Anora's Light: The Idealism of Chivalry
From Naïve Optimism to Mutual Recognition
“Life’s not knights on horseback. It’s a number on a piece of paper. It’s a fight for a knife in the mud.” - Logan Roy, Succession
They say chivalry is dead. I’ve been around a lot of guys in their 20’s (I went from a large state school to playing poker full-time, so they’re probably the majority of guys I’ve been around), and for a while I would’ve said “I agree", but I’d amend that statement now. Chivalry is dormant, and its dormancy is a product of philosophy. Almost a century and a half ago, Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” in The Gay Science. The madman who announces this does not come singing the triumph of the Enlightenment over medieval superstition, but is instead horrified at what he knows to be the inevitable result of this metaphysical patricide: “given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. ––And we––we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” Even more maddening, he knows the 19th century Europeans in the marketplace have no idea what he’s saying.
But unlike the madman whose words fall on deaf ears, Nietzsche had the advantage of the pen, and he made it his life’s mission that his warning be heard. "I am waiting for those who are not yet born, for those who will understand me; for those who are still to come," he wrote in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We saw the shadow of God’s death on full display for the entirety of the 20th century, and we were told by men who could not or did not want to see beyond the cave that the shadow represented the “end of history,” a notion so thoroughly refuted by almost every moment of the 21st century that it’s almost always mentioned in jest now. Well, it has come time to vanquish the shadow of God’s death, and in an age of nuclear proliferation, the battle for AGI, and the imminent collapse of the biosphere (among other catastrophic risks), it appears we may only have one shot.
Now, to the meat of this essay: a new Sean Baker film about a stripper with gorgeous naturals and a slightly questionable Brooklyn accent. At its core, Anora is the tale of a woman in Limbo who descends into an Inferno which she mistakes for Heaven, the long (and very funny) unraveling of all of the illusions and self-deceptions that landed her there, and her eventual ascent into Paradise. This description may seem very odd or even incorrect to those of you who have seen it, as it’s conventionally described as a “modern update to Pretty Woman/a subverted Cinderella story,” both of which are accurate enough descriptions, but underlying Anora is a narrative about the transformation from an atomized, naïve optimism (or, as you might colloquially call it, “idealism”) to a much deeper form of recognition (an embodied mutual understanding that Hegel considered the ideal relationship between two self-conscious beings) characteristic of philosophical Idealism. In this transformation, Anora has her own Beatrice (a young goon named Igor), but he’s not an abstracted divinity, just a man with a similar cultural heritage and a bit more life experience who sees her, and most importantly, seeks to understand her.
The “Cinderella story” that occupies the first act of the film depicts the marriage of two popular worldviews that have arisen in the shadow of the death of God. In Anora, we have the bubbly optimism of the New Ager/astrology girl, telling her co-worker who, “got dollar signs like a real hoe” painted on her fingernails that, “no, you’re manifesting with those.” A small detail, but an insight into the type of “positive vibes”-style wishful thinking she’s adopted while trying to make it in the city with barely any support (her mother lives with “her man” in Miami, she doesn’t seem very close with her sister, and her father is never mentioned). At times, she seems oblivious to the overall game she is playing, as when her rival at the club, Diamond, confronts her for poaching one of her regulars and she shrugs it off as jealousy. She also doesn’t seem to understand that her boss, Jimmy, will never care about anything she says, as when she tells him that his cousin (the club’s DJ) “was very rude and dismissive” to her when she showed him her playlist. She’s on good terms with most of the other dancers at the club, and she carries a friendly demeanor, but there’s clearly a lot about the world she doesn’t know at only 23 years old.
In Vanya (also called Ivan), we have the tacitly nihilistic materialist, as the 21 year old son of a Russian oligarch living the ultimate form of Peter Pan mode in America before he has to start working for his father. He runs and slides around his mansion like an excited kindergartener, his THC vape pen (which should be nominated for supporting actor) is almost a pacifier, and he spends most of his time at home gaming (it takes a great performance for me to forgive such poor controller handling, and while not Gandolfini-level, he gets a pass). The entire city is his playground with a novel hit of dopamine at every corner, and Anora becomes his newest toy when he requests a girl who can speak Russian at the club. Despite this very obviously being the dynamic (though Mark Eydelshteyn plays it perfectly, always leaving room for doubt on first watch), I think it’s important to understand that Vanya is acting this way at most semi-consciously. He’s absolutely terrified of his cold-as-ice overbearing mother, and he has zero interest in going back to Russia to work for his father since he knows his only use there is the continuity of the family name. His entitlement, immaturity, and constant intoxication also allow his young ego to maintain the dreamworld he’s been gifted, constantly commenting, “my parents are dicks,” acting as if the mansion is somehow “his property” and that his father’s long-time employees are people he has the power to fire. Self-gratification is his sole principle in life, and you would not expect anything else from somebody in his circumstances.
