The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

because he is trying to kill you,

              and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

                            and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

       because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

                                                                      your life is over anyway.

A Primer for the Small Weird Loves, Richard Siken

My favorite poetry collection is Crush by Richard Siken. I think it might be my favorite because I could never write like he does, because I know I could never be so vulnerable, at least not in a beautiful way. I am not sure. My vulnerability could never sound lovely. Instead, it is angry, biting, charred, rough-around-the-edges, other words that mean the same thing. It is not a pretty sight, and the words do not make pretty sounds, and I do not write about pretty things. My poems are of death, bodies, love, and men. I write about men, so does Siken. I use the limited vocabulary I own to attempt to describe what it is I cannot understand, only feel. I often write of actions, words, and looks. The glaring, pervasive, invasive looks I have received in an attempt to unravel and take ownership of the perception of myself that men have built for me: almost always without my involvement, my permission. And so, I write: admittedly, in anger, and in resentment, but largely in curiosity, as I claw (with words) at the pandora’s box that is my womanhood. 

I am going to talk to you about Anora. Not through my own poetry, no. 

I am going to use words that do not belong to me, but instead, Siken’s words, of his poem A Primer for the Small Weird Loves. Am I detaching myself from this? Possibly. Probably yes. But trust in me, reader, that in many ways, these words belong to me. Narcissistic? Sure, but of all mediums, perhaps a poem is one that belongs to the most people. For now, and for the rest of the page count of this essay, this poem belongs to me. Am I using Siken as a scapegoat, to escape from my own potential vulnerability? Possibly, but probably not. Reader, I feel that admitting to you what this poem means to me is likely amongst my most vulnerable acts. So, let me confess and get this out of the way. I feel and breathe and relate to every word of this poem. When he writes about pain, I have previously felt that pain. When he writes about yearning, I have been the yearner. All of the ugly, scary, personal, quieting things he writes of, I have been all of them, chronically. 

I am ready to write now.

This is the beginning of an ugly story. I took my seat in the front row of the Walter Reade theater at Lincoln Center to watch Anora in 35mm. I had a bucket of popcorn to the right of me, in my friend Lemo’s lap, as we broke our necks looking upwards at the screen for the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime. I wish she had a paper bag, one for me to vomit my emotions into, or to hold and bag my tears in. As the credits began to roll, I broke down into an aggressive, inconsolable sob. My head was in my hands, my elbows were on my knees, and I refused to look anywhere but the floor, or at the tears that were falling onto my hands. I sobbed, viscerally, at the hands of a feeling there was no explanation for, like there was some subconscious, distant memory that had been unearthed which beat the air out of my lungs and the water out of my eyes. I stood up to applaud. My body felt a million times heavier, but I felt about a billion times weaker. I had never so much felt the need to escape something, to escape myself. The credits provided a relief from the emotional beating the film had given me, but rushed me with questions I had no idea how to answer, much less even begin to confront. It was spiritual, it was holy, it was an exorcism. 

I must tell you what it is about in order for you to understand my emotion. Anora is a ‘Cinderella’ story of sorts about a Russian-American stripper, Anora (Mikey Madison) from Brighton Beach who falls in love with one of her clients, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a rich son of a Russian oligarch, as they engage to be married and fall into a whirlwind of a romance. However, as the story takes more of a ‘Romeo-and-Juliet’ turn for the worst, as the parents of Ivan are furious to hear of the marriage, scrambling to get it annulled. It was described as the comedy of the year, and, after many of the trailers I had seen, I too would have agreed that Anora was a comedy. In fact, I was convinced that it was. I witnessed marketing that worked almost like propaganda, building an excitement for a reality that was untrue, and non-existent. Anora was, in truth, an ugly story: angry, biting, charred, rough-around-the-edges. 

But I adore it. I love it. It built a place in my heart as one of my favorite films. But I do not know if it should be. If I write so angrily about men and the exploitation of women, how could I like Anora? You see, beneath the dishonest marketing, and the audience-wide chuckles throughout the theater during the film’s entirety lies a dark, almost sinister reality. Anora exploits Anora. Sean Baker exploits Anora. A woman is exploited in a way I do not believe I have ever seen before, because it creates a tone of humor that allows the audience to feel as though they can ignore its content. Like bystanders, like voyeurs, Baker gives them the ‘go-ahead’ to laugh, and perhaps creates the condition where not laughing would be wrong. But what is there to laugh at? 

