currently reading Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. on a bit of a noir kick, having watched Laura, Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, and No Country for Old Men all in the last month. noirs reveal to me just how shaky my grasp of plot is. I’m great at being carried along by a movie or a book, immensely enjoying it as it unfolds, but then retaining almost none of the details of the story. The Big Heat is about…a police officer gets killed…and there’s a bigwig politician…Glenn Ford’s wife is murdered by a car bomb…uhhh….Laura, obviously, Laura dies, but then she’s not dead, because…her effete journalist patron…kills the wrong girl……Double Indemnity, insurance fraud, of course, like the title suggests, Barbara Stanwyck tricks Fred MacMurray into killing her husband, but then…MacMurray’s boss doesn’t want the insurance company to pay out…so….and, and, No Country for Old Men, I’ve seen it innumerable times, could practically recite the opening monologue…but…Anton Chigurh works for…uh…and Woody Harrelson, he’s hired by…someone…who also is working with the Mexicans…to track down the money Josh Brolin finds…..
it’s worse for things I read, and Red Harvest is especially convoluted. all the characters are lying to each other, the “mystery” that incites the action is apparently resolved a third of the way in, and I’m now at the part where there’s a boxing match that’s fixed, but…one of the boxers is actually a different guy…from…Philadelphia? anyway, sorry if I’m spoiling any of these classics for you. the point is, well, the points are: 1) I think it might be beneficial to read/watch something almost immediately after finishing it for the first time; I’m thinking I’ll flip back to page one of Red Harvest as soon as I reach the end. 2) maybe “plot” isn’t exactly my thing; maybe I ought to care less about ensuring something coherently flows from beginning-middle-end, inciting incident-rising action-climax-denoument, at least not in terms of “events,” but work more through vignettes that ebb and flow, building towards moment(s) of clarity, like a Fellini film (I’ve watched three Fellini films, Nights of Cabiria, Amarcord, La dolce vita—none of which have much in terms of traditional “plot”—in the last week). and 3) I should pay closer attention to the things I read and watch—I’m notoriously bad about “reading” something while thinking of something entirely different for a page or two, somehow dissociating from an activity that is itself a little dissociative. that’s a bad habit; I envy people who can bring to mind specific scenes and sequences from books they’ve read once; I can’t even do that with books I’ve read multiple times.
I have a bad habit of browsing letterboxd reviews. as I’ve decreased my social media presence (as of this past weekend I disabled my instagram account), the time I might have spent idly scrolling has been redirected into an increased attention to the social media site about movies. this wasn’t even what I wanted to write about but I realized it was both funnier to say that browsing letterboxd at all is a waste of time, and also that it’s true that despite being pretty successful at training my attention away from most distraction machines, I still have been wasting time clicking through this one last site. something to note for myself, is all.
anyway, I have a bad habit of browsing negative letterboxd reviews for movies I enjoy. it strokes the same sensitive spot in my mind that secretly enjoyed being angry about the myriad stupid opinions and shitty “jokes” people share on twitter. it’s really not even worth engaging with most of these reviews: I can convince myself that it’s worthwhile to temper my enthusiasm against valid criticisms of movies I think highly of, and surely this is good to do. however, most negative reviews on letterboxd are like “this sucks” “what a waste of time” “snoozefest”—reactions that are perfectly within the audience’s right to have, but they don’t teach you anything beyond demonstrating that there are, in fact, different strokes for different folxx.
I saw Anora last night. enjoyable movie, excellent entertainment. it’s the kind of movie that should just be the standard for quality adult viewing. it doesn’t condescend to the audience, it’s shot well without being overly slick or pureed, and it’s not an adaptation of a preexisting intellectual property initially intended for children. does it deserve all the hype it’s gotten? should it have won the palm d’or? no probably not, but until they invite me to judge at cannes that’s not for me to decide. that’s not a criticism of the film, though. an indictment of the sorry state of the cinema, yes, but Anora is a perfectly “good” movie, which there are too few of nowadays.
because I enjoyed it and because it’s a buzzy movie, that means I had to see what kinds of negative things people were saying about it, and I guess try to respond to some of them. several low-star reviews feature some variation on “omg how could anyone find HUMOR in a SEX WORKER being subjected to VIOLENCE?” the long home invasion sequence in question, obviously farcical, wrings most of its humor out of how hard the hired goons try to not be violent with Ani. the men are the ones who actually suffer injuries in this scene! injuries caused by Ani!