It is in this unstable and ultimately loveless marriage that we see reflected a much larger cultural pattern: call it “the art hoe and the tech bro.” There’s many interchangeable hobbies and occupations that could stand-in here (could just as easily be “finance bro and wellness influencer”), but this is the archetypal pairing that’s closest to my heart (art and literature as my feminine passions, making my nut via online poker as my pragmatic masculine occupation). This pattern plays itself out so frequently because these relationships are undergirded by the same immature philosophies I described above: the New Age-y vibes girl who is mostly focused on various positive affective states (whether through yoga, meditation, psychedelics, sex — all potentially beautiful and soul-nourishing activities, but which can all easily get swept up into an empty hedonism) and doesn’t want to look in the face of real materialist analysis because it’s too horrifying (they will often reify it in their mind as “spiritual warfare” as if class war is not a form of that), and the tacitly nihilistic materialist bro who has a sense of how the world works but feels powerless to change it, so lapses into hedonism because what else is there to do? The latter obviously services the ruling class ideology (and even when they’re actively creating it, it’s still in service of the pleasure principle), and the former are very easily co-opted by it because 21st century capitalism runs on the distribution of positive affective states and that’s what they’re most interested in. He plays dynasty fantasy football. She makes pretty crafts. Neither want to shake things up too much, on a personal or societal level.
This archetype runs all the way to the top of our current society’s power structure, embodied in the failed marriage of Elon Musk (remember, all great conquerors are horny teenagers at heart — Genghis went on a legendary fucking spree, and our boy has a limitless harem of ditsy conservative influencers ready to go at a moment’s notice — first as tragedy, then as farce) and Grimes (Canadian synth-pop artist, a literal queen if you were back on /mu/ in the early 2010’s). Seeing these women try to contact him about their children’s health problems on Twitter evokes a scene towards the end of the film before they fly back to Vegas to get their marriage annulled, as Anora, still refusing to believe that the “man” who married her could possibly be this callous and cowardly, meekly asks Vanya, “so we’re getting a divorce?”, to which he forcefully replies, “Of course! Are you stupid?” He has no idea how she can’t see the logic he’s been operating under their entire relationship, and his entire life. He also can’t see how he’s done anything “wrong,” since she’s leaving up a cool $25k for a few weeks of partying, a good amount more than she would’ve made otherwise. It’s both deeply funny when viewed from a distance, and deeply sad when viewed from the perspective of Anora, seeing all her misapprehensions about the world and her place in it crumble in a moment.
I’d like to talk about some of the ways this tacitly nihilistic materialism has affected the many men in our culture that it possesses. After an early screening, one of my friends heard a woman in the row in front of him scoff, “ugh, what a fucking incel” to her friend. An initial reaction to this comment might be something like: “What are we even talking about? Do words not have meaning anymore? Nobody in this film is an incel. Which character are you even referring to? Sean Baker maybe??” But when looking deeper, I think her disgusted reaction to Vanya is exactly right. He operates with the same cultural logic and psychology as the incel, he simply has millions to throw around at will. The incel is equally terrified of their uncertain future, but they can’t pay an attractive stripper to be their girlfriend for a week (and the ones that do generally aren’t kvetching on social media). They are instead fighting to the death in the cutthroat arena of the dating app (talking to a woman in person would cause them to dissolve into ash, and they cope with this by saying things like, “women will literally cancel you if you approach them in a bar, I’m just spitting facts dude”), a zero-sum game that they recognize operates on the Pareto principle (~20% get ~80%). They are desperately clawing to “ascend,” roughly reach a 7 (two standard deviations above the mean if you’re an autistic looksmaxxer, roughly top 5th percentile) so they are able to have a steady stream of women from the apps who they can get into bed a few times before the women start peering into their souls and seeing nothing there. Many women will do this 10-20 times before realizing all of these guys have roughly the same motivations, becoming completely disaffected and finding it difficult to meet anybody in person because there’s a dearth of men to approach them and many of the guys who have actualized themselves to some degree are already taken. The population of men that would have a chance with them have neurotically foreclosed on the possibility because they’re unknowingly looking for a mother (who cannot be a “whore,” so 8 body count max I think). Match Group (operator of Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid) controls $4.5bil in total assets. We’re all having fun, right?
