By and large, the sex worker as a character has been consigned to the periphery on screen: hustling on the streets in fishnet stockings and mini skirts; seated on the lap of a gangster like an ornament; dead in a trunk or a back alley and autopsied in the morgue. Their nameless bodies are a dumping ground for misplaced anger and contempt.
Their deaths are the inciting event for whodunit mysteries and redemptive journeys. Their lives, their dreams, their hopes are invisible and invariably beside the point. Sex work has historically been pathologised in cinema as it has been in society at large. Too often, it is conflated with trafficking and exploitation. Anora presents a corrective to movies like Pretty Woman by exposing the Hollywood fantasy to be far removed from the socio-economic realities.
A spur-of-the-moment Las Vegas trip ends with him putting a ring on her finger. The fairy-tale dream is dangled like a carrot, only to be snatched away. By the realities of transactional relationships and the barriers to upward mobility.
Baker has spent his career cataloguing the material realities of people scraping by on the fringes. He has trained his lens on a gallery of dreamers and schemers, each as true to life as larger than life. Starlet was a disarming Harold and Maude -esque story about a young porn star befriending an elderly widow. Tangerine was a buddy comedy about the misadventures of two trans sex workers in Los Angeles.
The Red Rocket was a raucous portrait of a washed-up porn star, a man as charismatic as predatory who leaves behind a trail of destruction wherever he goes. While Manhattan strip clubs may appear worlds apart from neglected Texas suburbs and seedy Florida motels, the corners are yoked by the resilience of all of its working-class strivers.
