Urgent and timely

I loved Anora!

I watched Anora recently. I thought it was excellent. (There are about to be spoilers). 

The premise is that a young woman with Russian heritage named Anora who works as a dancer at a club meets a young Russian billionaire. He is goofy and fun and seems very young. She gives him her details to meet elsewhere for paid sex. They meet and hang out a few times. He scans as immature and clueless but basically harmless. They go to Vegas and have a big blowout party weekend with some of his friends. He asks her to marry him and she is reluctant. You can see she feels it is too good to be true, that this nice, sweet guy with endless money would sort of arrive out of nowhere and offer her an immediate solution to many people’s biggest problem: How to get enough money to live a good life. 

And more than just a solution. When you don’t have enough money you have to think about money all the time because it becomes this huge barrier to everything. Getting dental work done. Going to the hospital (the film is set in the US). If anything goes wrong, like if your laptop breaks or you lose your keys your first thought is: How much money is this going to cost? Will I have enough money to fix it? Will fixing it create other problems because there will not be enough money for something else? 

All your life you have to think about money all the time because of all the things it stops you from doing. And then this goofy son of a billionaire arrives and suddenly money is just a source of freedom and entertainment. Money becomes a spontaneous weekend in Vegas, a trip to whichever designer shop to impulse buy a coat that costs $10,000, any amount of drugs, any amount of champagne. One of the most negative things in your life becomes, overnight, just a great big source of fun. 

What would you worry about if you never had to think about money again? Obviously billionaires find lots of things to worry about. In Anora the billionaire’s son is plainly riddled with issues. He seems to be addicted to everything, from drugs to the playstation. And he has that terrible affliction where nothing seems like real life, everything is just a big game, a big joke. That mode where someone is so spoiled the only thing they can think to do is sort of play silly tricks and kick and punch at the big bouncy castle that is their overly cushioned life. But this is because he has lived this way forever. If money had been this big constant problem and then it wasn’t you wouldn’t just become “playstation for a brain” silly, or not overnight at least. 

She was right to be reluctant. The idea that she will marry this man and live happily ever after is too good to be true. The billionaire's son turns out to be amazingly cold and selfish. She is left humiliated and probably in a worse situation than when she met him. She has quit her job and he caused such a scene at her old employer that she will struggle to get it back. Maybe the worst thing is that he was not manipulative or scheming but just totally unthinking of the consequences of anything. He wasn’t trying to ruin her life, he didn’t even care enough to do that really. He just ruined it in passing.

But Anora stays uncomfortably close to Anora’s deluded perspective, and you do sort of hope and hope she is not really deluded at all. The end is so uncomfortably real. 

I thought it was the best dissection of wealth and power that I had seen in a long time. But I didn’t expect this when I went to see it. From the ads I thought it was a love story. And I was glad about that because I would not have watched Anora if it was marketed as skewering capitalism or privilege or likewise. This is because so much stuff is marketed as doing this at the minute and it is basically all terrible, totally cynical and pandering rubbish which offers audiences easy, morally obvious and vapid stories with over engineered heroes and villains. Stories where the moral is always: You are a good person for having read this or watched it and you can tell your friends that too. Bad people wouldn’t watch or read this because they would find the message too challenging even though the message is not challenging at all. The message is the exact thing you were expecting when you sat down to read or watch this. 

You see a novel marketed as “a whip smart skewering of bankers and privilege” or something and you know it is going to be the worst and most obvious and least morally challenging thing you have ever read in your life. And that the whole point of it is you will read it and feel like a good person for reading about the bad banker and you might be seen reading it on the tube and a stranger would be like “oh look at her, she’s a really good person because she’s reading that book about how the bankers are bad”. It’s just such rubbish. I find it disgusting if I’m honest. It treats audiences with an enormous degree of contempt. But then the audiences who like this stuff also see other people with an enormous amount of contempt, to my mind. Why else would you need books or films with that message? About you being better than other people for watching something? Because that is what they tell you. That is the appeal. 

I was drunk in a taxi the other week complaining about this stuff, how contemptuous it is of people. I said it was fascist. I don’t really ever say that about things. I believe if you overuse words they don’t mean anything. (In fact the marketing of a lot of this stuff overuses the word fascist to make its banal message feel urgent and glamorous.) But this kind of thing, this “press button get response” stuff works the exact same way that fascist propaganda does. You give people an easy story about good and evil that makes the world feel easy to understand and makes them feel like a good person in the process and then everyone goes home happy. 

The last time Trump won every cultural sector went into overdrive producing this stuff. Every book and film had to be a brave act of resistance. Everything had to be skewering the same few easy targets. It was all so “urgent” and “timely”. The underlying message was a bad group of people and a good group of people and a culture that was valiantly, bravely catering to the good group of people. It was so condescending and fake. I hated it. And if I hated it I can only imagine what a hardcore Trump voter thought about it all. And where did it get us? Back to the exact same place. I expect the response this time will be the exact same. 

Till next time xxxx