And the Winner Is...
*sigh* Anora.
Well. It happened. Anora won the Oscars. And by won, I mean that the film won FIVE of the SIX awards it was nominated for, which are all the big ones: Best Picture. Best Director. Best Lead Actress. Best Screenplay. Best Editing (what?). They were just throwing awards around by that point.
This post has been brewing around in my mind for some time now, but I wanted to wait until the Oscars passed to finally write it. I am glad I did.
This is not a review of Anora—if you would like to read reviews of Anora (brace yourself, I am going to use all-caps) BY SEX WORKERS, WHO ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE REVIEWING IT SINCE IT WAS ALLEGEDLY A “LOVE LETTER” TO US, here is a list of all the reviews of the film by sex workers that I know of:
‘Romance Labor: on Sean Baker’s Anora’ by Marla Cruz (@prolepeach) for AngelFoodMag [My personal favorite, apart from the author referring to Igor as a “class traitor.” Thugs gone thug. Igor got bills to pay too.]
‘Does ‘Anora’ Get the World of Sex Work Right? One Stripper’s Analysis’ by Lily Burana for Rolling Stone
‘A Review of Anora’ by Katarina Quinn for PetitMort
‘Whoreview: Anora’ by Mistress Zoey Belladonna for the Tryst.link Blog
East London Strippers Collective had one exclusively in their newsletter when the film premiered, maybe write them on social media asking them to make it publicly available.
Luna Sofia Miranda (who played Lulu in the film) being interviewed by Polyester Zine about her role
"That Made Me Really Angry": A Sex Worker Reacted To Anora, And Her Thoughts Definitely Need To Be Heard by Natasha Jokic interviewing her stripper friend Emma for Buzzfeed
This is not a full-on review of Anora. I’ve already written and edited a full-length assessment of Sean Baker’s five films about sex workers which is upcoming for publication on Tryst. But I am scream-writing this post because the way that civilian actresses make their careers off of portraying sex workers is driving me CUCKOO-BANANAS.
It wasn’t until I watched Whores on Film (free to watch in full on YouTube) directed by Juliana Piccillo (a former sex worker, who I was SHOCKED to find out was a story consultant on Sean Baker’s film Red Rocket since that film gave so many of us the ick), that I fully understood the breadth of this pattern.
You can skip to minute 15:52 of Whores of Film for the low-down and dirty of how the VERY FIRST Best Actress Oscar in 1929 went to Janet Gaynor for her work in three films, two of which she played sex workers in. Then Helen Hayes in 1933. Then Anne Baxter (Best Supporting Actress) in 1946. Then the list just keeps fucking going for films about sex workers winning as many as eight awards in one scoop at the Oscars on through the 50’s and 60’s. The only two I knew about in this pattern before watching Whores on Film were 1971’s Best Actress win for Jane Fonda in Klute (that is a good fucking movie though, although yes, there are some tropes) and Julia Roberts’ nomination for Best Actress in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman (while she didn’t win, the movie did make her career).
There is something about a civilian (read: pure) woman, somehow ‘lowering’ herself to do the difficult work of portraying a sex worker and being the fantasy-without-the-reality, that wins Oscars. Let’s also just go back to the fact that these are all cisgender white women…………I feel that these performances are seen as award-winning because the culturally held idea about that kind of woman is that she is the ‘opposite’ of what society says about sex workers: That we are dirty, low-class, etc. Thus, these white ladies are SO BRAVE and SO TALENTED for putting on some fucking eye makeup/sad face/fishnets/thigh-high boots/blowing bubble gum/fake Brooklyn accent and portraying a sex worker.
I just DON’T. GET IT.
And these movies make X amount of money and the careers of actresses get launched off of this.
In the words of the New York Times, “Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee.”
Compare this to Mikey Madison’s costar Luna Sofia Miranda, who played Luna, “I’ve been asked to audition for sex worker roles, and then they pass to a celebrity”. Is she nominated for an Oscar for her work in Anora? No, she is not. If, say, Jennifer Lawrence had been cast in the role of Luna as Anora’s sassy stripper best friend, let me tell you that she would AT LEAST have come away with a Best Supporting Actress nomination this weekend. AT LEAST (And actually, she probably would have acted the shit out of the role, because Jennifer Lawrence thrives playing magnetic sexually-powerful [yet dysfunctional?] women like in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle).
