Anora: Sean Baker's Conservative Critique on Sexual Liberation

“Cinema is like a machine that generates empathy” - Roger Ebert

If I could start every review with this quote I would, not only for its versatility but in its accuracy (despite how cliché this already seems). Sean Baker’s biggest success isn’t his focus on the “edge of society’s margins” or his effective use of 70s cinematic aesthetics; it’s the way his writing centers on the least assuming characters who would otherwise be traditionally undeserving of narrative focus. This is a high-risk high-reward endeavor, as it relies entirely on Baker’s effective character writing to derive entertainment from banal reality. The hard part isn’t recreating the real world in cinema (we live it every day, just write what you see), it’s in making normal people, ignorant to archetypes and plot diagrams, a meaningful conduit for narrative. 

Baker’s first technique isn’t too illuminating : “real people put in any difficult scenario will capitulate under pressure.” This is pretty fundamental, but it’s interesting to see how dynamically Baker uses this across his filmography. In The Florida Project, many of the bad choices made by the mother and cute ones by the daughter which play a key part in the drama are spurred on by a mountainous, insurmountable poverty. In Anora, the titular character’s Cinderella Story with a Russian oligarch’s son is stopped short, with his father’s goons strong-arming an annulment in a scheme straight out of a John Wick or Taken. Rather than build tension on Anora’s fish-out-of-water experience with the crime syndicate, the film’s humor derives from everyone’s innate human inability to live cinematically. Crime movies expect goons to hurt the hostage, but what if she, like, kinda did nothing wrong? A film focused on drama allows nonsensical violence, but a narrative based in reality asks us how we might react given the circumstances. We find synthetic drama appealing, but we find realistic clumsiness funny. 

More important is the way Baker weaponizes well-intentioned failure to guide his narrative empathetically. Return again to The Florida Project: the mother is not a bad person, she loves her kid and genuinely wants best for her, but her selfish (and obviously justified) intention to keep her daughter pushes our own impulses of self-loathing and fear to the extreme. Who knows what we might turn to when pushed to the edge of stability? Perhaps we too are undeserving of the good in our life given our inability to appreciate it. If Lynch and Daft Punk believe love to be the guiding principle, Baker asks an unfortunate question: “what happens when love isn’t enough?” and, where The Florida Project focused on love for your child, Anora sets its eyes on the limits of self-love. 

A Narrative in D-Flat Major

Anora follows a sex worker in New York who, in a moment of good luck, falls in love with the son of a rich Russian oligarch, Ivan. On a spur-of-the-moment trip to Las Vegas (he’s just that rich), he realizes that getting married to an American would let him stay in the country against his parent’s wishes, and despite her initial hesitancy, Anora leans in, quits her job as a dancer, and settles down for a life of domesticity. Catching word of this, Ivan’s dad sends his goons Toros, Garnick, and Igor to pull the reins on Ivan, who suddenly runs away leaving Anora behind and in captivity. Now, Anora must work with the mob to get her husband back, hopefully convincing him to ignore calls for annulment and resume their happily ever after. 

In what might be my favorite needledrop of the century, the film opens with an almost comically demeaning montage of a strip club, highlighting the gauche rooms and ugly customers awaiting faux-attention from entertainers who see them as a money well. Panning across a set of dancers in the private room, the opening credits land straight on Anora’s face with Take That’s “Greatest Day” bleeding into the film. This is our lead at her most confident: when her body (under her control) is pleasing someone else. It’s her talent, her desirability, her charm, and her persuasion that brings in the customers. 

And yet, these men are the one’s getting off. She might receive some personal validation and financial stability, but they’re receiving something more ethereal: orgasm, sexual and physical intimacy, freedom from loneliness, power over someone dependent on handouts. The framing and music tell us that Anora is the more pure of heart, but in Baker’s reality, we know that the power lies entirely in the hands of the client. She’s in control of her body insofar as she has the legal right to walk out, but with such a strong disparity in financial stability, she’s still an object. 

This needle-drop frequently swells in tandem with the validation she derives from others, and her objectification as a muse-like source of independence by others underlies most of the film’s conflict. This paradox in interpretation draws a fine line between Anora herself and her husband Ivan, who starts the relationship by paying her for sex-work as a means to show off an attractive girlfriend, proposes to her in a fit of puppy love both to get a green card and to piss off his parents, and eventually abandons her when someone stronger than him (his mother) says so. In contrast, Anora sees herself much older than Ivan (despite being 23 to his 21), admires his childish infatuation with her, and pleads for his return despite discovering a pattern of infidelity. The romance serves them both: him through a childish independence, and her through his primal desire. He wants her, and she brings pleasure to him.  

