by Ayanna Dozier
“What name should I address you as?” is a common phrase workers in the sex industry use when conversing with other workers outside of the “job.” It is a question that acknowledges the numerous names and personas attached to the role of the “sex worker,” which intermingles, co-exists, and sometimes clashes with the individual who creates and performs that persona. Though seemingly benign, the question doubles as a sign of recognition—seeing workers as containing multitudes, which includes their sexual labor, but is not limited to it. As journalist Melissa Gira Grant reminds us in Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, sex work is the only industry in which its laborers are always positioned to be on the clock, and this is what writer-director Sean Baker assumes and portrays of the titular character in Anora (2024).
Anora is very much a client’s take on Cinderella. Ani (Mikey Madison) is a young stripper who doubles as an escort. During a shift at the club she dances at, she meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of Russian oligarch Nikolai Zakharov. After a whirlwind two-week “fly me to you” experience that doubles as courtship, Vanya marries Ani in Las Vegas, largely to secure his visa status in the States. No less than 72 hours into their “marital bliss” does the carriage revert into a pumpkin, when Ani’s spoiled client-husband abandons her with several hired men upon hearing that his parents are flying in from Russia to annul the marriage. What follows is one of the slowest-paced and most depressing takes on the screwball, odd couple comedy, as Ani, after being physically assaulted by the henchmen, teams up with them to find Vanya. Ani’s accomplice status is largely coerced, as she is tied up and informed that finding Vanya is the only way for her to secure an annulment payment from his family. Throughout its nearly 140-minute runtime, Anora works to strip Ani of her safety, income, and aspirations by way of revealing—what every client really wants to see from a sex worker—her “authentic” self, imaged in this film as a lonely whore who aspires for more.
While it is an important distinction that Baker has made six films on sex work, I am not interested in reading Anora against those films. In fact, I have seen how Baker’s archive of films on sex work functions like a shield against other detractors in appraisals of Anora, as if the over-representation of the sex work industry in his narrative oeuvre is a sign of his ability to faithfully “represent” the field. As philosopher Sylvia Wynter argues in her work on narrative cinema, over-representation is precisely how the social imaginary of oppression becomes a cinematic fact. Anora, if anything, makes plain Baker’s representational investment in the cruel optimism of sex work rather than the workers themselves. Cruel optimism, as defined by theorist Lauren Berlant, describes the ranging affects of aspiration around labor that serves to “validate” the self. In Anora, these affect emerge in whirlwind camera movements and Glimmerglass filters to capture the aesthetic wonderland of being a high-class escort. These formal aesthetics shape the affects of fucking, traveling, partying, getting high, and getting paid, which Ani is consumed by and ultimately punished for desiring. Baker’s camera is here to “authentically” represent sex work, from its dizzying wonder to its harsh “reality.”
The irony of Baker’s “authentic” style is that it actually just mirrors the perspective of a client, for the film is not interested in Ani as much as it is in transgressing her boundaries. This is evident with her name in the film—she prefers “Ani” but is called “Anora” throughout the film. The fact that the film is named after the latter is demonstrative of its faux interest in getting to know her. Our cinematic (and overall societal symbolic) codes of the representation of sex workers are so flat that critics who lauded the film were incapable of realizing that Ani is an underdeveloped character. Sex workers are projections—we have no history, motivation, or life in the client’s eyes. Ani’s lack of characterization is what allows many viewers to read the extended sequence in which she is assaulted by Nikolai’s henchmen as a farce, rather than as a harrowing encounter in which Ani’s position as a sex worker makes her more vulnerable to assault or even death. It was terribly disturbing watching that sequence in a theater with a rambunctious audience hooting and hollering their way through, as my friends and I, all with experience in the field, quietly tensed up and clenched our armrests. Again, the film narratively builds upon and follows the social imaginaries of sex workers as subhuman projections for other people’s fantasies. Take, for instance, that we never get a sense of Ani’s interests outside of work. Is she in school? What is her favorite film? Does she have friends outside of work? What music does she listen to? We have answers to those questions when asked of Vanya, even though he is a tertiary supporting character who is literally missing for most of the film.
Many sex work advocates have recently come down on the labor-focused representation of sex workers because it forces workers to validate their humanity through their labor. Though I still see the usefulness of the term “sex work” as a general, layman phrase to talk about the industry, I do agree with contemporary detractors—including the late Scarlet Harlot Carol Leigh (who originated the expression)—that the phrase has been mobilized to push for respectability politics. The phrase can often obscure or ignore the stickier dynamics of sex work that remind us it is a criminalized profession, positioned as not only anti-social via a Marxist analysis, but even as a social ill, as any contemporary bipartisan bill against sex work reveals. Though some sex workers try to politically organize around labor, many non-sex work laborers often do not see themselves in solidarity with us and are all too happy to remind us that we are not fellow comrades, but whores.
This is what makes the henchman Igor’s solidarity with Ani so puzzling. Baker would have us believe that Igor is the only one capable of truly seeing Ani because he recognizes their shared labor as hired hands, though that does not stop him from physically assaulting her. The director has admitted in interviews that he views Igor as compatible with Ani for they are both gig-workers, and his appearance in the film is to demonstrate how much Ani has in common with him rather than Vanya. However, Ani is not like Vanya nor Igor, and the film even subconsciously knows this, as she is reminded ad nauseam that she is neither a wife nor a worker, but a whore. When Igor takes Ani home after she reluctantly participates in the annulment, he reveals that he managed to steal her engagement ring as a token of sympathy. While an interesting sequence could have emerged with Ani taking the ring and returning to her life, the film entraps Ani’s personhood to her work by having her mount Igor as what I am to assume is a “thank you.” And like all client fantasies of the working girl experience, when Igor attempts to kiss her (with an ambiguous use of force), she breaks down at the presentation of what we are to assume is authentic intimacy. As writer and sex worker Marla Cruz writes in Romance Labor, her critique of the film, Ani remains on the clock by not exiting the car. By extension, the audience cannot—and is not given the space to—imagine Ani outside of the circumstances of her labor. Hell, we are not even afforded a chance for her to be addressed by the name of her choice in Anora—leaving Ani entrapped in the cinematic frame of being a 24-hour sex worker.
Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer working in film, performance, and photography. Her current research and artwork is dedicated to examining how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. She is currently an assistant professor of Film Studies at University Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020).
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