Anora

Americanilienalyzation: America, Alienation, Analysis, Lacan, and Castration in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024)

by Owen Bromley

submitted for ENGL 426 with David Sigler

The film Anora (2024) follows Ani (legal name Anora), a Brooklyn sex worker who works in a strip club, where, because of her Russian descent, she is introduced to Ivan (also called Vanya) the son of Russian Oligarch Nikolai Zakharov. After several meetings Ivan pays Ani to be “exclusive with him” for a week where they fly to Vegas with Ivan’s friends and party excessively (Anora 27:30). At the end of this week the two decide to get married in Vegas. Upon hearing rumors of Ivan marrying a sex worker, Ivan’s parents send Toros along with Garnik and Igor to annul the wedding. The latter two men enter the Zakharov house in Brooklyn, sending Ivan fleeing as they deliver the news that his parents are on their way, they then restrain Ani as they wait for Toros. Toros arrives and after much disagreement they all set out together looking for Ivan; Toros so that they can annul their marriage, Ani so that they can stay together. After searching all night they finally find Ivan drunk at the same stripclub where he met Ani. They learn they have to go back to Vegas if they want to annul the marriage. Ivan cowers in front of his mother without the slightest protest of his love for Ani. Ani then consents to annul the marriage. In this paper I will examine Ani’s continual attempts to try and repress her subjectivity, and examine the mechanisms which propagate these fantasies and why they each fail, ultimately proving that despite the apparent juxtaposition between Ivan and Igor, the two reside in the same system of desire and represent the same attempt to abolish signification.

Ani, by way of her two names, evokes the condition of the split subject. The split between Ani and Anora, American and Russian, Being and existing (also realized as Being and meaning). It is the split which separates us from the reservoir of jouissance and forces us to live by the signifier; essentially, castration. When Igor asks her what the name Ani means she replies “in America we don’t care about that kind of shit. We don’t give meaning to names” (2:00:00). This statement is highly ironic as she had just ridiculed Igor’s name after he said that it means warrior, telling him that Igor means hunchback, disproving herself. Nevertheless, it presents the fictitious belief that America is a land independent of signification. A place of raw unbridled Being. According to this fiction, everything becomes a matter of surplus-enjoyment; nothing has to be done and the doing accomplishes nothing, it is done, rather, in service to excess. It is what Zizek describes as “liberal hedonism;” that which “elevates into its Cause the extra-symbolic Real of jouissance (which compels it to adopt a cynical attitude of reducing language, the symbolic medium, to a mere secondary irrelevant semblant, instrument of manipulation or seduction, the only ‘real thing’ being jouissance itself)” (“Bartleby” 386). In this fiction, there is nothing to signify, and the only thing that is real is surplus enjoyment.

Integral to this surplus-enjoyment, is that there are no consequences, all manifestations of lack must be eliminated. This must be done through the myth of the phallus and sexual coupling. During a montage we see Ani and Ivan partying endlessly with no repercussions in Las Vegas. Drugs are taken without any kind of hangover (Anora 30:00). And the two gamble without any loss. When Ivan instructs Ani to tell the dealer “we are going all in,” and they lose, the montage continues in the exact same revelry (29:50). The only thing that is actually being paid for, in the sense that there is a negotiation, is the sex itself, which happens in a lump sum before this nonstop party begins. At a glance, it seems payment for sex undermines the phallus —the fictitious organ that allows absolute un-signified enjoyment without limits. Are you really taking whatever you want if you’re paying for it? But, it is precisely the function of capitalism to accommodate itself through its semblance to the real: “its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the ‘real’ of the global market mechanism” (Zizek, “Bartleby” 388). The act of payment, assures the possession of the phallus while obliterating the question of its context, or what makes it so —just as a commodity becomes separated from its labour. The phallus appears as an object without its place, truth-without-meaning. And having hidden his lack through possessing the phallus, the myth of Aristiphonic coupling, or, the myth of the sexual relation, can take place. The two appear to complete each other and become whole, signaling everything as surplus.