On the face, Anora is a loud, aggressive, independent soul who will quickly turn to conflict and violence if she knows something isn’t right. We see this clearly when she breaks Garnick’s nose and bites Igor’s shoulder as they try to tie her down. She knows in her heart that these goons are doing something wrong, so she takes matters into her own hands. In fact, they too recognize the stuation’s oddity: all three goons are reluctant to tie up Anora. Faced with pathetic men with a weak dedication to second-order motivations, Anora is Queen of her domain. 

As the conflict escalates to Ivan’s mother, Anora finds herself submissive to maternal approval. Gornick and Igor were too pitiful to crave attention from, but as her step-mother, Ivan’s mom represents a figure with real power over Anora’s confidence. Landing in the States to force an annulment, Ivan’s mother immediately disregards Anora, who first tries to introduce herself as Ivan’s husband. Once Anora realizes that there’s no chance of avoiding the annulment (Ivan capitulates immediately), she formulates a plan to deny her signature and mount a legal battle for half of the family’s estate. Unfortunately, like the clients at the club, the financial chasm is blind to moral virtue: the Russian oligarchs can destroy Anora’s life regardless of her moral correctness. The confidence is gone, and while she still has her aggressive vocabulary and sharp wit, there’s nothing she can do to stop her ownership by the rich. They hold the power to make her behave just as they want in the most crucial way: they can’t control her speech or her thoughts, but they can control her autonomy. 

Returning home with Igor, Anora learns that what she assumed was an attempt at rape was merely misinterpreted, and that her captor cares more for her well-being than her would-be husband. Driving back to her the couple’s mansion, Anora stares face to face with Igor, the only man in the entire film to care about her.¹ Just as she’s about to leave the car, Igor hands her the diamond ring that now means nothing more than the value of the gold. The love that it represents is dead, but the gesture is a sign that Igor cares about Anora’s soul more than her utility as an object. Anora didn’t only misinterpret Igor’s battery for rape: her worldview depends on all men wanting to use her to fulfill their fantasies, and controlling who experiences them is the source of her confidence. Igor didn’t only return a valuable ring, he fulfilled a fantasy of her own. 

She hops over the armrest and onto Igor’s lap, trying to fulfill his crush as a way to take back some semblance of control. Igor sits motionless. She forces his hand onto her exposed ass, pushes his cock into her, and silently rides him to the rhythm of windshield wipers. This isn’t a dream, and there’s no needle-drop to bring about a coveted fantasy. Anora stops and breaks down crying, finally vulnerable, and in the arms of someone who sees through the veneer. She controls nothing. She is merely a tool to fill the emptiness in others. 

Delusions of the Young

From the lens of Baker’s “well-meaning failure” archetype, we can see the entire film as a critique on contemporary trends of bodily autonomy and the self-ownership of sexualization. Call it Kim Kardashian Feminism, this trend in younger feminism supposes that, in the age of Instagram modeling spanning age groups as young as high school, sexuality is not an evil in and of itself. Rather, owning one's sexualization rather than letting it be the product of a male-dominated industry with male-dominated expectations allows an avenue for expression without necessarily making the sexualization a product of sexism. This has been an incredibly useful lens for distinguishing self-owned OnlyFans or Instagram photos from the beer-ads and pinups of old. One is liberation, the other is control. 

In Anora, Baker calls this a pleasant fantasy that the most abused tell themselves to get through the suffering at the bottom of the social ladder. The erotic dancer might feel that she retains control over her work, but in reality, she still continues to be a tool for little boys in adult’s clothing, fulfilling their sexual and emotional desires through what might as well be financial coercion. Anora lives in a shared house with her dickhead sister. Ivan lives in a mansion and throws ragers on the weekends. Anora has to get the milk. Ivan has housekeepers to clean up his destructive parties. Anora has to follow the work schedule of a dickhead boss. Ivan can fly to Las Vegas for a weekend bender and be back whenever he wants. Anora has no work to fall back on. Ivan has a cushy factory job waiting for him back home. Anora needs someone like Ivan to save her from poverty. Ivan can drop her just as quickly as he found her. Her personality and body might give people reason to stay, but at the heart of it, she depends entirely on the value others prescribe to her. 