And what happens when a tacitly nihilistic materialist seeks to break out of that Matrix? In its most immature form, you have the incel shooter. Elliot Rodger, the 2014 UC Santa Barbara shooter, was the pinnacle of this archetype. He was a frequent poster to PuaHate (PUA stands for “pickup artists,” a group so hated by these types because they dare to imply that complete genetic determinism is incorrect and that it’s possible to improve at seducing women — even if the PUAs are usually plenty annoying themselves), the original incarnation of the incel forum group known as “PSL” (PuaHate, SlutHate, Lookism — they’re not exactly subtle), a culture which has and still is infecting the minds of tens of millions of young people on TikTok, so much so that the term “mewing” (a type of tongue posture meant to improve jaw and facial structure invented by father-and-son orthodontists who a decade ago only a few hundred weirdos on those forums and /r9k/ knew about) is now a culture-wide meme. This incel will recognize that he’s still living in the jungle, and because he knows he is unworthy of “ascension,” he will lash out in the most violent manner possible (amazingly, Elliot Rodger also spent months of his life attempting to manifest a lottery win after his father gifted him the “law of attraction” New Age self-help Bible The Secret). École Polytechnique shooter Marc Lépine was another famous example of this archetype, but he wasn’t quite as “blackpilled” and internet-exposed as Elliot, still pretending there was an ideological motive behind the carnage.
When this type gets a bit smarter and a bit better educated, they begin to look at “the system” and decide to attack it in physical form (call them “the Paul Schrader protagonist”). Our current cultural avatar of this is Luigi Mangione, the UPenn grad who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson a few months back. Now, whether Luigi was actually an incel or not is totally irrelevant (as is his family background — if he was poor, you’d call him a ressentiment-fueled wannabe-martyr, but since he’s well-off, he apparently should’ve just continued pleasuring himself with the silver spoon: is anyone allowed to fight?) because he’s operating under the same metaphysical logic (as evidenced by his generally rationalist, center-right media consumption). Since I’m a nerd who often thinks in baseball, it’s as if Luigi is trying to take down the Mets, and he figures clipping one of the guys up top will get a lot of people talking and have a tangible effect on the organization, but he can’t get a good look at Soto, Lindor, or Pete Alonso (and he can’t even see Steve Cohen), so he guns down Starling Marte (sorry Starling). Sure, the people that hate the Mets might get some cheers in (and to be clear, fuck the Mets), but the team ups their security, they sign a random outfielder to replace him, and a lot of people are confused why Starling Marte had to die. Luigi Galleani already tried and failed to make propaganda of the deed a meaningful form of protest 100 years ago. First as tragedy… you get it.
At the height of this logic, when one is an actual genius who decides to target the evolution of the system (after being exposed to God-knows-what type of psychological experimentation), this results in the actions of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Same misguided metaphysics, but taken to their ultimate conclusion: sending bombs to random engineers and owners of computer stores in an attempt to stop the inexorable march of human knowledge (sorry Ted, build a time machine and take out Leibniz, or honestly, start with Pythagoras, really the only good options here). Ted is looking for his mother in his own way: the regressive womb-fantasy of anarcho-primitivism, its absurdity best displayed in Tyler Durden of Fight Club (who has to be expelled before the narrator gets the girl). It doesn’t even honor the wisdom of the indigenous, brilliant systems thinkers of their time, since he’s not actually concerned with the interconnectedness of all beings. A collective “retvrn” to the solitude of the cabin is not in the cards in a world with billions of people, and it’s not even how people lived historically. All of these actors noticed various perversities in the societies in which they were living and took it upon themselves to try to stem the tide, but in one way or another, they were mostly throwing sand at the water instead of learning how to surf.
So no, with such a pernicious cultural attitude, I can hardly begrudge anybody for believing that chivalry has had its day. But as I said earlier, Anora learning the depths of Vanya’s dysfunction is only one part of her journey. At the start of the second act of the film, the “happily married couple” (she sits in his lap as he plays video games) are intruded on by Garnik and Igor, two of the goons who work beneath Toros, Vanya’s main handler who reports directly to his father. I’ve seen a lot of people comment that as a stripper with any degree of experience, Anora would be too shrewd to fall for any of Vanya’s deceptions and would be completely unsurprised that the marriage is doomed immediately, but I think that betrays a lack of understanding of both of their psychologies. Anora is still very young and believes she has “manifested” this lottery win (telling Diamond, her more experienced co-worker who gives the marriage two weeks tops, “Jealousy is a disease. I’m gonna go chill in my mansion or whatever”). Vanya is also convincing because he doesn’t even consciously know how full of shit he is, totally panicking and fleeing the mansion on foot the moment he discovers his parents are flying to America to get him as if that wasn’t inevitable.