Anora’s magnum opus, its Palme d’Or winning scene is a 28-minute long break-in scene, where Ivan’s parents send three henchmen, Toros (Karen Karagulian), Igor (Yura Borisov), and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) to annul the marriage right to their Brighton Beach mansion. The men break in and attempt to peacefully get the job done with the newlyweds. They refuse, because of course they do. They’re in love, Anora believes they are in love. Eventually, after Ivan learns that his parents are on their way to New York City to handle the problem face-to-face, he runs off, Toros runs after him, leaving Anora to her own devices, in a room with two strangers she does not know.

She fights back. She punches and kicks and breaks Garnick’s nose. She throws vases at them, breaks glass tables and damages the furniture in the room. How do the men respond? For one, Garnick calls her a ‘little bitch’, but what about Igor, the movie’s ‘comedic relief’ character? Well, he puts duct tape over her mouth to stop her from screaming, not like they were attempting to listen to her beforehand, and he ties her arms together. For a significant part of the scene, he holds her over his lap. She cannot move, she cannot speak. She has now become a spectacle, Sean Baker’s direction, and his creation of a humorous tone through the use of sound and absurdist dialogue says to the audience, ‘point and laugh!’ And it works. As Anora is being abandoned by her husband, and as she is being assaulted by two men she does not know, the audience erupts in laughter, in a magnitude irreplicable by even the funniest of comedies. They laugh, at what is likely the most humiliating and violating moment of Anora’s life, as it would be in anybody’s. I sit in anger, but not necessarily in much surprise. They do not stop laughing. 

       The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, see you
as a piece of real estate,
                    just another fallow field lying underneath him
                                                like a sacrifice.
      He's turning your back into a table so he doesn't have to
              eat off the floor, so he can get comfortable,
pressing against you until he fits, until he's made a place for himself
                                                              inside you

In my heightened emotion, I concluded that Sean Baker not only insists upon, but he requires exploitation for this film. I was, however, left with a void asking how and in what manner this could be validated, if at all, and will the director’s conscious exploitation for arts sake disregard the manner of exploitation; could it justify it? In many ways, Baker encapsulates the third section of Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema titled ‘Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look’. I am not sure if this encapsulation is something to necessarily take pride in, however, it is certainly impressive regardless. While in this section, Mulvey largely focuses on the role of women in films with a male protagonist, we can still find Anora on this spectrum, as even when the woman is the protagonist, her treatment within the film is still treated with the same hostility as when a woman plays a supporting role. Anora herself exists in ‘a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/male’, and her role within this scene could not be anymore passive. Within the break-in scene, she has suddenly become a vehicle for a narrative, but her role within it is largely insignificant, as she is a toy for the men in the film, and in the audience, to act upon. To abuse. To assault. To laugh at. The women in the theater are not exempt, either. As the camera introduces and begins to focus on Igor and Garnick, the audience’s laughter portrays a focus on these male characters, empowering them further and cheering along. And ‘by means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too’, Mulvey states of the women in film. In Mulvey’s perspective, the audience is just as, if not, more indicted within this exploitation of Anora. By laughing, they show support, and through support, they enable violence. Furthermore, Mulvey quotes Budd Boetticher’s devastating, yet blatantly true remark: ‘In herself the woman has not the slightest importance’. From this point onwards, Anora has lost control over her own narrative. The film titled after her is suddenly not of her story at all, as she begins to exist fully as a character whose existence is dictated by the men in her life. But, as I realize now, in tragedy and deep devastation, Anora had never had any control over the narrative, so there was not anything to lose. Hadn’t Sean Baker’s own pen, typewriter, or laptop stolen her story from her the second the film had been conceptualized? And to what extent does her occupation as a sex worker contribute to this dilemma?

The clock ticks from five to six. Kissing degenerates into biting.

      So you get a kidney punch, a little blood in your urine.

                                          It isn't over yet, it's just begun. 