When is Anora in her A-game? When she’s desirable. People stare at the party, clients pay at the club, and the mob knows she’s the person most likely to know where Ivan is. In all of these scenarios, people need her as a means to an end. To use, to own, to fuck. 

When isn’t she? When no one wants her. Igor doesn’t want to use her as a tool for his own desires, in fact, he empathizes with her. Igor sees right through the fictional confidence and into a soul he harmonizes with. We know very little about him, but we do know that everyone in the mob wants him gone once his utility is up (only when the marriage is annulled can he leave) and that he lives with his grandmother in a high-rise. Just as Anora says she isn’t a prostitute despite selling sex, he says he isn’t a drug dealer as he illegally distributes opiates. Perhaps this is just a joke at the expense of these two, highlighting the way we lie to ourselves when pressed on our guilt. 

Or, perhaps it’s the truth: Anora isn’t a prostitute and Igor isn’t a drug dealer. Not only because these are socially “bad”, they don’t exist; concepts defined by the privileged to permanently brand the desperate and less fortunate with shame. Terms that may once have been accurate are blanketed in disgust by those who fundamentally do not understand how difficult it is to survive at the lowest economic rung. You’re not just making ends meet by having sex for money, you’re a “prostitute.” There’s a connotation to these terms that is fundamentally untrue: the drug dealer and the sex worker are not moral criminals on principle. 

Nowhere is this better exemplified than the red scarf, which Igor both used to gag Anora during the kidnapping and to warm her while searching for Igor in Coney Island. This highlights Igor’s fundamental inability to consistently relate with other people, a natural extension of his empathy clashing with his profession (remember this). To Anora, this is confusing not only because of the paradoxical intentions, but because this is the only time someone actually extends kindness to her. The scarf tied her down, but it was also a source of kindness and warmth. Let’s keep this fact in mind: the source of happiness might come at the cost of autonomy. 

Nonetheless, despite being a charming, confident woman with hopes and dreams, Anora’s value both internally and out depends on how people derive value from her. Surely you can post whatever you want on Instagram, and you might tell yourself that the more risque photos are in support of liberated identity, but your success on the platform, the number of likes and followers you amass, are entirely dependent on the gaze of people who see you as a sex object. There’s no escaping the tightening grip of objectification on a platform based on crowd-sourced attention. What happens when you’re really good at it? When you amass a following? It must feel good to make so many people happy, and if they’re giving you money, it must feel really good to escape poverty and have your worth validated in one fell swoop. Two birds with one Benjamin. 

Baker’s point is clear: a culture of validation through sexual self-ownership might give the impression of liberation, but it merely circumvents dependency on the client by stuffing this reality beneath a veneer of confidence. Like a factory worker who suddenly turned to Buddhism, there’s no meaningful difference in the conditions, rather, radical acceptance suppresses reality under denial until it boils rapidly to the surface. The opening titles of Anora play Greatest Day to highlight the confidence she feels in the moment, the euphoric proposal brings it back, and where we might expect it at the end in a bit of poetic irony, Baker leaves us in silence. Anora can’t lie to herself anymore: she’s not in control of anything. Her finances, her body, herself, all are in the hands of others. All she can do is cry. 

Sean Baker’s Political G-String

Because we live in the world of cancellations and anger, I feel like I have to be explicit here: I don’t think very many of these things. Rather, I think this is a fair reading of the film’s politics, exquisitely balancing a narrative about the means by which the rich take control of the poor with the lies those victims tell themselves to conjure up some sense of control. There’s nothing we can do about the evil misdeeds done by those in power, but it’s important to realize just how little control we actually have in light of this. Surely they can’t control my self-worth, right?  

A cornerstone of the American film is the American failure, a destitute optimist promised the American Dream and given the American reality. Paris, Texas is my go-to example, and you might initially feel some parallels between its lead Travis Henderson and Anora. Both wander aimlessly trying to understand the hand they were dealt, both are still looking for a future that will never come, and both are presented on the margin of society. The similarities don’t end there: both films are open to women being sex workers, but being distinctly American, both critique the woman for giving up a porcelain treasure to the pleasure of onlookers (Americans are so sexually conservative). In Paris, Texas, Travis must accept that the body he’s coveted/craved is no longer his, and in Anora, she must come to terms with the structures holding her’s down. 

