Social control really became contagious. I read an interview recently in Cultured Magazine between Jamieson Webster and Mindy Seu who wrote A Sexual History of the Internet and Webster refers to our relationship online as a non-consensual BDSM dynamic. The monologue in the film is a reflection of my experiences over the last five years. The news station audio from the motel television that references outdoor dining is a coincidence that really speaks to how we continue to frame our lives. Pre this post that. It’s stagnant.. I’ve noticed more and more people are speaking out against cancel culture. Like finally after years. What took people so long? I hope we can all move on.
How can people watch your film?
They can’t. I will eventually make an edition of four copies as part of a collection of my work and you will have to fill out an application for consideration before purchasing. Artists are often asked to prove their qualifications and I want to subvert that process so that the artist is in control. And I’d rather withhold.
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