This becoming whole is the last thing needed to sustain a full belief of a life of pure being. For Ivan the coupling seals the loop opened up through paying Ani. By replacing his mother —who assumes the dominant phallic parental authority— with Ani, he has hidden the parental origin of his money and thus escaped the symbolic order that limits pleasure. This is done visually by replacing Ivan's family photos with photos of Ani, as well as Garnik and Toros, the parental proxies, leaving, fittingly, in the middle of Ani and Ivan having sex (Anora 26:00). And can also be seen quite plainly as Ivan declares “it’s the champagne glass of my fucking mother, and now it will be your champaign glass” (28:30). The money now appears fully as his, guaranteeing the appearance of the phallus devoid from signification, and allowing for the proper indulgence of surplus-enjoyment through lack of meaning. Ani too avoids signification through this coupling. She no longer means anything as a sex worker, and more importantly she no longer means anything as Ani. She is fully within what Lacan calls the “animalistic” fantasy, propagated by sexual coupling; the space where “language does not exist” (“The Vanished Partner” 82). There is no separation between her name and herself; she just is.

Of course this fantasy doesn’t last. The symbolic order, that which is “beyond the pleasure principle,” is threatened to return with the impending arrival of Ivan’s parents (Zizek, “You Only Die Twice” 146). Ivan realizes this as the end of his ability to possess the phallus, to be permitted to everything, but Ani remains ignorant. She is still under the impression that everything is still theirs. Despite numerous explanations from Garnik that the house and the money do not belong to Ivan, and the fact that Garnik and Igor were allowed on the property by the security guard and entered the house with a key, Ani repeatedly asks if she should call the police as the two men enter the house against Ivan’s wishes (Anora 44:00). Her belief in institutional regulation in the forms of matrimony, the police force, and the courts, is precisely why she does not see the impending return of the symbolic order. What has permitted her excess this whole time, and the force behind these institutions has been God. Indeed, despite the absolute lack of religious imagery surrounding her, Ani, and the Americanism she represents as Ani (as opposed to Anora), has a foundational belief in the existence of God. God permits every act in the present, for in the end, all will be judged and justice will be issued, washing away all sin[gnification]. This too explains Ani’s repeated confusion at being called a prostitute, or even an exotic dancer by Ivan; it is not a matter of being offended, she is, rather, confused at being thought of in this signifying way. What need is there to symbolize as such under God and through liberal hedonism? The Zakharov family instead has only a performative belief in God, demonstrated in the comic scene where Toros leaves a baptism he plays a very important role in to go and deal with Ivan’s new marriage (40:00). As Freud says “In reality these are only attempts at pretending to oneself or to other people that one is still firmly attached to religion, when one has long since cut oneself loose from it” (32). Zizek expands on this point, elaborating that the performance of religion is actually to attain some “minimal distance from it” (“Bartleby” 379). When God is gone, the chains of signification we must live by are all the more restricted.

We must fill in the absence of divine justice through the symbolic order; where it is expected that Ivan must appease his parents and the big Other alike through these notions of familial respect. But Ani, unaware of her belief in God and ignorant of its conflict with Ivan’s family, does try to align with the Zakharov symbolic order. When Galina finally does appear, every character apart from Igor pays homage to her and elevates her to the position of master as they tell her how happy they are to be able to spend time with the family, despite their own unpleasant positions (Anora 1:51:00). And while Ani still affirms her belief that her and Ivan “are two consenting adults,” “in love,” and his parents will have to respect that —again, the belief that God permits their coupling— she for the first time introduces herself as Anora (55:00, 1:49:00). This action unknowingly undermines her faith, the only thing that would allow her to maintain precedence for her union with Ivan. Galina, seizing this lack, immediately rejects her for being a low class sex worker, and insults her Russian. Just like that, Ani has been stripped of the opportunity to assume the signifier as Anora. But it isn’t until she speaks with Ivan and realizes his impotence that she can no longer be Ani devoid of signification.

On his bender, Ivan tried to maintain his state of being through the unacknowledgement of Ani as signifier. He drinks to the point of incoherence in an attempt to disavow signification, which solves nothing as he undermines the coupling in the first place by going to another stripper. The practice of being and not seeing works both so he cannot see Ani as a sex worker, but also where he cannot see her as his wife. Further, during his bender, Ivan wears dark sunglasses to distract from that fact that he can see, and the only way to see is through the signifier; he wants to not see and simply be. But when he is finally caught and in the plane with his mother, sober and stripped of his sunglasses, he completely capitulates to the symbolic order and argues that Galina should not be berating him so much, that all he did was spend a week with a “hooker,” “why make such a tragedy of it?” (1:55:00). When Ani asks him why he lets parents tell him what to do, when she tells him to act like a man and all he can muster is “what do you want me to say? Now we must go on the plane,” she realizes that he is without the phallus, and, as such, they are without the phallus, undermining the animalistic fantasy that destroys signification (1:53:00). The illusion of coupling is gone because she is realized as a sex worker. Further her earlier acceptance of the name Anora makes it so she can no longer return to her previous faith in God and its institutions. When she threatens Galina not to annul the marriage but instead to divorce Ivan, and thus inherit much of his wealth, Galina briskly destroys this idea, telling her how much it will cost and further that she has no chance at winning against all the Zakharov family. Ani’s agreement proves she has abandoned God’s divine justice and its ability to destroy signification.