Considering these similarities, it’s not hard to see how so many have responded to Anora with moral disgust. Paris, Texas may be sexist in the way it treats women as objects just out of reach, but Anora borders on inhuman fetishization. Baker seems intent on us watching a sex worker claw for autonomy in a world demanding control, punishing her for a life of commodified sex by highlighting the line it blurs between human interaction and her profession. The narrative points a finger at her for being so naïve in her marriage. It’s her fault that she can’t distinguish commodified and genuine intimacy. Not because she constructed the social hierarchy (the film is more than willing to admit she's being exploited financially), but because her line of work demands willful ignorance on the effects of intimacy as a commodity. 

I think this is Baker’s major argument broken into two pieces. First, that sex work is like any other labor, in that it is subject to control from above and objectification by the customer. The people holding the money demand action from the laborer, and the customer has a leash on their autonomy. This part is the more agreeable thread: showing how Anora’s perceived sexual independence is undermined by social and labor structures explicitly designed to control her. She may think she’s merely expressing herself creatively for money, but entering the marketplace with something as intimate as the self demands commodification. Second (and notably less progressive) is an argument tied together in the ending: sex work, i.e. the selling of the body and somewhat the inner soul for money (her life only truly gets worse when she starts selling “love”) is the necessary end of our independence culture, and will atrophy any sense of personal connection. In other words, Baker doesn’t only think sex work is affected by the same socio-economic structures found in all labor, it is a paradoxical endeavor that inevitably leads in a collapse in social relations. The next time someone wants to see you as a person, all you can do is cry. 

Solving the political puzzle in a director’s work has become a dominant thread in film criticism over the past decade. No doubt spurred on by a culture hellbent on unveiling dirty-laundry both to punish the conservative rich and anyone who dared to actually be a fan of something in the post-irony world, much of the discussion surrounding of Anora will likely center around Sean Baker’s personal politics, which sit somewhere close to a Bush-era (or even light Trump) Republican. 

This comes as a surprise to viewers who are only familiar with his breakout film The Florida Project, an empathetic if not voyeuristic exploration of poverty spurred on by the biggest accumulation of wealth in the entire country. How could a director so in-tune with the less fortunate hold a such regressive set of personal politics? Perhaps decades of Trumpian authoritarianism have blinded us from the underlying poverty of conservatism: a set of beliefs that finds its heart in the poorest parts of the Appalachians, Midwest, and Bible Belt.² Perhaps viewers didn’t pay enough attention to the film, which seemed to derive its empathy for the daughter in the failures of her well-meaning mother: a woman caught in a vicious cycle of drugs and poverty that continues to endanger her child. 

Let’s not kid ourselves: most of the political analysis of Baker’s film’s happen ex post facto.³ The hardest pill to swallow as an observant, politically engaged viewer in the modern day is that art can come from any end of the political spectrum, as the shared experience of humanity is not separated by party lines. Having discovered a creator’s political leanings, guilty viewers hellbent on discovering the trail of breadcrumbs that may have led them to abandon the director had they only paid enough attention start analyzing older projects with a fine-toothed comb, hoping that in realizing the truth they can avoid accusations of right-wing sympathizing. 

In the current climate, it’s clear that Anora is making some kind of distinct political commentary on the attempted reclamation of independent sexuality in a culture more dominated by social credit than ever, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a right-wing critique of left-wing politics. Instead, Baker frames an incredibly humanist narrative, using his trademark sense of empathy to highlight the ways we subdue real, tangible emotions in favor of lies that, while momentarily validating, merely disguise our reality for something more tolerable. The sex worker gives the client the fantasy of erotic pleasure, and the sex worker gives herself the fantasy of autonomy. Somehow both a commodity and a human containing multitudes, she must one day confront how the rest of the world sees her, how they treat her, and most importantly, how much control she really has. 

This is actually why Baker works at the margins of society: it’s not because he cares about the unfortunate, rather, it’s because they represent the greatest paradox between actions, delusions, and values. Anora is a sex worker who believes she owns her body while selling it, and The Florida Project is about a mother who believes she loves her daughter while endangering her. A less skilled (and more explicitly conservative) writer would punish these two for such flagrant contradiction, but Baker instead objectifies them: using their misfortune as a mirror to show how incongruent our values and actions can truly be. In other words, we’re all just lying to ourselves, and that’s life. 