The entirety of the second act concerns the way in which Anora’s fingers are slowly pried off of the lottery ticket one by one, her still holding out hope at every moment that she’ll somehow be able to hang onto it (she basically knows the jig is up by the second time Vanya doesn’t answer his phone, but the power of denial is too strong for her to acknowledge it) instead of returning to her physically and psychologically-draining life with an uncertain future. In this process, she gains an unlikely overseer, one of the muscles hired to wrangle her. From his very first appearance, Igor seems to be aware of the absurdity of the situation he finds himself in, with the more self-serious Garnik telling him not to laugh at the prospect of Vanya marrying a prostitute. Whereas everybody else in the film is mainly looking out for their own ass, Igor has settled into his working-class existence (though the entire arrangement echoes certain pre-capitalist social formations) and is happy being able to make money to take care of his grandmother. He is so sincere that he almost comes off sarcastic at times, as when he first tells Anora “congratulations” on the marriage he is there to break up, or when he tells her “Ivan did the just leave the house…” when she threatens to report him to her “husband.”
Igor doubles as both caretaker and soldier while maintaining a comic detachment from the absurd situation. There’s been plenty of moralizing about his behavior during the initial confrontation, but he basically does as little damage as possible while taking some serious abuse himself in the form of a deep bite to his collarbone, even making sure to note “fucking impressive” when she draws first blood. He is able to get Garnik some pain medication from his grandmother’s after Anora breaks his nose (a lot of the second act concerns the collateral damage inflicted on members of Anora’s class during the marriage’s fallout) and he provides Anora a scarf when he notices she is cold. He also refuses to “deal drugs” to her when she asks for them. He’s completely in control when violence is required of him, instantly swiping a metal bat away from one of Vanya’s dipshit friends and smashing up his candy store during the search (and playing with it like a sword before chucking it off the boardwalk). He’s genuinely inquisitive, asking Anora if she’s wearing a real mink (it’s fucking Russian sable) and making sure he has the correct pronunciation of “bender.”
Much of the second act (and the film in general) deals with Anora’s way of distancing herself from her Eastern European heritage and her class background. She’d initially refused to speak Russian at the club when she met Vanya, and both at the club and during the search she is very insistent on being called “Ani” instead of her given name. Feeling uncomfortable with Igor’s interest and concern for her, she targets him quite a few times in this regard, repeatedly calling him a “gopnik” (derogatory term for a working-class delinquent in Russia). When these insults don’t stick, she resorts to attacking his masculinity, calling him a “faggot-ass bitch” in the hopes that she’ll trigger his latent Russian homophobia (evoked later when Vanya’s mother tells him it would’ve been better if he’d married a man), but secure in himself, he’s mostly confused as to what she means (when he asks why, she responds, “they say you’re just born that way”). Igor is aware of how much Anora is running from her own cultural background, and looks genuinely pierced for her when Vanya’s mother calls her Russian embarrassing and when Vanya finally tells her that they are getting divorced.
On first watch, Igor feels like a comedic relief background character for the entirety of the second act, which he partially is. He’s funny because he’s fully accepted the circumstances of both his inner life and the world he lives in enough to be able to laugh about it. He is in the background, but he is always observing Anora, interested in understanding her and what she’s going through. There’s always the seeds of sexual attraction there, but he’s a virile man in his late 20’s, early 30’s, and she’s a very beautiful young woman who shares a cultural background with him, try as she might to run from it. Why wouldn’t there be an attraction? To somebody living in negation, with an implicitly transactional view of every interaction that’s been fostered by capitalism (an attitude she will ultimately have to transcend to reach Paradise), Igor may seem like a “nice guy,” carefully crafting every interaction to get closer to Anora with the ultimate goal of sleeping with her. But as I’ve said, neither Anora for almost the entire film or the portion of the audience who put forward this critique are yet to believe in real chivalry.
The third act, much shorter than the first two while being the most impactful, begins when Anora officially signs the divorce papers. Anora is now able to strip away the pretense that she has any hope of joining the Zakharov family. She is able to get back to her more authentic self (but not her most authentic self), the brash bitch from Brooklyn, telling Vanya’s mother that her son is a “fuckin pussy” and that he hates her so much that he married a “disgusting hooker” just to piss her off (seeing his wife be stood up to in a way he may never see again, Vanya’s father is absolutely hysterical as this is happening). This is also the first moment we see Igor stick his neck out for Anora, telling his employers, “this may be out of line, but I think it’d be appropriate if Ivan apologizes.” This request is quickly quashed, with his mother telling him, “my son won’t apologize to anyone” — why has anyone expected Vanya would act any differently the entire film? This is the first moment where Igor has risked some of his security to defend Anora’s honor, a chivalrous act.
