Sean Baker's Sex Worker Saga
The disturbing thing all his films have in common.
This article originally appeared on the Tryst.link blog on March 19th, 2025. Read it in the original form here.
First, there was Starlet in 2012. Then Tangerine in 2015. Then The Florida Project in 2017. Then Red Rocket in 2021. Now in 2024, Anora, director Sean Baker’s fifth film about sex workers, has won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, and the film – and its leading actress, Mikey Madison – is becoming the darling of the indie film world.
I first encountered Sean Baker’s work in 2015 at age nineteen, when I happened upon the movie Tangerine on Netflix. I’d been a sex worker for over a year already at the time. It is safe to say that at that time I fell in film-love with the characters Alexandra (played by Mya Taylor) and Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), two sex workers and women of color who spend Christmas Eve working and hunting down Sin-Dee’s erstwhile pimp-cum-fiancé Chester (James Ransone). The dialogue, the drama, the quick cuts, the street life relationships within an underground social network, and the hot mess energy spoke to me vividly. Sean Baker, it should be said, does have a way of capturing many of the lesser-known minute faces of the United States of America – where I grew up. I didn’t grow up in L.A., but I do know that Hollywood Boulevard is not what many people outside the U.S. imagine it to be and I appreciated Tangerine for showing the “real” L.A.
Tangerine quickly became a central source of inside jokes and enjoyment for me and my fellow queer friends in Paris; along with Paris is Burning, some days the three of us would stay home from class, make mimosas with supermarket orange juice and sparkling wine, put cushions on the floor, and get extremely tipsy while screening these movies together. To this day, if I called up one of those long-lost friends and screamed, “Mary’s at SEVEN,” (an iconic line from the film) into the phone, I guarantee we would each fall out laughing into hysterics on the floor. It became so essential to our triad friendship, that we christened ourselves with names of characters from the film as nicknames: I, the Afro-Latinx who was known to be for the drama and always wore denim shorts with ripped tights underneath, was Sin-Dee; our friend L was Mama-San; and our friend also known as D-Nasty was Alexandra. It felt real – a movie, as it is often lauded, shot on an iPhone, which cast real sex workers and best friends in the lead roles, and sourced actors from Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez’s social circles.
In 2024, Anora, director Sean Baker’s fifth
film about sex workers, has won the prestigious
Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival...
So when I saw the release, two years later, of The Florida Project on Netflix, by the same director, with the same wavy font script luring me to click ‘Play,’ how could I resist? I’d say that The Florida Project is when we started to take Sean Baker seriously. The general consensus is – “This is a good fucking movie.” Until reflecting on the release of Anora (don’t worry, I’ll get to it), I didn’t think about The Florida Project as a movie about a sex worker, but instead as a movie about the illusion of Disney World (like the illusion of Hollywood deconstructed in Tangerine) and the real-life poverty co-existing with the forced magic of Disney in Florida.
Actress Bria Vinaite’s character, Halley, speaks to an offscreen Social Services representative in one early scene about having lost her job as a stripper because she wasn’t interested in doing full-service work at her old club; when things get tough financially for Halley – a young single mother – and her six-year old daughter Moonee (played by Brooklynn Prince) after a hoped-for waitressing job at a waffle restaurant doesn’t work out, Halley begins advertising as a full-service escort on Craigslist to avoid homelessness. To me, as a viewer and a sex worker, the fact that I didn’t register this movie as being explicitly about sex work is a good sign; to me, it was a movie about poverty and the stark contradictions of America. Halley is just one of many low-income people living precariously in the area around Disney World, struggling to meet the basic needs of herself and her loved ones.
Except, of course, when Halley is almost kicked out of her rented budget motel room by the superintendent after an enraged client comes back to retrieve the Disney World entry passes Halley swiped from him during their session. In the second-to-last penultimate scene, when Halley’s former best friend and neighbor, Ashley, shames Halley (after Halley asks Ashley for financial help) by showing her screenshots of Halley’s Craigslist ad, Halley (I feel justifiably) beats her ass. Ashley then tells Child Protective Services about Halley’s sex work, and CPS arrives to take Mooney away. These are real situations which can happen to precarious sex workers.
By the time Red Rocket was announced in 2021 for release, I was excited – I made plans ahead of time to see the film in a Berlin kino (movie theater) once it was released in Germany in 2022. I’d heard that the movie had a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, and the previews and the movie poster had me looking forward to what I expected to be a funny look at an empathetic main character of a washed-up cishet male sex worker. It would be interesting, I thought, to see a movie from a male sex worker’s perspective! I went out for the evening to see Red Rocket in great spirits – and I left the theater with the ick.
I went out for the evening to see Red Rocket in great spirits – and I left the theater with the ick.