In a way, it’s hard not to find this disgusting. It seems like Baker actively looks down on sex workers trying to reclaim an industry fraught with abuse and manipulation, but I do think there is a slight silver lining here. Whether a sex worker or an oligarch, a candy-shop worker or a hired goon, we’re all fundamentally lying to ourselves to make any of this interconnecting web make sense. Our sons aren’t fuck ups, we aren’t taking advantage of our geriatric boss, asking everyone in *New York City* if they’ve seen our godchild isn’t moronic, and our bodies are still ours despite selling it for a meager profit. The stripper doesn’t love me, and neither does the Russian heir with arrested development. We often lie and tell ourselves that any of this makes any sense, but in lies we build fantasy. A falsehood yes, but a necessary one, distracting us from what we can and cannot control. 

Greatest Day

Music is a great vector for experiencing emotions voyeuristically, but it is incredibly poor at actually generating new ones. We don’t make memories from other people’s experiences, rather, we empathetically harmonize with music as a means to feel the underlying vibe of someone else’s experience. 

Callum Scott and Robin Schulz’s remix of Take That’s Greatest Day is the main anthem during Anora’s most confident moments, almost as if the melody is circling through her head whenever she feels in control. The film opens with the almost heavenly call to “hold on, hold on” amidst an incredibly intricate and attractive lapdance in the club, and when she finally accepts Ivan’s proposal in Las Vegas, the chorus sweeps back in to punctuate the moment. Whenever Anora takes a step forward, the song is sure to follow.

Have you felt the same? Sometimes when I feel down I put on something dismal just to know someone feels the same. When I walk down the street in the middle of a winter night, my brain might just cling onto a song I heard once on the radio, and like a symbiotic partnership, my footsteps might suddenly match the tempo. Are they singing to me? Maybe they’re cheering me on.

Needle-drops in “artsy indie” movies typically come in threes. First to highlight an emotion, second as a callback, and once at the end as an ironic callback, juxtaposing the optimistic vibes of the start with a crushing defeat at the end. Anora perfectly lends itself to this cliche, and you can almost feel it in the final scene. Imagine Anora leaning over Igor, crying in his shoulder, British pop soaring over her pain to further cement this notion of misplaced confidence and a desperate attempt for absolution.

Anora doesn’t do this, instead letting the windshield wipers score the final moment. Stripped of her confident sexuality, Anora can do little more than lean into her abusive kidnapper’s shoulder and cry. The man holding her has both tied her up and comforted her soul in the past 24 hours, and no music can shed any clarity on this paradox. Yet, the music is still there.

Stay close to me… Can you feel it now? Can you hold it in your arms tonight? …

Oh, hold your head high (Hold on)

Arms open wide

Yeah, the world starts to come alive

When you stay close to me

Not in melody but in action, the anthem has become reality. Music, like the narrative’s underlying our confidence, are constructs designed to make the dull moments feel more eventful. How many times have you listened to breakup music immediately after a breakup? Probably not too often, post-breakup music typically explores the fantasy of suicide and escape. We turn to music as an escape from our current feeling, but when we’re in the thick of it, breaking our bones on reality and suddenly grounded from guiding fantasies, music just doesn’t seem to work anymore. Instead, we write music about moments like Anora in the car, hoping that Anora in the club will find use for it.

Of course, everything I’m saying is full of shit. Baker didn’t even listen to Greatest Day until after the film was done, so there’s no way the final scene could’ve been directed with the lyrics in mind.

I hope I was able to spin a convincing story to you, even if it was a lie. Narratives don’t really exist to tell the truth but to shape it, changing reality into something more palatable, clear, or illuminating. Maybe Sean Baker is the conservative we all write him to be, or maybe he’s just another American with indiscernible politics somehow balancing regressive demagogues with social empathy. Maybe Anora is the confident dancer simply selling a product like anyone else, or maybe she’s just trying to take some bit of control over the most intimate and personal piece of the self, wrestling with the fact that her body is a commodity like any other, doomed to be underappreciated by an audience of shallow onlookers.

1.  Interestingly, the only other people to care about her are a fellow dancer and the butch-lesbian who schedules acts at the club. It seems like Baker only lets the people least interested in her body as an object be the ones who admire her as a person. The ones who are most hateful? A jealous dancer at the club and Ivan’s mother: two people who see her as competition for their control.

2. I wrote this before the election, but I’m leaving it in for posterity.

3. which is the smart way of saying “after the post facto”