Sean Baker’s Anora illustrates how sex work – a working-class job – is a dance between creativity and commerce, art and artifice.
After sweeping the award season, including winning Best Picture at the Oscars, Anora is now streaming on … Disney+. Sean Baker produced, wrote, directed, and edited the small independent film, which centers on the everyday experiences of a sex worker. It now shares a digital platform with Mickey Mouse.
Platform capitalism can be as discombobulating and dizzying as Sean Baker’s masterpiece.
For more than a decade, Baker has been making working-class films that center on sex workers, including Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), Red Rocket (2021), and now Anora (2024). These films foreground how sex work is a complex form of labor that should be recognized and respected as such. Sex work is work.
In an economy of increasing precarity and insecurity for the working-class majority, sex work is one of the few industries that continues to offer ample job opportunities, especially for women. The sex industry continues to thrive despite the violent vicissitudes of the market economy—the inevitable recessions, depressions, and inflations that are currently exacerbated by state-imposed austerity plans that choke assistance to working-class communities who struggle to make ends meet, who struggle with more month than money.
While the sex industry is a billion-dollar industry, sex work is hyper-exploited. In the US, sex workers are predominantly forced to be in the informal economy, and hence, they are excluded from the protections of organized labor. Sex workers do not have access to fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions, which includes protection from clients who don’t respect the boundaries of sex work. (See Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights.)
Anora is the name of the movie’s central character, brilliantly played by Mikey Madison, who goes by their chosen name, Ani. Ani is a young sex worker with a tough exterior who strives to make ends meet while primarily working at an upscale Manhattan strip club. Anora follows Ani as she navigates her exhausting work schedule, which requires more acting than union-carrying members of Hollywood’s acting guild.
In Anora’s early scenes, we see Ani’s everyday working life, including her constant performance to attract, engage, and persuade customers to buy dances and other adjacent fantasies. Ani is a saleswoman, and the services she offers center on her body. The marketplace insists that this body must become a vehicle to enact customers’ desires (which in this film are exclusively men’s desires).
Throughout Anora, Ani remains a cipher. We learn little about her past, interests, passions, dreams, and desires, and we only glean glimpses about her family and friends. Ani is a performer, projecting a distant and distinct persona from her carefully guarded self. (This division between persona and personhood shatters in Anora’s devastating final scene.)
Sex Work as a Genre
As Anora suggests, sex work is labor and a genre. To be profitable, sex workers must act in established genres, performing (male) fantasies of female attention, sexuality, and desire, wrapped in an aura of authenticity. Sex work is a dialectical dance between creativity and commerce, art and artifice. In this manufactured fantasy, any man with capital can (temporarily) gain access to a woman’s body. Central to the complex labor of sex work is the ideologically transforming scenes of commerce into scenes of desire that exceed the grammar of capitalism.
Anora begins in the genre of male fantasy. In the opening shot, the camera slowly pans to the left as we see men of all ages and ethnicities receiving lap dances from mostly young, female sex workers. These men are in semi-private spaces flanked by walls that give the illusion of privacy. Sean Baker’s camera slowly pans across these barriers of privacy, revealing how these men occupy a shared social space within what can be called an assembly line of sex work.
The opening scene places viewers amid the sex work, foregrounding how the women work to manufacture fantasies. As the camera slowly pans across this assembly line of sex work, the soundtrack plays a song by Take That with the opening line (and eventual refrain) that “Today this could be the greatest day of our lives”. Sex work manufactures the fantasy that anything is possible and that unsanctioned pleasures are permitted.
The camera finally stops on the protagonist, the titular Anora. Before we learn her name, before we hear her voice, before we learn her story, we see her bare breasts as she gyrates on a customer’s lap, performing a desire and a persona.
Aurora‘s Genre Switch
Anora is about sex work and the (false) promise of genres.
Genres abound in Anora, and one of the most prominent genres, at least initially, is the Cinderella genre. When Ani meets Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (portrayed by Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch who relishes and revels in obscene wealth, the film seems to shift gears and genres.
Ivan is like a prince who can make magic happen; he can magically transport Ani away from her life of working-class precarity and exploitation to a world of fantastical wealth that only seems possible in Hollywood movies. The film’s paratextual framing establishes this genre expectation. Anora is officially described as a “Cinderella’ story”. On Disney Plus, for example, the movie is summarized as follows: “young woman from Brooklyn… who gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she marries the son of an oligarch”.
