Anora and the Death of Civilization

Couched

A couple of weeks ago, I posited that the Super Bowl LIX ads marked the end of civilization as we know it — specifically, that some abiding deep layer of the human brain had changed from ‘storytelling’ to something like ‘voyeurism,’ in which the world of fame and success was understood to be a locked box of unlimited fascination and the only pleasure that could be afforded from an ad was the opportunity to peer for a moment into that world of C-list celebrities. In terms of the psychic health of the culture, the image of the singer Seal superimposed on the face of a seal is roughly equivalent to the Vandals getting on their boats and heading towards Rome.

For your reference. What would you say the odds are that civilization can survive this?

I stand by this analysis, but more bad news was to be had for civilization’s survival from the victory of Anora at the Oscars. If the problem with the Super Bowl ads was the complete absence of storytelling — in a storytelling medium! — the problem with Anora is the absence of any inner life for the characters, of any purpose to their journey, of any dimension in the story other than the pursuit of status.

Let’s just understand, before we go further, that Anora is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie. I started watching it as I usually do — with Apple Notes in hand, ready to take down anything interesting that I might want to reference back to in a review. I gave up on that about halfway through the film, put the Apple Notes away, waited politely for the film to the end and hoped (forlornly) that it wouldn’t drag on too long and I would be able to get some of my evening back. I wasn’t going to write a review about it, or think about it again — it just felt like the kind of smart-ass, tougher-than-thou film that the denim-wearing roll-their-own-tobacco kids in film school make when they think they’re much more talented than they are. The film had a bit of stripping, some arthouse-style sex scenes, got ahold of the cool house (and plane!) of somebody’s parent, but then, in the interminable chase scenes looking for Ivan, was two hours of the sort of exasperation you get when you misplace your keys somewhere and all in order, in the lat few minutes, to build up to something very much like an episode of Jersey Shore. The fact that it was nominated for an Oscar seemed like a novelty — symptomatic of a weak year in which the competition included Wicked and Dune 2; and seemed to have something to do with wherever Sean Baker was situated in his career.

But then it won the Oscar, and I sort of had to reconsider everything and think my Gibbonesque thoughts on the decline and fall. How was that we as a culture, out of all the movies made this year, by all the insufferable rollie-smoking film students as well as by everybody else, settled on this overheated-reality-show-in-Russian-accents as the thing we wanted to celebrate? And the clear answer, it seems, is that we are so far enmeshed in the New Gilded Age that that has just become reality for us, we have come to assume that everything in society is transactional (stripping seems like the perfect metaphor for everything else), and if the son of the oligarch shows up and wants to invite us to the party and overpay us for the week, then, no matter if the son is a puny 21-year-old, with no skills or redeeming features, no matter that he has done nothing whatsoever to earn his wealth and everyone around him despises him, we will regard him as a catch, and we will spend the next two hours running around diners in Queens trying to get him to honor his agreement, or at the very least to get a cut of the family wealth if he bails.

Gibbonesque thoughts

The argument for the film is that this is ‘reality’ and a ‘slice-of-life,’ and, yes, I suppose it is fairly accurate to the mercantile sensibility of sex work, that Ivan is the ticket out and it’s really not worth asking any other questions, and I suppose the film is structured so as to be a completely ground’s eye view of this way of life, so that we are following a not-particularly-consequential episode within Anora’s stripper career that is nonetheless illustrative of wider socioeconomic dynamics, but it is still incumbent on the filmmaker to choose what he wants to say, and Baker seems interested in saying nothing at all — just that this is the way it is, and it’s kind of sexy and kind of fun; and then the Academy and every institution you can think of got in line to agree that this particular cultural object is in some way of value. The filmmaker Emir Kusturica, no prude and no shrinking violet, voiced his objection to the film in terms that I very much agree with. “There is nothing there! No hero, no statement, no human story,” he said.

The other argument for the film is that it’s really well-acted, and, yes, it’s a nice showcase for three up-and-coming actors. Mikey Madison is leaning pretty heavily on her outer borough accent, but Yura Borisov does a near-perfect imitation of his own role in Compartment No. 6 and seems to have crossed cultural lines to become America’s gopnik next door. Mark Eydelshteyn is very talented and captures the vulnerability of a poor little rich boy with his soul and conscience crushed long before he was ever bought his first pair of Ray-Bans. But I don’t think too much should be of the acting ensemble. I mean, look, Russian acting is in general at a much higher level than ours — the length that Borisov is willing to go to develop his characters speaks all by itself to that — and it’s nice to see actors like Borisov and Eydelshteyn get their spotlight. But this is not how the richness that’s in Russian filmmaking and acting should be reaching American audiences. The characters in Anora are an array of Russian stereotypes — the oligarch, the tiger mother, the golden youth, the tough, even the corrupt priest — and there’s really not much movement beyond that. And then, really, it’s just a travesty of intercultural connection. It’s as if, after all those toasts to international friendship that so many boozy, intrepid businessmen spent the ‘90s conducting, all the hope of some post-Cold War liberal world order, this turns out to be the bridge, that the Russian oligarchic class is really not so different from an American reality show — “you’re fucking trash,” says Anora in her star turn at the end of the film, her moment to really tell it like it is.

Anora also, as many commentators have noted, comes across like a housewarming gift for Putin as Trump’s America seems to be solidified under the Putinist cultural imperium. That’s not necessarily the fault of the film — certainly, it’s not as if Russian characters or Russian subject matter should be out of bounds — but the film is a Putinist document. It participates in the fundamental tenets of Putinism — of ironclad, all-encompassing materialism and consumerism; of a near-worship for those who are at the top of the pyramid and a reification of all hierarchies however unjustly they may have come about. Anora’s protest at the end — “your son’s a fucking pussy,” she says of Ivan — is entirely futile and is taken as such. Ivan has already put on his dark glasses, the oligarch laughs over what she says, and Anora herself heads straight back to the mansion to enjoy her last comp’d night there. The hierarchy is entirely in place, and all that’s expected of audiences really is to be impressed with the design of the mansion and to salivate over the plane and to maybe be a bit titillated by the striptease.