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I’ve never fucked a rich guy, but I thought about it once. He lived in a penthouse in a really nice building. His job was about watching numbers go up and down, or maybe it was about making them go up and down — I can’t remember. We’d met online. He was sort of funny (surprisingly). He was older than me (obviously). I was nineteen or maybe twenty, a virgin, and had literally never felt sexual attraction to a man, even the ones I’d made myself date — I sometimes tried halfheartedly to masturbate to straight porn, or to the idea of Dylan O’Brien or something, but it never worked. I had never reached orgasm or anything even close to it while thinking about a man. 

The idea of fucking the rich guy, though, was exciting. I made about $23,000 (CAD!) a year and did not, at the time, feel particularly hopeful that I’d ever be making much more. He sent me pictures of the view from his panoramic windows, and I did not send him pictures of the black mold creeping up the wall next to my mattress. I thought about him buying me dinner, and what expensive sheets might feel like, and stepping out of the shower onto a marble floor, and the sharp, illicit thrill that might come with ignoring the ethical implications of how he made his money. The erotics of class ascendency flirted enticingly with a dream of heterosexual normalcy that had long been out of my reach. The first time a heterosexual fantasy ever helped me cum, I was thinking about him calling me poor. 

When Sean Baker’s Anora took home the Oscar for Best Picture, he became the first person since Walt Disney to win four Academy Awards in one night. It’s a poetic connection, for a variety of reasons: Baker’s breakout film, The Florida Project, takes place on the outskirts of Disney World, and the titular character of Anora wants to go on her honeymoon in Disney’s Cinderella suite. Most of all, though, Baker — like Disney — is a man who cares very deeply about fairytales, particularly when it comes to how they reflect and establish his era of the American empire.1 In Anora, he wrote his own. Unlike Disney, though, who pioneered a structure for the optimistic heterosexual love story that would dominate the next century of American culture, Baker’s Cinderella story self-immolates at the end of the first act; his primary interest is not in the fairytales themselves, but in their consequences.

To quickly recap the film: Ani is a beautiful, charming stripper who works at a Manhattan club. She is introduced to Vanya, the 21-year-old heir to a Russian fortune, because of her ability to understand his language; the two become entangled during a whirlwind week together, in which Ani, paid $15,000 to be his temporary girlfriend, enjoys huge suites in high-class hotels, fur coats, lavish parties, and a huge waterfront mansion. Vanya proposes to her in order to secure his green card, and she happily leaves her job at the strip club to join the elites. When Vanya’s oligarch parents find out about their marriage, they send a pair of henchmen to find the pair and force an annulment; Vanya runs away, leaving Ani in the custody of the two men paid to do his dirty work. The trio spend most of the movie’s runtime miserably futzing around New York, searching for a billionaire manchild who never cared about any of them. Ani protests for most of the film that her husband loves her and will protect her when she finds him, but when they do track him down, he’s back at the strip club with another woman in his lap, too wasted to look her in the eye. She is offered a relatively small sum to disappear, and she takes it.

In the nearly endless discourse surrounding Anora since its awards season sweep, it feels like the primary subject of debate has been a question about what the movie actually is. Is it a romcom? An Uncut Gems-style comedy? Does it hate its protagonist or love her? Is the ending sad? Offensive? Is Sean Baker a feminist? (Is this tv show my friend?) Contributing to the confusion is the fact that the poster for Anora bills the film as “a love story from Sean Baker”. One could easily interpret this to mean that the film is a love story between Ani and Russian playboy Vanya, or even a love story between Ani and the sympathetic thug Igor — but neither of those were the love stories in the film that captured my attention. To me, Anora is a film about a romance with mythology. It’s a story about stories, about the vast cultural narratives that enchant and delude and control us, and about how love, especially heterosexual love, can be propelled by an attachment to an imagined “good life” even more than it is an attachment to any specific person.2 Anora is a story about a girl so in love with an idea that she loosens her grip on material reality, until reality re-imposes itself with force. It’s like most love stories, this way. 

More than a love story, though, Anora is a demolition project. Baker spends the first third of the film building up the promises of the American Dream in all their glory, sketching out intoxicating cultural fantasies about class ascendency, romance, labour, wealth, and America itself, only to spend the remaining runtime systematically and mercilessly destroying them until there’s nothing left, no shelter, no safehouse. This is clearly a kind of sadism: by the end of the film, Ani has been spared no punishment for her naive investment in the great American fairytale. (I’ve seen some people posit that the ending of the film is a romantic one, or that it represents Ani finding a “good man” who loves her for who she is; I did not read it as anywhere near that optimistic. To me, it was an image of complete alienation, total defeat.) 

Perhaps it’s Baker’s skilled work in establishing these mythologies that explains why Anora is so frequently described as a light-hearted, romp-ish romcom. I’ve felt confused by this reception; I experienced it as both a deeply tragic and crushingly nihilistic film. But given that a central theme in the film itself is how the overpowering mythological pull of hetero-optimist romance can obscure the pain and pessimism of reality, perhaps this rosy reception makes sense: Ani, after all, believes her story is a romcom as well. You’d be forgiven for getting swept up by the incandescent needledrop that thrums behind her as she agrees, cautiously hopeful, to marry Vanya, or by the bright lights around the chapel in Vegas where they say their giddy, profanity-laden vows. Their shared elation is real and palpable and undeniably beautiful, and you can’t help but feel, as Ani does, that she has made it, that she’s won.