In Ronald Weitzer’s ‘The Sociology of Sex Work’, Weitzer attempts to tackle the debate on whether or not sex work can be entirely consensual choice of a woman. He poses two paradigms: the oppression and the empowerment, which he claims are ‘diametrically opposed models based on entirely different assumptions’. While the paradigms appear self-explanatory, they ask the divisive question: is sex work oppressive to the women who engage in it, or does it empower them? Weitzer highlights that writers supporting the oppression paradigm claims that prostitution is ‘something done to a person, not something that can be chosen’, displaying it as synonymous with ‘paid rape’, and ‘sexual slavery’. Weitzer quotes Farley, who powerfully states that ‘the difference between pimps who terrorize women on the street and pimps in business suits who terrorize women in gentlemen's clubs is a difference in class only, not a difference in women-hating’. Thus, sex work is presented as a ‘deviant behavior’ that exists as a result of several sociological factors: class, control, and above all else, patriarchy. Alternatively, there is an argument to be made that it is empowering, inherently ‘involving human agency’, and ‘liberating’ for women attempting to escape oppressions at home, or in the workplace. Weitzer’s ultimate conclusion is that the reality of sex work is somewhere between the two. It is a spectrum, and not a black-and-white, straightforward social phenomenon. But the debate within Weitzer’s reflection, at least to me, reflects but one glaring conclusion: if oppression exists so rampantly, how can it ever exist as something truly empowering, even when it may feel so? If the existence of sex work, within both paradigms, only arises because of external social factors that create only one avenue for ‘liberation’, is this not an illusion of choice? 

The debate of Anora begins to build itself terrifyingly similarly to the debate on sex work. What are the ethics of sex work, and what are the ethics of Sean Baker in directing Anora? Sex work is created in an echochamber of its own social and political contexts, creating the illusion of choice by making it the only option for a woman escaping oppression, only to find herself with an inherently exploitative, patriarchal system once again. Isn’t Anora, too, created in void of a woman’s control, leaving her to her own devices as her narrative begins to untangle, one unwritten by herself? While it does not initially appear so, Anora is entirely rooted in the titular character’s occupation as a sex worker, as a woman in a patriarchal world. Every woman’s life is, in many ways, rooted in their existence in a patriarchal world. While it is easy to result to ‘this is just the way the world is’, there is much left to explore regarding how men and women’s relationships work under this environment, in particular the exploration of sexual relations.

The rest of the film unfolds as Anora, alongside Igor, Garnick, and Toros, runs around New York City searching for Ivan. Reader, I hate to disappoint you, but I must let you know that it does not get any better for Anora from now on. So let me kill your hopes now, as mine were so indiscriminately were, this story does not have a happy ending. It is tragic, it is a disaster. They finally locate Ivan, catching him in the act of sleeping with another stripper at Anora’s club. She forgives him. They get dragged to a courtroom to get the marriage annulled, she defends him to the judge. They meet with Ivan’s enraged mother and indifferent father, she attempts to make a good impression. They board a plane bound to Las Vegas to complete the annulment, she defends herself in the face of Ivan’s mother who relentlessly insults her. Ivan says nothing. Not to defend Anora, and not even to defend himself. 

Silence.

So you say you want a deathbed scene, the knowledge that comes
                    before knowledge,
                                          and you want it dirty.
              And no one can ever figure out what you want,
                                                                      and you won't tell them,
and you realize the one person in the world who loves you
                                                isn't the one you thought it would be,
      and you don't trust him to love you in a way
                                                                            you would enjoy.
                                  And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.
              You thought if you handed over your body
                                                              he'd do something interesting.

It’s funny that in the face of so much chaos and loudness, which the city and her situation so loudly create, the only thing that could awaken Anora and give her a reason to leave is silence. It’s daunting, jarring, striking, and it is terrifying. She throws her diamond ring at Ivan and deboards the plane, leaving in a car with Igor, who is tasked with taking her home and ensuring she does not return.

Now, we are in the living room of Ivan’s mansion for the last time. Anora and Igor are sitting together watching television. Up to this point, there have been subtle, yet not negligible implications that perhaps Igor might feel something for Anora, yet we are not entirely sure what it could be, however, our conclusion is that he feels the need to protect Anora, largely from Ivan, but from the situation that has now unfolded. I think he has seen this film before. 

She gets up from their conversation on the couch and says, bluntly, “you have rapey eyes”. She says this to him, in clear acknowledgement of the many glances he has given her throughout. The audience erupts in laughter once again, and not to spoil it for you, reader, but this is the last time. This laugh broke a new anger out of me, one I could not place previously. Now, the film delves into its exploration about sex. All of the terrible evil of the men in the film comes out in one damning act of finality.