Red Rocket is where Sean Baker started to lose me, and lost other former fans. Maybe it’s because my expectations of the film did not at all match the film’s reality – Mikey (played by real-life former porn actor Simon Rex), is a piece of shit and as his estranged wife Lexi (played by Bree Elrod) clinches at the film’s end, “a broke suitcase pimp.” In retrospect, I can appreciate aspects of Red Rocket because the film examines how older cishet men manipulate and groom girls and women – not just for sex work but for their own survival and satisfaction. After weeks of tailored previews, once I was sitting in front of the opening scene of the film, where ‘Bye, Bye, Bye’ by the Backstreet Boys thumps out dramatically while Mikey is on a Greyhound bus (if you’re not U.S. American, you don’t know the stigma – read: broke as fuck – of the Greyhound bus), I thought Mikey would be the hero. Instead he was the villain.
At the end of the film, I felt so gross after watching it – and so did my fellow-movie goers – that we all sat in painful silence for a few moments trying to digest what we had just seen. I and one of the movie theater employees who joined the screening ended up speaking about the film over a cup of tea in the kino’s lobby to try to process the uncomfortable feelings with which we were left. Raylee, AKA Strawberry, is the 17-year-old girl that Mikey (in his mid-thirties) pursues, lies to, has sex with, and grooms to the point that she believes she is in love with him and willing to move to California with this near-stranger to begin shooting adult films with him. If you’ve ever been exploited by an older man, within or outside of a sex work context, the pattern was likely familiar to you: Raylee is impressed by the illusion of worldliness she sees in Mikey, and because she is young and inexperienced she can’t tell what everyone else in their small Texas town knows – that he is a loser. Susanna Son, the actress who plays Raylee, really looked underage – it is one of the elements of the film that made me extremely uncomfortable as a viewer. I had to independently search for her age after the movie to reassure myself, because in reality, she looked less than 17 years old in the movie and it made me feel sick to see her and Mikey’s sex scenes.
I thought I hated the film, and while I still don’t like it or the stark contrast between the way it was marketed to the audience and what I received as a viewer, I feel I now understand it better. From my view, Raylee was young and thought she was in love with a much more experienced adult man who knew which buttons to push to get what he wanted from her. First they’re having sex; then he suggests filming it; then he suggests they watch it back together and compliments her, saying she would be so great at porn – he assures her that if she goes with him, it will only ever be him and her shooting together, doing what they already do sexually but just in front of a camera. It made me wonder if that was how he and Lexi ended up making porn together in California seventeen years before the events of the film: the same age Raylee is in the movie. It is deeply agonizing to watch, as a viewer, the step-by-step process of Raylee falling under Mikey’s thrall. Meanwhile, in order to avoid being homeless – because he has no money and nowhere else to go – Mikey worms his way back into the life and bed of Lexi, his estranged wife and former shooting partner.
At the end of the film, I felt so gross after watching it – and so did my fellow-movie goers – that we all sat in painful silence for a few moments...
Lexi, as the film’s lore goes, had to leave California many years before – where she and Mikey went when they turned eighteen to become porn stars – because she struggled with addiction. Now back in Texas living with her ailing mother, the film shows Lexi living in poverty, having lost custody of her child due to her addiction, chain-smoking in nearly every scene, and taking Craigslist clients as a full-service worker so that she and her mother, Lil, can survive. Even though Lexi knows Mikey is a piece of shit and he’s clearly fucked her over before, she wants to believe the dream – that she can be married, be happy, get her son back, be protected and provided for financially. It’s another look at the ‘real America,’ complete with Lil, Mikey, and Lexi watching Donald Trump on the news; we see low-income white and low-income Black people in unlikely community together; we see a strong Black matriarch character as the center of this community, with the power to hand out both justice and opportunity.
It wasn’t until I went back recently (in the year 2024, while waiting for the release of Anora) and watched Starlet, Sean Baker’s first film about sex workers, that I began to put the pieces together and see the common threads of his movies. Starlet depicts the unlikely friendship between a new adult film actress named Jade and a much older woman, with a background B-plot of Jade’s work and the chaos caused by Jade’s roommates, who are also adult film actors. James Ransone – who played Chester in Tangerine – is again an erstwhile pimp-cum-boyfriend named Mikey. I suddenly saw that Baker has a certain kind of character he likes to reuse: the raggedy, exploitative, wannabe-alpha-yet-perpetually-omega male pimp who siphons off the women around him. Ransone’s Mikey in Starlet is indistinguishable to me from his Chester in Tangerine, and is in boilerplate essence the character of Simon Rex’s Mikey in Red Rocket.
Something much more disturbing came to my awareness in light of Starlet and my subsequent viewing of Anora: Baker seems even more enthralled with recycling the type of character East London Stripper’s Collective termed in their newsletter review of Anora as a “hot-mess-express”: a wild, unpredictable, beautiful, emotionally unstable, streetwise, and dramatic female sex worker. Since seeing the repetition, I can’t unsee it. In Starlet, Baker made his first fantasy of this character with adult film actress Melissa, the best friend/roommate of Jade and girlfriend of Mikey. We see this manic-pixie-wild-cussing-sex worker again in Tangerine with Sin-Dee; again in The Florida Project with Halley; again in Red Rocket with Lexi; and again in Anora with the titular character.
