Sean Baker is from New Jersey. Or, Sean Baker is from Summit, New Jersey, a violently kitschy, white, and affluent suburb about a ten minute drive from the equally kitschy, white, and affluent suburb I grew up in, which is about a twenty minute drive from the President’s Golf Club, where, in 2014, my Uzbek best friend worked as a nanny and almost hit Trump with her car: she touched his thigh with her Beamer. In Anora (2024), not a single scene takes place in New Jersey; it is filmed between Brooklyn and Las Vegas. Yet Anora is a film deeply informed by New Jersey, by the same catatonic nihilism that Garden State (2004) captured, that enabled Todd Solondz to make movies about gleeful pedophiles in its suburbs. In Garden State, when Zach Braff’s character returns to Jersey upon the sudden death of his mother, he is comforted only by an aunt at the funeral who tells him that his mother had redone the bathroom. The aunt has made Braff a shirt from the print of the wallpaper. And when Richard Brody remarked that while Anora is filmed on location in Brighton Beach, “the characters move within even the grittiest spaces as if walking past backdrops or C.G.I. green screens,” he understood: Sean Baker is from New Jersey. To be in New Jersey is banal, and it is arbitrary. You are wearing a shirt that matches the wallpaper. You are the wallpaper, and you are the shirt.
This slippage, dissociation, inability to distinguish between oneself and the environment—and therefore, to experience being a self who can have an actual effect on the environment—is what, I think, makes Anora fail as a film, what ties it to Zach Braff wearing that shirt at his mother’s funeral, to Jack Antonoff’s Muzak pumping through the state’s endless Stop & Shops. Marla Cruz writes that in Anora, “the contradictory burdens between being a person and being a [sex] worker are glaringly absent.” But all of the characters in Anora are written by Sean Baker as not-people, in a not-place; they are entirely devoid of any desire, or ability, to make the present environment into a place they actually want to inhabit. Let’s call this lack-of-desire boredom; let’s say people who feel this way are bored. In New Jersey, especially for the white progeny of the wealthy suburbs who did not have to work, people are mindlessly, ecstatically, terrifyingly bored. They are slack-jawed, watching TikTok for eight hours a day, or game shows, or network television where they renovate bathrooms. They are not “involved” in a “community.” I know them well. Sean Baker does too: he graduated from my neighborhood’s all-boys private school one year after my mom graduated from its all-girl’s Catholic school. Baker worked to make Anora a film that is not, literally, boring. But with Anora, he has written characters wholly consumed by boredom. As far as I can tell, he does this not as a critique of the cultural forces that produce such boredom, but because he finds it to be true that people can have no agency under those forces. I do not think this is true.
Nothing that happens in Anora has to happen. Anora (Mikey Madison), a stripper and sex worker, meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), an oligarch’s son, in the strip club, and she dances and he pays her and they fuck and he pays her and then he asks to be exclusive and he pays her and then he asks to marry her and they get married in Vegas. The synopsis for this film describes it as “her chance at a Cinderella story.” Ani tells her coworker that she wants her honeymoon to be at Disney World, in the Magic Castle. It is one of the only moments in the film where anyone states a vision of a future they would actually like to inhabit. It is also, crucially, not her own idea, or an idea that comes from any life Ani may have had outside of media consumption. After their marriage, Ani is seen quitting her job at the strip club, but we are completely unaware of the financial impact this will have on her. She has very little backstory; a sister roommate and a rudimentary grasp of Russian, learned from her grandmother, doesn’t add up to much. We see she has one friend and one enemy at the club where she works, but her place in that social sphere is barely sketched.
