A big night for strippers at the Oscars
Bonus Edition: 'Anora,' swept the this month's Academy Awards with a simple message: It’s about the vulnerability, stupid
⚠️ Warning: This dispatch is full of spoilers. If you haven’t yet seen Anora, go watch it. (Seriously.) Then come back and read this week’s edition. ⚠️
Less than four minutes into Anora, Sean Baker’s tragicomedy about a stripper swept up in the chaotic life of a Russian oligarch’s son, I found myself seizing my partner Lisa’s arm. We laughed so loud we should have been booted from the theater — or at least shushed.
“Dude, the DJ is a fuckin’ asshole. I swear to God,” says Anora, played by Mikey Madison.
“How old is he?” asks another dancer named Lulu. “Like 40? Shit.”
Those lines hit a little close to home.
Yet, as Lisa and I watched Anora sweep the Oscars on March 2, a chill rolled over me, the hair on my arms stood up and I felt pressure building behind my eyes.
I almost cried… over the goddamned Oscars.
During his acceptance speech for Best Original Screenplay, Baker, who wrote, produced, directed and edited Anora, said: “I want to thank the sex worker community. They have shared their life experience with me over the years. My deepest respect. Thank you. I share this with you.”
“Fuck yeah!” I heard myself shouting.
I’d tolerated many of my colleagues, grown fond of a good number of them — and, with time, had come to even trust a few and consider them friends. Yet in that moment, I understood how much I was in their corner. Every last one of them.
I couldn’t help but see Anora’s five-Oscar haul — Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing — as a victory for the dancers I work with in the clubs.
For Lex, who shares with me the bristly bits of her love life, hoping I can decipher the behavior of the men she dates…
For Zora, more chemist than cook, who offers me bites of her vegan burritos and French dips and shares her recipes with Lisa and me…
For Velvet, who squared her shoulders and walked taller, her face bright, her eyes sparkling, after the owner of a fledgling club hired her — a Black woman who strips — as a consultant…
And for Halo, who weaponized herself with a killer makeover, including a stunning blue-and-silver wig and silver lamé body suit to match, then took home three grand in a single night after landing a whale of her own…
…And for so many others at Whispers and The Haven.
To prepare for the role, Madison spent months working with strippers who showed her how to hustle, twerk and pole dance — how to walk like a stripper and how to speak like a stripper.
Baker has also written, directed and edited Starlet, about the San Fernando Valley adult film business; Tangerine, about two Los Angeles sex workers who set out to avenge a cheating boyfriend and The Florida Project, in which a single mother living with her daughter in an Orlando motel turns to sex work to survive. Baker regularly consults sex workers for his films and has long been their advocate.
Anora opens with Ani, as she’s called throughout the film, accepting the hasty marriage proposal of a despicably wealthy 21-year-old client named Ivan. She yearns to be seen and loved in the primal and vulnerable way we all do. Ivan, however, yearns to be a drug-infused chunk of veal who’s been handed everything yet understands nothing.
This isn’t going to end well, and the audience is consumed by an ever-creeping dread as the film unfolds.
The Brighton Beach fixers and knuckle-draggers charged with babysitting Ivan soon kidnap Anora and hold her hostage while Ivan’s scandalized parents swoop in via private jet to annul the marriage.
Along the way, virtually no one will so much as glance at Anora. She suffers indignity after indignity until, by the film’s end, these cold-blooded, Armani-clad zillionaires have burned her soul to ash.
The thing about trauma is one dose may knock you back on your heels. You’ll get pissed, sure, but you’ll soon regain your footing. But a second? A third? You fall to pieces. You turn on yourself. And you somehow find yourself trapped in a flywheel that brings on the same pain again, again — and again.
Anora, young and wonderfully naive, is shoved headfirst into that death spiral. It’s what makes Baker’s film more about the risks of lowering your defenses than about stripping.
Hard-earned experience has taught sex workers to keep their guard up. And yet they invariably let it down, lay bare their tenderness — because they’re human, because they want to be seen and they want to be loved.
Of course they do.
The risks of “letting (people) in” is a common topic around the clubs. I recently found myself doing my best to console a dancer, her chest heaving as she tried to stave off a panic attack, after a man she thought she could trust had humiliated and abandoned her.
That’s what happened to Ani — except it was at the hands of a mob instead of a single suiter.
Anora’s final scene left audiences perplexed and ruminating, the way good movies often do. But after months in the clubs, the scene made perfect sense to me.
Anora and Igor — a henchman (played with nuance and heart by Russian actor Yura Borisov) sit alone in a car. Igor — unlike the others, even Ivan — sees her and shows her compassion. Anora straddles him in the driver’s seat, then fucks him. But when Igor tries to kiss her, she begins to sob and pounds her fists against his chest.
Why? Because Ivan’s parents and their lackeys have, quite cruelly, convinced Anora her humanity begins and ends with her livelihood. She knows she can fuck without fragility because that’s what she does for a living. Things get dicey only after Igor offers her real intimacy. A mere kiss can put her back on unsteady ground, in dangerous territory, so she falls apart, flies into a rage.
The shame and degradation she’s suffered in recent days pour out of her. Ani’s not falling for that again. Her body won’t let her.
Anyone in her situation would feel the same.
That’s the paradox I’ve observed in sex work — not for every dancer, but for too many.
Last month, as Anora raked in seven BAFTA awards, Madison gave another shout-out to sex workers: “You deserve respect and human decency,” she said. “I just want to say that I see you.”
I see you.
Here’s how badly sex workers need seeing, and how enthusiastically they can respond when it happens: As the lights came up after an October screening of Anora, a group of strippers slipped off their Pleasers — those towering stiletto heels designed for strippers – and clacked them over their heads.
It’s common for dancers on stage to spread their legs wide, then clack together their Pleasers. Why? To draw customers’ attention.
In other words, they’re asking: ”Do you see me?”