Igor is tasked with accompanying Anora back to the mansion and bringing her home. They fly coach on the way back, finally aligned together in an environment that matches their own class status, where Igor gently covers her in his coat while she sleeps. After Anora tries to shower off the past month, we have my favorite scene in the film, her and Igor smoking together in this extravagant palace before they both return to their humble lives. Anora learns that the day Igor just spent being bitten, traipsing around Brighton Beach looking for a toddler, and doing a cross country roundtrip was his 30th birthday. This is one of their first genuine moments approaching mutual recognition, Anora grounded enough to recognize how sad it is that special day in his life was spent clearing the debris from Vanya’s wake. Still, while Anora may have relinquished her delusions about being married to the heir of an oligarch, she is now back to her normal form of false consciousness that has protected her in her attempt to “make it” in America. She still views Igor as a “gopnik” who is beneath her since she’s not truly in touch with her Russian heritage.
Another moment approaching mutual recognition occurs when Igor shows an appreciation for her heritage, telling her that he likes the name Anora more than the mask of false consciousness in “Ani.” Her social persona’s quills flare up, calling him a “fuckhead” with a “stupid name” that means “hunchback weirdo.” Igor likes his name, since it means “warrior.” He asks her what Anora means, and echoing Butch in Pulp Fiction, she tells him, “In America, we don’t care about that kind of stuff. We don’t give meanings to names.” He looks it up on his phone and sees that, along with “pomegranate fruit,” it means “light, and bright.” She cuts him off while he’s doing this, telling him, “Yeah, I’m not interested in conversation, dude.” She’s still shielding herself from her heritage to the point of not being able to acknowledge the roots of her own name or think about what her parents might’ve been thinking when they named her. He once again tries to validate her birth class, telling her, “It’s good that you are not part of this family,” and once again she hits him with a, “Did I ask for your fucking opinion?” He never once tries to counter or insult her back. He remains totally unphased, and when she gets in a good jab, he gives her a lighthearted “toosh.”
We then have an interaction that probes even deeper than class or ethnic background, looking into their philosophical outlooks on the world. Igor, the Hegelian Idealist, has seen himself as attempting to look out for her in the best way he can while playing out his social role. He tells her, “I just tried to support you.” Anora, whose surface veneer of the New Age-y vibes girl has dropped to reveal the materialism underneath it that she didn’t want to acknowledge, enumerates all the ways he abused her, shows him the bruises she has to prove it, and insists that, “You fuckin’ assaulted me, you psychopath.” Igor, knowing he never had an intention to hurt her, asks her if she knows, “you were not in danger of injury or harm, right?” She laughs at the notion, knowing even better than she did before the entire ordeal that men will take whatever opportunity they can to gratify themselves regardless of the woman’s feelings and responds, “You know if Garnik wasn’t there you’d have raped me, guaranteed.” When he asks, “Why would I have raped you?” she tells him, “you have rape eyes” (the audience analogue to this comment is believing Igor is a conniving “nice guy”). She does not believe him when he says he didn’t want to rape her, responding with an amazing “Why?” He doesn’t even understand the question, and when she reiterates, “Why wouldn’t you have raped me?” he gives what in his mind is the simplest answer in the world, “because I’m… not a rapist.” He is a man with capital-I Ideals who will not prey on the weak simply because he can, and in Anora’s frame, still resisting being truly seen by him, he’s still a “faggot-ass bitch.”
But why should she believe him? Saying “I’m not a rapist” after the fact is very easy. How does she know he would ever give up any amount of satisfaction at her expense? Igor drives her back to her house in the morning after taking her to the bank for her “green card marriage fee,” a cold winter morning with plenty of snow falling. Just as she’s getting out of his car, he stops her, and their eyes meet in the closest moment to mutual recognition we’ve seen all film, but they’re not quite there. He shows her the wedding ring (that Toros had declared was “Zakharov property” when he took it off her), a fully concrete material risk he takes to give her something she earned out of this whole mess, that he saw her true pain and devastation in when it was taken away. This is a moment of true chivalry. He takes her suitcases up to her front porch, but she doesn’t leave his car, processing the unfamiliar possibility that this man might actually care for her. He gets back in the car and she tells him, “This car is very you.” Now Igor is beginning to feel recognized by her and asks, “Do you like it?” Her defenses are still up, and she tells him she doesn’t. He smirks, remembering the reason he knows Anora in the first place, why he schleps and chases the son of an oligarch around New York City, even on his 30th birthday. “It’s my grandmother’s.”