“obviously written by a man.” and that’s a priori bad? what do you mean when you say that? there are definitely scenes that are voyeuristic, where women’s bodies are sexualized. this has never been a convincing line of criticism to me, in part because I’m a man who likes to watch nude women be sexual. but 1) you’re watching a movie, ie you are being a voyeur, and 2) it’s a movie about a stripper, do you not expect there to be some objectification involved, objectification that we all participate in, male female or somewhere in between? I could go on and on about how poorly understood the concept of the “male gaze” is in contemporary discourse, but even granting that yes there are some scenes in Anora that exist primarily to titillate, they aren’t exactly gratuitous, nor are they the primary focus of the movie. and if you mean the man Sean Baker botches the opportunity to write realistically about the life of a woman sex worker, then I would say I didn’t buy a ticket for a documentary, I bought a ticket for a convincing entertainment and feel satisfied with how the titular character was written in the context of that entertainment. which brings me to:
“Anora” may be named after its main character but Baker spends barely any time developing her. Who is Anora? What does she want? What motivates her? What does she fear? You imply she is smart but then give me a solid hour of her acting dumb.
this is the most thorough example of the other “criticism” that some people are leveling at the movie: that Ani doesn’t have “agency,” that she lacks “interiority.” but the way this poster poses these questions points at exactly what I thought were evidence of her “agency” and her “interiority,” namely that she’s a complicated, imperfect person, driven by contradictory desires. she’s fiercely independent, and believes herself to be wised up, but the whirlwind of meeting Vanya brings out the hurt, neediness and romanticism she works overtime to suppress. she’s “smart” enough, but totally unprepared for the forces of class and power she’s stumbled into, so she “acts dumb” in an effort to maintain the illusion of having escaped her poverty. (as an aside, I also don’t think Ani is particularly smart, nor that she needs to be to be a good character. just like with men, some women aren’t very smart!) plus, to ask “Who is Anora? What does she want? What motivates her? What does she fear?” after watching the movie suggests to me that either you weren’t paying attention, or that you yourself feel a peculiar lack of agency and interiority. because this movie doesn’t condescend and trusts the audience to pick up on subtext, some people end up projecting their own impotence all over what I thought was a really well developed character.
a random bonus potshot:
I also didn’t like her casual use of the f slur that was super unnecessary, especially being used as an insult against a guy who isn’t a rapist.
sorry, are you saying it would be preferable if Ani called someone a “f****t” so long as the guy is a rapist?
it makes perfect sense to me that a certain section of very online people with Perfect Politics would take issue with Anora, even though there’s almost nothing particularly offensive about the movie aside from several f-bombs being hurled. but, I hate to break it to you, woke mob: regular people, especially lower class people you so valiantly wish to champion, are often stupid, they say offensive things, and they don’t behave with the decorum you expect everyone, even people without fancy graduate degrees, to carry themselves with. and more often than not, it doesn’t matter how much “agency” they exercise when pitted against the richest and most powerful members of the international elite.
does Anora ultimately have much to say about class or sex work or being Russian? no not really, and that’s fine! again, it’s just a solid flick. a Howard Hawks style screwball not really deserving of the kind of defense I’m mounting here. but I’m very very tired of the scandalized, self-righteous stance some people take when criticizing movies (or any art) that treat their audience like adults. it’s evidence of a neo-puritanical anti-intellectualism that makes me despair at the state of American culture. you don’t have to like the same movies as me, but if you don’t dress your distaste in smug sanctimony, then I won’t have to call you a pissy adult baby.