Crucially, the heterosexual contract is not the only political promise secured by their matrimony: while they spin around the Vegas concourse, Ani squeals “we got married!!!” and then, with equal glee, cupping Vanya’s face in her hands — “you’re an American!!!” He roars in agreement, in victory. The link between these two identities — foreigner and spouse — is not superfluous. Ani is a second-generation immigrant (who rejects her ethnic name, Anora, in favour of an Americanized one), and she’s also a woman, and thus is at the intersection of two world-shaking American mythologies. The American Dream tells poor people and immigrants that everyone in the United States has the opportunity to attain for themselves a better life through hard work and sacrifice; heterosexual patriarchy tells women that the best and only way for them to secure their safety and prosperity is through attachment to men via the nuclear family. Love and happiness are a reward for the hard work of securing this union, but they also constitute the essence of the work itself (“Help me love Bob and the children as I should,” Christian crusader Anita Bryant wrote, pre-divorce, describing the nightly prayers she made to her God — making love and happiness sound very much like work indeed). The Heterosexual American Dream encourages women to pull themselves up by their heartstrings, so to speak — to buckle down and commit to the work of finding and feeling love so that you too might one day get the life you deserve. And, like all work, a good American knows that it’s only worth it when it’s hard. 

This is the context in which Ani lives. The jury is out on whether she really cared for Vanya, or if she just really believed he cared for her, or if her only real faith was in the sanctity of “wife” as a protected position. Either way, she’s practicing some flavour of hetero-optimism: she is earnestly invested in the potential of conventional heterosexual love to change her circumstances, to bring her safety and security, to save her (either through material gain or through the spiritual salvation of real love and companionship). It’s a popular affect, these days. After a decade of liberal-mainstream heteropessimism seemingly brought women no closer to liberation, women everywhere are inching further towards the palliative care of patriarchy and the warm (if suffocating) embrace of the marital bed. Some critics of Anora have called it unrealistic that a woman like her — a career stripper, a native New Yorker — would fall for any of Vanya’s promises, and I agree that the trope of the open-hearted, earnest, gullible stripper showing a “real self” to her clients is both a male and a consumer fantasy. But, at the same time, the largest and most powerful systems in the world have been working for centuries to provide both the conditions and the incentives for smart, practical people to identify the promises of patriarchal capitalism as the best deal available to them. And to put it frankly: smart, practical women take this deal all the time. I can barely unlock my phone without seeing another trad wife or a so-called “stay-at-home girlfriend” extolling the virtues of partnering rich and learning to cook, and more and more women I know are hearing them out. These women pitch their lifestyles as escape hatches out of the indignities of patriarchal capitalism: humiliated by the casual sexism of the dating market and frustrated by the alienation of the labour market, they aim to quit the markets altogether by committing themselves to a single buyer. Female dating strategy influencers, who encourage women to hetero-optimize by seducing high value men for personal gain, accept it as inevitable that women are for sale and push smart women to focus their energy on selling high. At their most self-aware, these women offer a simple idea: you’re going to be exploited anyway, so why not get what you can out of it while you’re still the type of girl men want to buy? 

Despite my issues with the film (see Marla Cruz’s take on Anora’s labour politics and Sam Bodrojan’s sharp critique of Baker’s sadism), I can’t help but appreciate Anora’s conviction in demonstrating that the rewards of buying into this program are greatly exaggerated. I appreciate, too, how it made me think about the circumstances — isolation, unjust labour conditions, class oppression — that might lead someone to attach themselves to it anyway. Ani might be punished for her optimism, but it doesn’t feel like she’s judged for it. Like many of the women I reference above, she’s not an idiot: she’s just trying to get the best deal in a world where few deals are offered to her.3 Heterosexuality is a prison, as they say. But, as my friend Emmeline Clein often adds, half-joking: a prison can also be a house. 

The most important scene from Anora, in my opinion, is in the middle of the film, when Ani and her captors are searching for a runaway Vanya in Brighton Beach. When Igor sees Ani shivering on the frigid walk down the shoreline, he offers her a red scarf to keep warm. It’s the same scarf that was used to bind her mouth a few hours earlier, the same scarf that kept her quiet after she was bent over, tied down, and restrained in her underwear on the lap of a strange man twice her size. She notes indignantly — and correctly — that he only brought the scarf in the first place in case he needed to gag her again. But she is freezing, and so she eventually accepts it. This is a familiar situation: Ani is far from the first woman to know that the thing that gags you can also be the thing that keeps you warm. Certainly it is insulting, undignified, to accept the warmth of the object that exists primarily to hurt you — but sometimes, when it gets cold enough, you start to think that it would be stupid to suffer twice. And the scarf would be there either way, so perhaps there is some feeling of liberation in the fact that you want it now, that you get to choose where it goes; you get to wrap it around your neck, gently this time, so that it cradles you rather than chokes. To deny the warmth of the scarf, Ani knows, wouldn’t change the fact that she’d been bound by it before, and it wouldn’t stop her from being bound by it again. But it would stop her from shivering on the beach, stuck chasing after a boy who abandoned her, surrounded by enemies and yet somehow also totally alone. There’s no dignity, surely, in accepting the comfort of the binds. But where would be the dignity in freezing? 

