That Oldest Profession

Sometimes, you just can't win. The Academy was getting so much shit for anointing Emilia Perez that they turned around and made Anora the big winner at the Oscars. Now people are complaining about how suspicious it is that the Oscars have so very often honoured actresses who played sex workers, even just last year with Emma Stone in Pretty Things.

I know I've written about this on my blog before. I wish I could find one of the entries so I could quote myself, then I'd look really prophetic. Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to repeat myself. The reason there are so many great prostitute roles is twofold; you usually have a beautiful young woman who's either doing a lot of nudity or, at the very least, a lot sexually provocative things, and you have the built-in existential problem. Is prostitution the ultimate liberation or the ultimate enslavement? Pretty Things went all in on the former, movies like Mizoguchi's Street of Shame or Sezuki's Gate of Flesh go for the latter. Then there are movies that tread the line of ambiguity like Vivre sa Vie or Belle de jour. It's a question that can never truly be settled, though, so it always has a lot of drama to unpack. It's always perfect fodder for a story. The fact that sex and beauty are integral to the topic sells it to the groundlings.

It's a preoccupation that predates cinema, to be sure. There's 1633's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, there's Moll Flanders. It's an issue that traverses the political spectrum as one political side or the other insists on treating women as eternally fragile beings who must be sheltered from moral dilemmas or insists that women are wanton hell-beasts best suited for secret or public exploitation. The enigma of human consciousness can be even more inscrutable when it's coming from someone else (which would be women, given the traditional narrators are men).

That dramatic, existential ambiguity is an essential part of Anora in which the story revolves around the value of the title character's marriage to a young Russian man. Even when the movie's not about that, it's about that. Pretty Things made the mistake of treating the issue like it was a complete illusion, like prostitution is clearly no different from any other job. If that were true, this problem would have been settled a long time ago.