On Anora and invisible labour
While addressing the invisibility to which sex workers are subjected, films like ’Anora’ also examine how the capitalist framework shapes sex work, how the transactional nature of sex work shapes relationships, and how money shapes power dynamics
By and large, the sex worker as a character has been consigned to the periphery on screen: hustling on the streets in fishnet stockings and mini skirts; seated on the lap of a gangster like an ornament; dead in a trunk or a back alley and autopsied in the morgue. Their nameless bodies are a dumping ground for misplaced anger and contempt. Their deaths are the inciting event for whodunit mysteries and redemptive journeys. Their lives, their dreams, their hopes are invisible and invariably beside the point. Sex work has historically been pathologised in cinema as it has been in society at large. Too often, it is conflated with trafficking and exploitation. If sex workers aren’t cast as pitiable victims, they are flattened into archetypes: the glamorous, the fallen, the golden-hearted waiting to be rescued and reformed by a moneyed saviour.
Anora presents a corrective to movies like Pretty Woman by exposing the Hollywood fantasy to be far removed from the socio-economic realities. Sean Baker’s latest casts Mikey Madison’s tough-as-nails Brooklyn stripper as a latter-day Cinderella with tinsel-flecked hair, butterfly nails and stiletto heels. Anora — or Ani — thinks she has found her Prince Charming when she catches the fancy of Mark Eydelshteyn’s Vanya, the bratty son of a Russian oligarch. Just as easily as she wins over horny clients with coquettish precision, she says yes to $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week. A spur-of-the-moment Las Vegas trip ends with him putting a ring on her finger. The sweet surge of fantasy ferments into the screwball tartness of a farce when Vanya’s parents send a trio of bumbling yes-men to hector the newlyweds into an annulment. The fairy-tale dream is dangled like a carrot, only to be snatched away. By the realities of transactional relationships and the barriers to upward mobility.
Baker has spent his career cataloguing the material realities of people scraping by on the fringes. He has trained his lens on a gallery of dreamers and schemers, each as true to life as larger than life. Starlet (2012) was a disarming Harold and Maude-esque story about a young porn star befriending an elderly widow. Tangerine (2015) was a buddy comedy about the misadventures of two trans sex workers in Los Angeles. The Florida Project (2017) presented a child’s-eye view of a precarious life lived in the shadow of Orlando’s Disney World. The Red Rocket (2021) was a raucous portrait of a washed-up porn star, a man as charismatic as predatory who leaves behind a trail of destruction wherever he goes. Looking at Baker’s films in sequence points to Anora as a natural evolution as well as expansion of his concerns about the marginalised in a transactional world.
The hustlers of Baker’s films lead us to a distinctly proletarian underbelly of the American Dream, a forgotten corner with its own subculture and vernacular. While Manhattan strip clubs may appear worlds apart from neglected Texas suburbs and seedy Florida motels, the corners are yoked by the resilience of all of its working-class strivers. In the worlds Baker surveys, being resilient and resourceful is a precondition, an ideal even. The system diminishes the value and identity of the sex worker to their product. But Baker is generous with his subjects by revealing their ambitions and desires. And he expects the same from his viewer – to watch without judging. Starlet doesn’t reveal what Dree Hemingway’s Jane does for a living until half-way in. Because Baker refuses to define her solely by her job as a porn star.
Language constitutes an important site of negotiation in the sex worker’s fight for dignity. When Ani is called an “erotic dancer,” she doesn’t object because it affords her a sense of choice and artistry instead of casting her as a mere object for sale. But she is quick to take offence when called a prostitute, a hooker, a shlyukha. For each term is used to derogate, to degrade, to demonise. Ani resists others’ attempts to shrink her identity with one unsavoury word. Only she gets to decide how she is defined. Introducing herself with her chosen name (Ani), not her given (Anora), is an act of self-definition. It also allows a distance between the person and the performance.