This, to me, is the deeply human centerpiece of Anora: the idea that people in difficult situations take bad deals. This is quite literally true of Ani, who at several points in the film accepts far smaller recompense from her overlords than she likely could, but it’s also true of the hetero-optimist contract at large. The function of romance within the Heterosexual American Dream is not to make these deals better, but rather to make them easier to stomach; investment in romance is both a kind of work and an anesthetic that makes the work less painful. Here’s a more sentimental version of that Female Dating Strategy line, and one that I find much harder to rebuke: You’re going to be exploited anyway. So why not believe in love? 

If Anora isn’t a romcom, what is it? While watching, I most often found myself thinking about horror. In Halloween (1978), John Carpenter popularized a type of scare-shot where the audience is positioned in front of the victim, facing them, watching helplessly as the killer approaches from behind. Unlike a jump scare, where the audience often shares perspective with the victim and feels fear, shock, and surprise alongside them, the horror here relies on sustained tragic suspense, and on a kind of forced powerlessness. You know what’s coming. You can see what the final girl can’t. You might want to scream at her to run, to stop being stupid, to leave the dark room and go back to where it’s safe, but you’re stuck watching silently as death stalks her from behind. Every second brings you both closer to the inevitable. The feeling produced by this type of scare isn’t a burst of cathartic shock; it’s a pit in your stomach.

I felt the same pit in my stomach throughout Anora. When I watched it in the theatre with an audience who seemed mostly primed for a campy love story, I spent most of the film noticeably alone in my dread. The audience around me laughed uproariously while Ani was cornered and restrained in her underwear by two older, larger men — a scene that made my heart beat hard and fast and my gut churn with anticipatory fear. This happened several times throughout the film, to unsettling effect: it felt as though the audience, like Ani, was swept up in the fairytale, married to an anesthetic belief that a happy ending was guaranteed. 

In the final act of the film, there’s a scene where Ani tries one last time for her Cinderella ending. After Vanya’s parents show up to dispose of her marriage themselves, she tells Vanya’s mother with the bluster of a television lawyer that she didn’t sign a prenup and intends to sue them both for half their fortune. I experienced this line, again, as crushingly sad; it’s clear that Anora’s world, like ours, doesn’t work like this, and that women in Ani’s position can rarely expect justice or protection from the legal system. Her final attempt to fight back just added another layer of tragedy. And yet, the audience around me literally whooped and cheered when she delivered the line, as if expecting that at this point her luck would change, her pumpkin would turn into a carriage, and she’d take a family of billionaires to the cleaners. When Vanya’s mother delivered the obvious truth — that she could destroy Ani’s life with a wave of her hand if she didn’t submit — the air drained from the theatre all at once. The previously enthusiastic audience went silent, and no one made a sound for the rest of the film. I realized, then, that we really had been watching different movies: for the hetero-optimist viewer, Ani’s defeat was a jumpscare. For the hetero-pessimist, we’d watched it stalk her since the beginning. 

Like I said at the start: I never fucked the rich guy. I think I sensed, in some way, that I’d gotten what I needed from him. Even just the image of his power — the mythology of his class position and my relation to it — helped me place myself into a heterosexual contract I’d felt alienated from for my whole life. I know now that managing to fit myself within this structure was no real accomplishment, no great relief, although it certainly felt like one at the time. When I realized there could be a place for me within the Heterosexual American Dream, it felt like a locked door swinging open; I’m still struggling with the implications of the room it led into. Sometimes, I wonder if I should have tried to get a necklace out of him or something. Mostly, I try not to think about him at all.

In

As discourse has proved, Ani’s sparse characterization makes her ripe for interpretation. Is her interior world underrepresented in the script because Baker doesn’t care about her interior world, or because the reality is that women in her position are frequently discouraged from revealing their interiority? Is the minimalism of her character design just a dehumanizing writing choice, or a purposeful reflection of the fact that sex workers are often incentivized to craft a persona that allows for the projection of the audience’s desire? (For the record, I have never thought of Ani as a one-dimensional character, and felt a great deal of interiority implied through the script and through Madison’s performance.) Regardless of authorial intent, Anora does an effective job, I think, of capturing a certain kind of feminized suffering. But I’m arriving at a question that has haunted feminist discourse for decades: where is the line between representing gendered suffering and reproducing it? Is the sadism involved in chronicling a woman’s endless abjection the price we pay for realism?

I loved Anora, honestly. I haven’t been able to stop thinking or talking about it for months. I still can’t help but wonder, though, if there might be better deals.

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