Anora is ready to admit to herself that Igor might care for her, and she wants to reciprocate his love and concern, but she doesn’t know how. Her naïve optimism has been stripped away, leaving only a transactional materialism in its wake, still protecting herself from the possibility of mutual recognition because of the risks of harm and betrayal she has come to know growing up and in her brief career. She climbs on top of him as if he is a client in a private room. She begins grinding on him and undoes his belt, beginning to initiate sex. Igor doesn’t mind, but he wants to see into her. He knows how much she has been running from herself, how she has been used and discarded, the tough exterior she has built to defend herself. He moves to kiss her, an even more intimate act, and she’s still not ready to let go. There’s no way he really cares for her. There’s no way he isn’t going to toss her aside once he gets what he wants. Just fuck me and let me go. You’ve earned it. She pulls back. She punches him, just as she punched him in their very first interaction, only this time she isn’t resisting being pulled back to her regular life. She’s resisting being fully recognized. She’s resisting Love. It’s too much of a risk in a world so cold, so uncaring, so dangerous. It might not even exist. But he’s still there. He sees deeper into her than she can see into herself. She realizes she no longer wants to go through this life alone. She’s ready to let somebody past the armor she’s built up for 23 years. She collapses into his arms, sobbing a complete catharsis, releasing the pain of not only the past few weeks, but her entire life. Igor holds her firmly, knowing the depth of the pain she’s entrusted him to see. They have become Spirit.
A generational catharsis for all those who have had to put their Light on sale, to those who have had to put their Warrior up for auction, which is most of us. It is not a one-way street, either. As Anora gains recognition of her inner depths, Igor gains the recognition that he is trustworthy, that he is capable of protecting her, that his Ideals have radiated Love into the world. Calling Igor a “nice guy” is silly since this level of authenticity is almost impossible to fake. Calling Anora a “hooker with a heart of gold” is a non-statement: we all have hearts of gold, regardless of how many layers of trauma they are buried under. Anora is a classic tale of chivalry. The knight has come to rescue the princess held captive by her false consciousness. This is a power we all possess in our own lives, only it requires letting go of false comforting beliefs that shield us from the pain of material reality, which can only be reckoned with and eventually changed once fully acknowledged. And this is a process that requires solidarity, not in name but in Spirit. For many, this takes years or decades of abuse, of selling our essence, and that’s alright. Redemption is one of the greatest gifts of the human project, and one never arrives at it too late.
Anora has butterflies painted on her fingernails at the beginning of the film. She is called a “night butterfly” by Vanya’s father before flying back to Vegas. This same process of dialectical progression into Spirit was laid down a decade ago by another of our generation’s greatest artists, and I’m going to share it because it describes the same catharsis that Anora undergoes, and because I do not believe these references were accidental:
The caterpillar is a prisoner to the streets that conceived it
Its only job is to eat or consume everything around it
In order to protect itself from this mad city
While consuming its environment
The caterpillar begins to notice ways to survive
One thing it noticed is how much the world shuns him
But praises the butterfly
The butterfly represents the talent, the thoughtfulness and the beauty within the caterpillar
But having a harsh outlook on life, the caterpillar sees the butterfly as weak
And figures out a way to pimp it to his own benefits
Already surrounded by this mad city
The caterpillar goes to work on the cocoon
Which institutionalizes him
He can no longer see past his own thoughts, he's trapped
When trapped inside these walls certain ideas take root, such as
Going home, and bringing back new concepts to this mad city
The result?