Cinderella is a working-class fantasy of transcendence—a fantasy of leaving working-class conditions that breaks working-class bodies, minds, and spirits. Cinderella is initially condemned to the endless, thankless tasks of reproductive labor—cleaning, cooking, mending, and beautifying the home.
While Cinderella is fated to a life of domestic servitude, her stepsisters adventure beyond the home, “free” to pursue their fantasy that they will marry a wealthy prince and leave their class position behind. Cinderella is a gendered fantasy predicated on working-class women wishing to be rescued from the conditions of working-class exploitation. In Anora, Ani’s prince arrives, or so it seems, in the form of a wealthy party boy who drinks, smokes, and snorts in an endless bender.
Ani and Ivan meet at the high-end Manhattan strip club where Ani works. After a few paid dances, during which Ivan makes it conspicuous that money flows as freely as tap water in his life, Ivan asks Ani if they can see each other beyond the confines of this sanctioned institute. Ani consents and arrives at his mansion the next day, which makes it clear that Ivan is part of the 1%—the sliver of the population who control and can change genres.
Initially, Ani and Ivan’s relationship is strictly transactional. What starts as a single encounter soon morphs into something bigger as Ani agrees to be Ivan’s girlfriend for a week in exchange for $15k. Soon, however, their relationship seems to change into something beyond commodification. Anora seems to become a love story.
However, Sean Baker refuses to stay on any singular genre track. Instead, the film genre hops. For a period of time, it becomes something akin to a slapstick comedy.
These genres—the Cinderella story and slapstick comedy—promise to transcend working-class conditions. For all the unexpected narrative turns and genre shifts, Anora seems to be headed towards a happy ending. It appears to be reaching for an ending in which Ani will become a butterfly, a prominent symbol throughout that Ani has tattooed on her body and painted on her nails, which she shows a co-worker in an early scene. In this context, the butterfly becomes a symbol of working-class transcendence.
New genres suggest new possibilities, but Sean Baker offers a powerful critique of genres as Anora switches gears in the final act. The ability to choose and change genres becomes revealed as a class privilege not afforded to Ani.
Capitalist Realism Hits Hard
On their week-long date, Ivan takes Ani and some friends to Las Vegas on a private plane. In Las Vegas, Ani and Ivan get swept up in the impossible fantasies materialized and promised by the city. While partying in penthouse suites, lavish pools, and clubs, amid cascading drugs, music, and sex, during VIP treatment in all spaces they enter, Ivan proposes to Ani, and the two wed in a Las Vegas haze.
In one sense, this marriage is transactional. It allows Ivan to become a US citizen and break free from his domineering Russian parents. For Ani, the marriage will enable her to escape into a life that previously seemed surreal and unreal. However, Anora suggests that despite the transactional benefits for all parties involved, the marriage still exceeds the transactional. The film, as the description promises, is a Cinderella story.
The Cinderella story, however, proves to be a lie.
In the second half, Anora creates a classic conflict between young lovers and traditional parents. The initially goofy, funny, fun-loving, and lovable Ivan proves to be callous, privileged, and entitled, and he ghosts Ani the moment “reality” settles in.
When Ivan’s parents arrive from Russia to annul the marriage, his parents—and especially his mother—cast the relationship as a disgrace that has humiliated the entire family. The mother tells Ivan, in Ani’s presence, that she would rather her son marry another man than a “whore”. Ivan retorts not by defending Ani or calling out his mother’s homophobia and patriarchy, but by telling her that she doesn’t need to see the situation within the genre of “tragedy”. Instead, Ivan implies, his parents should treat the scenario as a “comedy” with no real ramifications. Indeed, Ivan’s dad learns to laugh at the scenario.
To be wealthy and part of the 1% is to control and change genres. Ivan and his parents escape into a genre of wealth, while in Anora’s devastating ending, Ani (temporarily) breaks down.
For all the promises of transcendence, at Anora‘s end, Ani remains trapped within “capitalist realism”, a genre that working-class subjects seem to be forever condemned. As Ani learns, and as the film dramatizes, all other popular genres are empty fantasies.
Works Cited
Anora, written, directed, and edited by Sean Baker, starring Mikey Madison (Neon 2024).
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Zero Books. 2009.
Grant, Melissa Gira. Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. Verso. March 2014.
Smith, Molly. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (Verso 2020).
Srnieck, Nick. Platoform Capitalism. Polity Press. December 2016.
Take That. “Greatest Day”. 24 November 2008.