Baker seems even more enthralled with recycling the type of character East London Stripper's Collective termed in their newsletter review of Anora as a “hot-mess-express”...
I now find myself a bit bored with Baker’s movies in retrospect, especially because it’s with Starlet, and Melissa’s dramatic rampage through the office of her porn production company Renegade, that I also noticed Baker’s movies tend to hold a similar plotline around this type of character. The manic-pixie-wild-cussing-sex worker always has a violent, loud outburst scene that is central to the movie. I find it a bit lazy for a film director to do this now that I notice the repetition. Melissa cusses out everyone in the Renegade office and literally shows her ass, Sin-Dee kidnaps Dinah – the woman her fiancé cheated on her – with from a flophouse brothel and literally drags Dinah through the streets of L.A., Halley beats up Ashley, Lexi throws a coffee pot at Mikey’s head in one scene and participates in robbing Mikey of the money he’s made selling weed while cursing him out in another scene, and finally we come to Anora, where Ani is constantly cursing people out and most notably takes on two enforcers singlehandedly, leaving one with a broken nose and black eye and the living room of a mansion smashed.
If I had to guess, I would say that Sean Baker has a thing for this kind of woman – it may be an admiration, it may be a fetish, it may be a subliminal recognition that these kinds of characters are exciting and sell movie tickets. I am unsure. To his credit, Sean Baker talks publicly about the need to decriminalize sex work, and the best friend character Lulu in Anora, like other actors in his previous films, was a real-life sex worker. But why are we repeating the same plotlines, the same events, the same type of character? Even when I saw the character Granik in Anora throw up next to Toros (played by the talented Karran Kargguilan) in a car, I was instantly reminded of the scene in Tangerine where an unnamed passenger throws up in the taxi driven by Razmik (again, Karran Kargguilan).
On the one hand, repetition by a director can be an artistic choice. I like that Sean Baker reuses the same actors in his movies, thus creating for me the feeling of a closed universe akin to the magic I used to feel watching Quentin Tarantino’s (who also reused actors) movies. It’s great to see Karran Kargguilan again and again (apparently he was also in The Florida Project as the motel owner), see Tsou-Shih Ching as Mamasan the donut shop proprietor in Tangerine and Red Rocket, and see the L.A. county clerk in Anora be Mickey O’Hagan – who also played Dinah in Tangerine and the Renegade office employee Janice in Starlet. But I am now tired, and suspicious, of seeing this same style of central sex worker character in Baker’s movies who has a big emotional and physical blow-up.
The manic-pixie-wild-cussing-sex worker
always has a violent, loud outburst scene
that is central to the movie.
I am a writer, and a quote from one of my favorite essayists is: “A good essay teaches the reader how to read it.” I’d say the same about a good director and his films. As a sex worker, I don’t think that Sean Baker is teaching civilians well how to digest our stories. The ending of Anora, which every sex worker I know personally including myself has a problem with – like yes, we all agree that Igor could get it, but not like that, and not at that moment – makes Ani seem like a victim. To me, as a sex worker, she is a victim not because she is a sex worker, but because she is a 23-year old girl who bought a fantasy of love, commitment, and security from a shitty cishet manboy – the same way Sin-Dee did from Chester; the same way Melissa did with Mikey; the same way Lexi and Raylee did with Mikey #2. She did what any inexperienced sex worker could do and forgot that they are the ones selling – not buying – the fantasy. If Sean Baker wants to make movies with similar themes and do some good, perhaps he can shift his focus from sex workers onto these repeating and realistic dynamics of the ways in which cishet men – to speak plainly – ain’t shit.
While he says that he wants to help remove stigma from the sex industry, portraying these manic-pixie-wild-cussing-sex worker women over and over again is unhelpful in my eyes. Baker has already said he is working on his next movie, and that it will – surprise – also involve a sex worker. In light of these patterns, I don’t find Anora “refreshing” or “paradigm-shifting” as other civilian reviews have praised it. Instead, I worry about the increased exposure of his films and the growing power of his messages. I worry about how capitalism and civilians eager to be cool will do what they do and overwhelm Baker's advocacy for decrim in interviews about the film with the commercialization of pole dancing classes and sex worker aesthetics. It was very disturbing to see "learn to twerk like Mikey Madson's character in Anora, see the film and get a free pole-dancing class" as promo for the film online.
At this point, there actually seems to be a chance that Anora, and Mikey Madison, will be Oscar contenders. Like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Leading Actress in 1991, and Jane Fonda who won the Oscar for Best Leading Actress for her 1971 performance in Klute, it appears that portraying a sex worker has the power to make the career of civilian actresses. I’ll always appreciate Baker’s realism of aspects of life in the United States of America and relatable dialogue like, “If you can’t zip up your fucking pants after you use the bathroom, how can I trust you with the music?” But civilians don’t know how to tell what is real about our world or not – so Sean: If you’re reading this, I challenge you to make your next movie without a female sex worker character who starts screaming, cussing, breaking shit, or beating people up. Maybe that film will actually be the love letter to sex workers you wanted Anora to be.