Wings begin to emerge, breaking the cycle of feeling stagnant
Finally free, the butterfly sheds light on situations
That the caterpillar never considered
Ending the internal struggle
Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different
They are one and the same
As a purely personal story, I still believe it’s one of the greatest films so far this decade, but I’d like to explore more of the film’s cultural dialectics. Like many left-leaning people born in the 90’s, my early-mid 20’s consisted of a steady diet of “dirtbag left” podcasts, and as a man I gravitated towards Chapo Trap House and Cumtown, two fairly brilliant projects led by the genius (in their own arenas) of Matt Christman and Nick Mullen, along with a revolving cast of straight men and funny men (and women). These were broadly leftist projects meant to serve as a countercurrent to the “woke” attitude that arose both as an organic result of continued progress in civil rights for many marginalized groups in the early 2010s, and as a convenient strategy for the Democratic elite to suppress class critique in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. To answer a question posed by a recent video that I have not watched but whose title (“Was Nietzsche Woke?”) deserves an answer: to a 19th century European Christian, yes, Nietzsche was extremely woke. To the modern liberal who shouted down Adolph Reed for “class reductionism,” an epithet they never more than half-understood, Nietzsche is very much not woke. The mocking phrase “wokeness is a religion” was used as a shibboleth by the online left for years as a way to stifle the seed of a legitimate critique of wokeness: that it is a set of temporarily-useful received values which will eventually need to be transcended. Nietzsche knew that the mass of aimless nihilists that the death of God creates would require surrogate fathers, which wokeness served as for a lot of well-meaning liberals in the 2010s. They were called “wokescolds” for a reason, but more often than not by people who were looking to shield themselves in the fatherhood of an older set of regressive values, signaled by the desire to say no-longer-polite pejoratives like “retard” and “fag” (and maybe the n-word *teehee*, not in public of course, but you know, wink wink).
It is in this movement that we find another subject of inquiry for Anora, the redheaded stepchild of the “dirtbag left”, the Red Scare podcast. Red Scare was the brainchild of Anna Khachiyan (for the few mathematicians I have reading this, her father was Leonid Khachiyan, the mathematical programmer who proved the polynomial-time solvability of the ellipsoid algorithm in 1979, a genuine giant in the field and esteemed professor at Rutgers for years) and Dasha Nekrasova (probably most visible in her role as Kendall’s PR assistant Comfrey in HBO’s Succession). This was a leftish podcast that focused more on aesthetics and cultural commentary than material analysis, which got famous in part because of an interview Dasha did dressed in a sailor outfit with an Info Wars drone who she declared had “worms in her brain,” casually summing up their early Sanders-supporting ethos in the famous soundbite, “I just want people to have healthcare, honey.” Anora asks for healthcare without actually organizing as well, and is told it’s never going to happen.
It wasn’t long before they were taking photos at the shooting range with Alex Jones and thoroughly enmeshed in right-wing Twitter (colloquially known as “Frogtwitter”), representing the face of a population of vibes-based Bernie supporters who were left stranded when his movement was crushed by the establishment of both major parties. Anna cozied up to posters like Bronze Age Pervert (a right-wing philosopher who reads a version of Nietzsche encased in amber, taking the radical call for a future generation who will enact a “transvaluation of all values” to mean “let’s jive with the exact same values we had 2000 years ago,” and who I’ve never seen demonstrate more than a surface familiarity with Hegel) and Dasha began hanging around the edgy dilettantes of “Dimes Square,” finding shelter in the rules-based, liturgical revival of “traditional Catholicism” (where Hegel’s “cultus,” a community that comes together regularly to celebrate the sacrifice of Christ and the possibility to honor it and embody it in the world is nowhere to be found. In Dimes Square, it’s replaced by a group of young Carmela Sopranos who enjoy bumping ket — no hate, I do too — and will occasionally get into a Twitter argument about an obscure ecumenical council to signal their allegiance to… something. At the heights of power, this theology is being represented by JD Vance, whose misreading of Augustine’s concept of “ordo amoris” was so bad that it required Pope Francis to tell him he’s an idiot from his deathbed before he passes over).
But how relevant is any of this to Anora? Baker layers in just enough references to put anybody familiar with the podcast on an “if you know, you know” basis (most notably: the recurring role of friend of the pod Ivy Wolk, who went semi-viral for being upset that she was denied entry to the film’s premiere at Cannes, warranted given she’s an important presence both in screentime and cultural representation; an allusion to a girl named Dasha while they are searching for Vanya; the needle drop when Vanya enters the club wasted, “All the Things She Said” by Russian pop duo t.A.T.u., famously the podcast’s intro music), but what is he actually accomplishing by referencing them? Is he just saying, “hey, look at me, the 53 year old director who knows about Red Scare, that secret cool kids podcast, I’m hip”? Many think he’s doing something approximating this, calling the film “Red Scare”-coded and drawing comparisons to a director with a somewhat similar cinematographic style, Sam Levinson, who likes throwing similar easter eggs into his shows (and while I’ve enjoyed Euphoria, I don’t think he’s near the same level of an artist as Baker). But I believe Baker is saying something far more interesting than that.
