Beyond the Pleasure Principles of Work: Anora and the Trauma of Class-Awakening
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2280-9481/23773Keywords:
Sex work, Screwball comedy, Affective labour and economy, Cinema and Neoliberalism, Becoming classAbstract
Sean Baker’s filmography is famously focused on the expanding role of sex-work in the current social landscape. His recent financial and critical success with Anora (Id., Baker 2024) operates as a consolidation of this authorial path and project, which, clearly, not only aims to “reveal” the pervasiveness of different forms of sexualised labour, but also its capacity to capture and visualise anxieties and concerns of our age. This essay will attempt to unpack the reasons for this particular fascination and to examine what the dynamics of sex-work underscore about the transformation of labour in a more general sense. In doing so, the paper will try to think about Baker’s production as a reassessed form of screwball comedy by taking into account the political and historical significance of this specific sub-genre of romantic comedy. At the same time, Anora will be employed as a central case study to analyse and comment upon a primordial sense of class-consciousness rising from the narrative and, more specifically, from the string of “bad luck” affecting its main character.References
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