The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to
      sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him
                                  you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,
      but he doesn't listen.
You do this, you do. You take the things you love
                                                                      and tear them apart
      or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours.

Igor drives Anora back to her home in Brooklyn. They sit in the car in some silence. Igor produces the ring that Anora threw at Ivan, in an act of giving. They stare at each other. Sex in Anora is not a tool of intimacy, as is so typical with modern cinema, but rather, a weapon built purely on a violent, lustful greed, and a burying self-hatred. The last scene of Anora sees our titular character begin to have sex with Igor. She touches him, and he kisses her. I sink into my seat. She hits him: punches at his chest, slaps him, and attempts to escape his lap. And he holds her. She begins to cry into his chest.  I cry in the theater. They begin to hold each other, the morning after Ivan had abandoned her, and she was left with no reminders, trinkets, or souvenirs of the relationship she had with him, but that ring.

So, you kiss him, and he doesn't move, he doesn't
      pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn't moved,
he's frozen, and you've kissed him, and he'll never
                            forgive you, and maybe now he'll leave you alone.

 I am struggling to find any reasonable conclusion, as Anora does not give me one that feels right, or moral in any way. Anora leaves me empty: hopeless and pessimistic, unlike anything else I have ever seen. To witness tragedy unfold and be unable to step in and act against it, and to sit in a crowd that only enables it to happen is a feeling unlike any other I have experienced, and I am unsure where to put all of the conflict exploding within me. Anora is not the comedy I wanted, nor should it have been, and it was not. Anora is a film about patriarchy. It is inescapable, and I struggle to breathe within it. It chokes the air out of me. Within sex work, between men and women, and within cinema, there is little-to-no room for women to breathe fully. To exist without the bounds of patriarchy. Anora is a film about women, and for women, but not by a woman, so I do not know if any validation for the exploitation is at all possible. I inevitably sit with the question I started with: could it be justified? Am I amongst the enablers for enjoying it?

Sean Baker creates a facade of honesty and true, true love between Igor and Anora. But what lies beneath this facade is hollow, a shell of a true moment. It is dark, and it is unforgiving. Anora uses sex almost as a test, asking herself if this is all a man could want her for. Was there ever really any want to protect Anora for Igor, or was it all in one big scheme to get out of her and pursue a desire he could not otherwise have? Coupled with Anora’s previous remark about Igor’s ‘rapey eyes’, I refuse to view this scene as anything intimate. Ultimately, it is a man’s use of a woman’s vulnerability in order to get at her body. To objectify her, one last time, and to dehumanize her, as she has been through the entirety of the runtime. What, if any of this, was consensual? I would beg to argue, none of it. Baker himself does not leave me much to work with, either. In an interview with NPR, Baker, in response to being asked about the ending, explains that it is important to leave audiences with something to talk about “moments later on the sidewalk”, and that there was “a catharsis there”. His answer is one that is equally as ambiguous as it is significant: he reveals that this, indeed, is not his narrative, as I had previously assumed, but rather, it becomes ours. It still, however, does not belong to Anora. 

For this reason, Anora initially felt impossible to decipher, and so I clawed at poetry to give me some semblance of understanding. When we do not understand what we see or feel, we look to references to provide clarity. And, through the references, but also through a patience and willingness to understand Anora further, I think it has become evident. The portrayal of emotion and human experience is so fragile, any restrictions put upon it will result in a break, a disconnect between audience and viewer. To demand answers or definitions within art is a futile effort, as I have now learned. Siken’s Crush begs to breathe within the poetic interpretations of millions, and Baker’s Anora demands that it complicates us, and makes us learn through discomfort and tragedy. My early hesitancy to accept this discomfort caused me to wholly reject it, through the belief that this portrayal could not possibly be founded in any justified reality. However, nine pages later, I realize that my very hesitancy, and undying urge to write and explore it is the justification I was searching for. It is compelling, significant, and necessary because of how elaborate it is, and as an audience member, so overwhelmed with sobs and conflicts, I would prefer to walk out of the theater, sit on the sidewalk, and try to build a jigsaw out of it, rather than succumb to an indifference. Anora does not belong to Anora, neither does it belong to Baker, but rather, it belongs to everyone who can feel Anora, and are willing to drown within its intricacies.