Sex work is just another gig in the labour market. There are allies and rivals. There is no insurance and health benefits. The fat cats get rich on the production and reproduction of the workers. Anora joins the ranks of a cadre of recent films more interested in sex work as labour than indulgence, supply than demand. Instead of looking in from the outside, these films work from the inside out, building on valuable inputs from sex workers. The weight of an informed perspective is critical to producing films free of judgement, condescension and editorial distance. D Smith’s documentary Kokomo City allows four Black trans sex workers to reframe their own stories on screen. While recounting stories of survival and solidarity in playful interviews, the subjects don’t sugar-coat the ostracization they face within their own community. In Pleasure, Ninja Thyberg goes behind the scenes of the porn industry to examine the uneven power dynamics and the cycle of abuse characteristic of any predatory structure. Swedish newcomer Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) moves to LA to become the next big porn star. The more her star ascends, the less she comes to enjoy the work. By capturing the shoots from her point of view, Thyberg questions the viewers’ own relationship with porn.
Online sex work has redrawn the boundaries between intimacy and commerce. Camsites allow adult performers to monetize their labour via traffic. OnlyFans presents a whole new avenue. But these platforms can be a double-edged sword. While they give workers a greater sense of freedom and safety, they also make them vulnerable to unauthorized leaks and deepfakes. Isa Mazzei takes us down a rabbit hole of paranoia in Cam, the screenplay for which she wrote drawing on her own experiences as a performer. Alice aka Lola (Madeline Brewer) is a camgirl who discovers her account has been taken over by a doppelganger. As her digital ghost assumes a life of its own, Alice grows desperate to recover the account she has been locked out of and reclaim her identity. This identity crisis speaks to the duality and disconnect online sex workers may feel between who they are and who they are performing.
In the lively opening sequence of Anora, we see Ani in full control: writhing on a line-up of men, working the floor, sizing up the clients, beguiling them to the ATM before guiding them to the backroom for a private dance. What the clients pay Ani for is a sensual experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection. It is similar to acting in terms of how the performance convinces people to buy into an illusion. Ani’s exaggerated Brooklyn drawl only plays up the artifice.
Each of Baker’s films is rooted in a clear sense of place. As Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) searches for cheating boyfriend/pimp with Alexandra (Mya Taylor) in the iPhone-shot Tangerine, the camera tails the two down the streets, back alleys and motels of West Hollywood. The city emerges as a lived-in space defined by the intersection of money and bodies. Key to the lived-in quality of the film is Baker’s casting of Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, both former sex workers. In Anora, we go on a roller-coaster tour of New York, from Manhattan to Brighton Beach to Coney Island.
Another throughline that emerges from Baker’s body of work is how money creates a power imbalance in a relationship. Madison as Ani is dewy-eyed, shrewd, feisty, exposed and fabulous. Vanya is blind to all the complexities of her personality because he is too blinkered to see her as anything more than a buyable plaything. Midway through Tangerine, a man refuses to pay Alexandra for her sexual services. The police intervene to sort out the ruckus but side with the client, giving him a reprieve while misgendering Alexandra. The scene crystallises the institutional bias trans sex workers face and also the larger struggles faced by those denied a legal safety net. Alexandra is marginalised not because of sex but work.
While addressing the invisibility to which sex workers are subjected, these films also examine how the capitalist framework shapes sex work, how the transactional nature of sex work shapes relationships, and how money shapes power dynamics. On learning about his parents’ imminent arrival, Vanya runs away, leaving Ani to fend for herself against the handler Toros and his enforcers Garnick and Igor. As the men attempt to restrain her, she squirms, bites and kicks. Though she is ultimately gagged and tied up, the damage she causes bares the naked heart of a real scrapper. When Ani reluctantly agrees to cooperate to track down Vanya, the ensuing madcap chase serves a sobering reminder to each of them about their position in the social hierarchy. Over the course of the film, the working-class fatigue is discernible in the knowing glances of solidarity Ani exchanges with her fellow wage-earners, be it the servants who clean up after Vanya’s house parties, the Las Vegas hotel staff or a gas station clerk. The world may deny Ani her humanity. But Madison and Baker allow it to shine in small moments of grace. The power of Baker’s films stems from such small moments within worlds big on intense physicality.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.