As a sex worker, I found the end of Anora GROSS and UNCOMFORTABLE to say the least. Here are my original notes from my diary while watching Anora that I took for the drafting of my Tryst piece:
I resonate with the following comments by sex worker Lucy Huxley on Anora as quoted in the Huffington Post;
“Sex worker, content creator and host of the podcast “The Wh*re’s Bedroom,” Lucy Huxley stands firmly at the intersection of pop culture and sex worker advocacy. While initially enjoying Anora, Huxley shared on TikTok that she hated the ending scene, feeling that it left viewers with the conclusion that “[Anora is] only a sex worker and that she simply doesn’t know how to have emotional relationships outside of work — a tired, boring and inaccurate stereotype that is placed on sex workers all the time.” I felt that. From my own lens of experience, I saw Anora hopping on top of Igor after he stole the ring for her (that was so sweet though) as a way of taking control of the situation—this is a transaction. I owe you nothing.
Huxley continues, “…the ending should have departed from a tired norm and instead presented ‘that breakdown at the end with a friend or someone else in her life to show more of her emotional life, who she is as a person outside of her job, and dispel the stereotype that she is an emotionally broken sex worker.’”
One of my own sex worker colleagues in Berlin told me that she went to go see the film in a kino by herself, and after the movie ended, a couple next to her had the following interaction: One asked the other why Anora was crying at the end, and the respondent said, “Oh, it’s because she is fucked up because of her job.”
It just didn’t make sense. It was such a weird ending. You know what would have been a better ending? Anora takes the ring, opens her car door to leave, looks out, looks back at the camera, shuts the car door, and smiles. Cut to black. BOOM. That is an ending that Hollywood would love and that we could all still find reasons to be bitter about, albeit many less reasons than the real ending. We can all imagine that Anora rides off into the sunset (snow) with Igor, smoking cigarettes and being messy. I like that. I’m for it. Igor was hot.
Her crying on top of him was not hot, however. It was really uncomfortable to watch, and I am so happy I watched the film at home alone rather than in a movie theater with a bunch of civilians. It would have made me sick.
In the same article from the Huffington Post, Luna Sofia Miranda commented, “I’ve been reluctant to comment [on Lucy’s video] because I played Anora’s best friend in the film. People will just be like, ‘Oh, she just wanted more screen time,’ which, hey, I’ll always take more,” she jokes. “But that’s a valid point. I hope in the future to see sex worker movies where strippers and sex workers [are] comforting each other. When I get sexually assaulted at the club, it’s my coworkers that are there for me.”
Even when I saw Anora’s coworkers being like OHMYGOSHIMSOHAPPYFORUGURLLL in the locker room, I was like…um…what? But I actually chalked that up to her working in a white club—yes, for those who don’t know, strip clubs in the United States of America are more or less segregated with there generally being one token white dancer, if any, at black clubs and one or two token black dancers at otherwise all-white clubs, if any; Black dancers are lucky to get into ‘gentlemen’s clubs,’ let’s just say—because I knew for damn sure that had she been a 23-year old dancer at a Black strip club in New York, all her coworkers would have looked at her like…bitch is you crazy?
I assumed that maybe that’s how white coworkers would react like “oh my goddd, i’m so happy for youuuuu, go girl!” so I let it go.
I can count the number of Black strippers I know who left the club to marry clients/get wifed up back in the day and highly regretted it on two hands (Another fun alternative ending to Anora would be her having gone to marry Vanya and becoming a trad-wife, just saying).
These elements just didn’t make any sense, and I am unsure how the apparently many sex worker consultants on the film let that happen in the script. At the same time, I can understand how being invited to be a consultant on a major film can cause impostor syndrome and the feeling of ‘I’m just happy to be here,’ and how speaking up/candidly could become a fear—you don’t want to lose this opportunity or piss off the director or the producers, do you?
Is this Mikey Madison’s fault? No. At the BAFTAs, she apparently said as an address to sex workers:
“I just want to say that I see you…You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and an ally, and I implore others to do the same.”
We appreciate that. It’s a step in the right direction.
What is the resistance to casting sex workers in sex worker roles in Hollywood, apart from obvious whorephobia? Is it because a sex worker playing a sex worker is somehow, not, ACTING (*James Lipton voice)?
I’m just tired y’all. For real. Anora was a good movie, but five Oscars seems like overdoing it. To be fair, I didn’t watch all the Oscar movies so how can I say who deserved what. I feel like every year, the Powers That Be and the mass public pick a movie that is their ‘favorite’ and they confuse that with being the ‘best.’
I think I’ve gotten out all my feelings on the matter for now. Let’s just do better please (looking at you Sean). These civilians don’t know what the hell they are looking at, and many of them are just so, so dumb or impressionable and unable to think critically about whether what you put in front of them is the truth or not.
Fin.
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Bio: empress mirage, also known online as thepasteldomina, is a writer of smut and cultural commentary. a former fssw, bondage model, and str!pper, she now creates online content as a findomme and living goddess. dip a toe into the cool waters of mirage at: https://direct.me/thepasteldomina and find her on all the platforms as: thepasteldomina
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