The only things Vanya and Ani do together are fuck and do drugs and party, but no one knows what it actually means to party except to fuck and do drugs, and maybe eat candy, receive IVs, get massages, splash in a hot tub, gamble, run through casinos, run on the beach, run in a hotel suite, fuck. In the first half of the film, Ani is written as jocular, using her body with the dexterity of an athlete, a smile pasted on her face for most of it. Their courtship runs close to a montage, each scene lasting for just a few minutes, each played to its peak Event, like an Instagram post. With Vanya, Ani oscillates between the doe-eyes of an adolescent—which does little to garner Vanya’s attention—and intense irony, breaking the fourth wall enough to keep Vanya engaged, and to keep herself not-pathetic. When Vanya proposes, she teases him and the roles they are playing: “You want me to be Vanya’s little wifey?” It is a credit to Baker that none of this felt fun, or glamorous, to me. Nothing is ever set up or taken down, except for the few rare shots of workers cleaning Vanya’s mansion. Ani and Vanya barely speak.
Eydelshteyn’s performance is remarkable because of the constant action and non-action and perpetual boredom of the uber-wealthy flicking around in his body; it is clear Vanya has never thought of a single consequence to his actions. The day of the election, three days before I saw this film, the child I nannied for years was doxxed for yelling racial slurs at random women on the street. He does not look like Eydelshteyn, but everything in Vanya reminded me of him. The children of the uber-wealthy are bored by their own massive toys, their motor boats and jet skis, their private chefs and mansions and yachts and stunts; there is a complete lack of meaning that comes when such fruits of labor have been constantly presented to you, when you are categorically unable to create anything through work, because there appears to be no work. There is no point in interacting with, or bettering, your environment: I saw these kids scroll TikTok while riding horses. The only trash cans in their house were in the kitchen, because someone else picked up their trash for them. Wealth can change what you have to worry about, but it can also actively corrode your sense of attention. Through Vanya, Baker has written an impossible force for Ani to be up against, a carelessness fostered by extreme wealth that another person cannot fight, scream, or kick into awareness, nor truly embody through proximity, despite Ani’s smiles. It is incredibly transparent what Vanya is, and what he is not, capable of. Vanya is not just wealthy; he appears to have never actually worked, or to have done anything for any reason outside of shocking another person and “having fun.” He wants to marry Ani to evade such work, and my stomach curled when I saw how she looked at him. This was not just because I knew it wouldn’t work out for her, but because it posited inhabiting such carelessness as being what determined both her and Vanya’s desires. I do not think it is possible for this brand of sociopathy to be the basis of every single decision a person makes (even if it can be the basis of a vast majority of them), but Baker writes it as such. As for Ani, it is true punishment to care for someone who is fundamentally incapable of caring for you back.
This is Sean Baker’s movie, and Sean Baker is from New Jersey. He knows that stories are not inherent to any place or person, that they must be constructed, lived through, by real people. He knows what it is to choose a life that actively corrodes narrative, as Vanya has, to avoid the pressures and trials that inherently produce meaning. I just don’t know who still needed to be told this. I guess Sean Baker felt that someone did.
Ani has been praised as a contemporary princess, but I struggled with princesses immensely as a child because I could not understand what it was that they did. This had almost nothing to do with gender; it just seemed like everyone else in the world did something beyond Sit, and princesses, as far as I could tell, Sat, and maybe occasionally Danced. In New Jersey, my father worked on Wall Street and didn’t even lose his job during 2008; I was a princess, even if I categorically rejected them because I always wanted to do something, anything. I liked playing in the dirt and writing. Ani is understood to want Vanya’s money because we can understand that everyone needs money, but we don’t know what having that money would mean to her. There are no sick grandmothers or children or mothers, no teary-eyed looks at the ATM. Her house, for the few minutes we see it, is not uninhabitable. At one point, she says to her boss at the strip club that she wants a 401(k), healthcare, and workers’ comp, but outside of the deals she strikes with Vanya, that is the only time her finances are brought up. Shopping with Vanya, she only buys their engagement ring and a sable coat. To the extent that she wants anything, it is clear that Ani wants to become a princess—she wants to Sit. It is understandable that Vanya is depicted as her chance to do that, but given how muddied Ani’s financial stakes are, it’s surprising that Baker does not portray their relationship as being one where Ani is given genuine care, or rest (which is different from Sitting); like their courtship, their marriage also runs close to montage; the nature of the fucking does not change.