In many ways, Anora’s arc mirrors the arc of the Red Scare podcast itself. These were very bright, charming, beautiful women with good-intentioned yet vibes-based lowercase-i ideals that aligned with the Sanders campaign who at some point were offered the lottery ticket into a higher class that would come with more opportunities for career advancement and greater earning potential (I have no interest in speculating as to who might have started bankrolling them and/or giving them greater industry connections when they began their shift to the right, as I find it’s generally the behavior of people without an argument, but suffice to say, the “we just realized the Democrats are kind of lame, honey” deflection is extraordinarily unconvincing, especially when the shift is as drastic as making fun of an Info Wars reporter while being ensconced in the cultural milieu of the “dirtbag left” to going and hanging with Alex Jones around the time of the Sandy Hook trial), and they took it. Should this be seen as some grand betrayal of their roots? Baker knows those roots. He’s from the nice suburbs of Central Jersey (Millburn and Branchburg specifically, Anna went to South Brunswick High School which is where I took my SATs — I grew up 15 minutes away in East Brunswick — there’s a little “Middlesex county mentioned!” moment towards the end of the film). He knows that most smart kids from around here who hover around that middle-upper middle class boundary end up moving to the city with a chip on their shoulder.
No, Baker is not throwing barbs or judging them at all. They took a bargain that almost all of us, especially when we’re young, could barely resist taking. This is why the armchair moralizing and stone-throwing doesn’t work, since nobody has any interest in hearing from the hypocrite who happens to be losing (this is the basis of what Nietzsche refers to as “slave morality” throughout his work; the literal social structure is incidental). Does Anora begin to violently react against those ostensibly in the same class as her because they’re threatening to bring her back to reality? Yes, but it’s a natural reaction, since nobody wants to be told that the lottery ticket they found is never going to cash. It’s just another variation on that same “art hoe/tech bro” dynamic I’ve already laid out. Matt Christman and Nick Mullen had capital-I Ideals, but the limp-dick Freudo-Marxism that leaves the door open to a Camille Paglia addiction that one receives as a liberal arts student especially near the Obama years just doesn’t give you the theoretical grounding to avoid being co-opted, and because you don’t have any organic class solidarity stuck in the superposition of “upperish-middle class, two-story in suburbia”/“successful in the city” (while running from failure in the city), just forget about it. The bridge of “All the Things She Said” reads: “Mother looking at me / Tell me what do you see? / Yes, I've lost my mind / Daddy looking at me / Will I ever be free? / Have I crossed the line?”
Is this an isolated case of bubbly, good vibes idealists co-opted by the forces of capital? Of course not. How many caring, beautiful women and potential mothers do you know who have become melded to the algorithm in some form or another? The race to the bottom with beauty filters, the way class status has to be carefully constructed via Instagram (don’t have the marble top kitchen island? Might as well kill yourself), the emptiness of the dating app meetups where there was never a chance at mutual recognition (of course life-long couples can meet on the apps, but the reason they are such a poor simulacrum of in-person approaches is because one can never peer into another’s soul through a few curated photos and a couple of superficial prompts). As Kevin Durant famously stated when he discovered that some women remove their bottom ribs for a skinnier waist: “I'm gonna go outside and light myself on fire. What are we doing to our beautiful queens?” And how many men have had their inner warrior, whether physically or intellectually, drained of its essence in the accumulation of capital? How many brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have been sucked into Jane Street or Citadel? How many storytellers and theorists are withering away at Skadden or Davis Polk? How many elite plastic surgeons, people who can add fifty years of almost unimaginable quality of life improvement to a patient’s life, are shooting Botox into housewives in Boca? This happens to almost all of us in one way or another, and it’s tragic. Most of us are powerless to change it because that power would require acknowledging just how tragic it truly is. How many years have we spent dazed and passive, spinning in the hedonic hamster wheel, generating shareholder value for those who can never truly see us?
Anora offers no straightforward solutions or moral imperatives because there are none. Anybody carefully dissecting Baker’s politics is missing the forest for the trees. This fight requires fully embodied mutual recognition. There is nowhere for us to outrun the human condition. We must look deep enough inside ourselves to be able to forgive ourselves for all the ways we’ve let ourselves be deceived and exploited. We must look far enough outside ourselves to recognize that we can never truly divorce ourselves from the complex web of forces that drive our world. We must stop ignoring the voice in the back of our heads screaming, “This is not enough!” We must become true Idealists, capable of creating our own unique ripples in this ever-changing ocean of consciousness, capable of seeing into each other without judgment. We must remain in touch with the pure essence of both our inner Warrior and our inner Light. Our Igor and Anora. MLK said, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” If these seem like daunting tasks, it’s because they are. Who said the life of the knight was meant to be easy?
“Ernest Hemingway once wrote ‘the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for’. I agree with the second part.” - Detective Somerset, Seven