Vanya also provides something beyond wealth: he barely keeps still. He is the TikTok feed in front of her sitting eyes, relieving Ani of any pressure she may have felt to construct events in her own life, of which we only know the deadening repetitions of the strip club. But Baker never allows us to see what Ani might actually want to construct, or what kind of life she might choose. This is unique to Anora, compared to Baker’s other films: in Tangerine (2015), one main character, also a sex worker, actually wants to put on a well-attended concert. It is useful to want things to happen, it is useful to make them happen, because Sitting and Dancing are states that inherently must end: your phone will die, you will have to take a shit. You cannot literally be bored to death, and you cannot have a frictionless life. Showing the slightest hint of that friction, for either Vanya or Ani, would have made this a different film. As it stands, the schmaltzy and awful song “Greatest Day” that plays during the montage demonstrates how Baker is more invested in telling us that these people are having the greatest day than getting us to actually believe it, or believe that the characters are having it. The result is that Anora feels less like a film with clear directorial intent, and more like a contrived gender-logic-problem—what if a sex worker married a rich kid—that some guy was cornering me with. It could be pulled from Baker’s first film, Four Letter Words (2000) which consists of eighteen-year-old boys titillated by discussions of porn, and female sex workers, at a house party, set and filmed between our hometowns in New Jersey.
Upon marrying, Ani and Vanya spend a lot of time fucking, Sitting, watching him playing video games, and vaping. They are in this state when Vanya’s parents’ enforcers, two men, walk into his mansion and demand their marriage be annulled. Vanya tries to fight and then flees the house, and Ani screams and fights the two men. She kicks one in the nose; she bites another’s neck. She breaks a table and a painting and throws things. She screams that “I am Vanya’s wife,” and she screams “rape” when she is not being raped. (Of rape, Sarah Beckwith writes, “It is as though the rapist is saying, ‘There is no inside of you that I cannot reach.’” Ani is not raped in this film, but Beckwith’s description does, I feel, apply to how Ani is written, puppet-like). In the script, Baker writes: “It strikes Ani at that moment that her new life could be taken away in a flash.” But given how Anora is written, Ani did not have a life before this moment to return to. Her life with Vanya is not a life; it is Sitting. As a result, Ani appears to be throwing a tantrum rather than advocating for any kind of real future; Baker relishes in letting her throw it. It is absurd that this is referred to as the “Home Invasion Scene.” The men knock on the door and open it with a key; is it Vanya who tries to shut the door on them—something the kid I nannied also used to do, whenever I had to take him horseback riding. By calling it the “Home Invasion Scene,” it is clear whose perspective Baker has privileged. Vanya made a movie.
From the beginning of the invasion, the men are fairly docile. In fact, I couldn’t help but think that Ani did not have to fight these men at all. As far as we know, nothing will happen to Ani if she goes along with the men quietly and allows the marriage to be annulled, if Vanya goes back to Russia, and if she just returns home. The men do not touch her before she tries to run. She has the opportunity to choose the dignity of taking it quietly and bowing out at any time, but Baker does not grant her this. Given how quickly she previously oscillated between sincerity and irony (“Vanya’s little wifey?”), and again, her lack of true rest, I found it hard to believe that she had earnestly invested so much in the montage of their week-long marriage to resort to such anger and violence, especially once Vanya abandons her, which can in no way be interpreted as him desiring to stay in Ani’s life. We are not led to believe Ani’s life will become significantly worse should she leave Vanya; working at the strip club has never been explicitly posited as a punishment. She has already earned at least fifteen thousand dollars just from agreeing to be exclusive with Vanya. She already has a wedding ring that is at least four carats. The men do not flash guns because they do not have them. They do not threaten to hurt her, but she does try to run, and they grab her. They have this thing that needs to, arbitrarily, be done, that Ani, arbitrarily, does not want to do. The outsized nature of her reaction is intended to convey that Ani is really losing something here, but it’s a bizarre directorial choice, given that her new “life” has been so weakly built up. It’s adolescent in its understanding of stakes.
At one point, the men speak tenderly to Ani. Toros (Karren Karagulian), one of the enforcers who is seen leaving a christening to deal with this (he probably could have stayed at the christening), says to Ani in the tone of a consoling father: “He’s betrayed me too.” Toros is older and, I thought, has as such had a life where eight hours a day have not been spent looking at a screen; he understands what it means to live through an event that is not just presented for you to watch. Toros knows that it is impossible to be betrayed when the thing betraying you doesn’t really exist—is less a person than a teenage accretion of indulged, uninhibited impulses. But Ani doesn’t sympathize with him either. Baker writes Ani as truly being betrayed, for having lost her opportunity to Sit (which again, inherently couldn’t have been maintained in any case). After this scene—where Ani has been tied up—she reluctantly agrees to help the men find Vanya. During this search sequence, I was actually bored; there were easier ways to find him than driving around Brighton Beach.
The closest we get to meaning, of something done for the sake of a future worth living in, is that Igor (Yura Borisov), one of the men Anora fought, is kind to her. He lays a blanket on her. He offers her the scarf that he previously used to tie her up. He thinks it’s funny when she curses at him and tells him that he looks like a rapist. “Why wouldn’t you have raped me?” Anora asks him, fucking with him, and we do not really know; there is no narrative impulse for that to not have happened. In this film, sex is never transformative; it is as arbitrary as anything else. In my high school in New Jersey, there were over five-hundred nude photos of girls circulated on a DropBox that several hundred boys had access to. Some of these photos dated back to when the girls were twelve. There was a video of an unconscious girl being raped sent around and on everyone’s phones. Why wouldn’t you have raped me? No one knows. In this universe, it could happen, because nothing that happens has to happen.
In the end, after the marriage is annulled, Ani and Igor fuck in her car. Or, Ani climbs on top of him, they fuck, and he holds or chokes her, and she breaks down sobbing, and he holds her some more. The film ends on a black screen, with the sounds of windshield wipers repeating. It reminded me of the end of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, when the narrator is staring at his daughter, who is pregnant from a horrific rape: “And from within her will have issued another existence, that with luck will be just as solid, just as long-lasting. So it will go on, a line of existences in which his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may well be forgotten.” With each shudder of the windshield wipers, I thought, another existence. I did not feel like having sex ever again.
All of the fucking in Anora speaks to the point that it barely matters that you are alive; or rather, it is possible you are alive by complete chance. Ani speaks so little outside of cursing; she is her body entirely. She is neither exalted nor pitied. She is kicking you in the nose, and she is taking it from behind, both states that cannot make a claim for themselves. Maggie Nelson writes “fucking leaves everything as it is,” and she is right. When Ani breaks down in Igor’s arms, she just doesn’t have a choice. Choicelessness can be an experience of grace. Still, Baker’s writing of Ani—as being nothing more than “another existence” in a world she cannot budge, and does not really want to—actively works to strip her of that experience. I do not agree with Coetzee or Baker. I do not know how we are defining a world, if we are defining it by Sitting.
You can’t choose how or where you were born. I am constantly shocked at how often people forget this. When I was alive in New Jersey, I could not believe that anyone would view their one life and choose to live there, especially the wealthy, who have an abundance of choice. To be in New Jersey is to be confronted with this fact. For Sean Baker to be from New Jersey means that he is well-acquainted with this fact. I do not think he is a sadist; I think he is, actually, lazy.
One of the last times I was in Summit was in December 2016. It was a house party of a friend of a friend I did not know, a basement in a McMansion, and we walked in and there was a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN flag on the wall. That same Uzbek best friend and I grabbed drinks and said we went to women’s colleges. Two men immediately called us dykes. We screamed at them. One boy turned to us and said he had taken one gender studies course at the University of Delaware. He defended us in some fashion. As a reward, my best friend and I took him into a dark room and sat on either side of him on this silk couch. We alternated kissing him for an hour, rotating his head between us. At some point we left. I don’t remember his name; it doesn’t matter. It happened in New Jersey.
Amanda Larson
Amanda Larson’s first poetry book, Gut, was published in December of 2021 by Omnidawn Publishing. She is currently at work on a novel and a screenplay.