To be, Ani has but one hope left: raw sexual relations without the obfuscation of the market, realized in Igor who could never see Ani as a sexworker. After the marriage is annulled Ani is flown back to Brooklyn with Igor to accompany her as she packs up her things and moves out. When Igor is dropping Ani off at her home he gives her her diamond ring back, the symbol of coupling and wealth that he had taken off her as per Toros’ instructions. The two talk sparingly; then she climbs on top of him and starts to have sex with him. He goes to kiss her, she resists, he kisses her, she slaps him and starts sobbing, he cradles her head, cut to black. Throughout the film Igor has made efforts to deny the assumption of the phallus, that he is the at-least-one-man, the top left of Lacan’s graph of sexuation (“The Vanished Partner” 81). His denial to assume the phallus explains why he could not treat Ani as a sex worker. He could never take what he wants without the Other’s permission, and though the monetary exchange that occurs in sex work conceals the assumption of the phallus, there is still certainly an acknowledgement of its presence which is unacceptable to Igor. His denial of the act of assumption gets pushed to the extreme during the sequence where Ivan runs away and Igor has to keep Ani in the house. Igor resorts to physically restraining Ani and holding her in ways that visually double earlier instances of Ivan and Ani having sex. Yet Igor denies that this was assault and says that she was not in any real danger (Anora 2:04:00). The strange conclusion is that we see the phallus assumed while phallic pleasure is disavowed. We have reached the opposite side of the very same excess Ivan was engaged in. Igor’s enjoyment is also entirely surplus, in the sense that, he can enjoy because what he is enjoying is absence. He has constructed the frame of the phallus, but the object appears absent; “nothing but the place takes place” (Zizek, “Coke as Objet Petit a” 30). Through the disavowal of pleasure, “the subject [Igor] is correlative to the object [the phallus], but in a negative way - subject and object can never ‘meet’; they are in the same place, but on opposite sides of the Moebius strip” (28).

Igor’s attempt to disavow phallic pleasure falls flat when he starts to have sex with Ani. The phallus is always not lacking during the sexual relationship because from the moment the relation becomes at issue the Other, that which here confirms there is no one man, is absent (Lacan, “The Vanished Partner” 89). This disappearance is realized in Ani as alienation; as Lacan says, “the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death” (“The Subject and the Other” 205). Ani has exhausted all efforts to be without the split; more than just her disappearance, Ani now experiences fundamental alienation (Lacan, “In You More Than You” 264).

As despairing as fundamental alienation is, what ultimately causes Ani’s breakdown, and the tragedy of the film, is the realization that Ivan and Igor are two sides of the same coin, or rather, two sides of the same Moebius strip. The two men represent the same desire, only they obscure them differently. Ivan —who presupposes the phallus through capital— has throughout the film tried his best to maintain the illusion through his own self destruction; whereas Igor has displaced his desire onto Ani. He wants the same thing, to form the fiction of Aristophanic coupling, which presupposes his phallicness and hides his lack, by having Ani conform to his desires, but only on the condition that she wants to. Not only is she tasked with completing Igor, but now she must also want to do it. This is far from suggesting that Ani, or anyone else, cannot take pleasure in this type of sexual relationship. Instead it seeks to legitimize the occupation of sexwork by highlighting how it functions to obfuscate the same desire as Igor, the apparent “noble” character, works to avoid. The return of the diamond visually demonstrates this, it appears as a noble kind hearted gesture, but is it not also Igor literally paying Ani for sex (Anora 2:09:00)? Ultimately, this Igor-Ivan Moebius strip shows that it is not different desire that causes the various pains and, what we now call, the “problematic” encounters in the film, but the different attempts to conceal the exact same desire.

As the film ends Ani cannot be happy with Igor, nor can she return to any of her other attempts at pure being. The return of the symbolic order, that had been temporarily suspended by liberal hedonism, stopped the endless stream of surplus-enjoyment; the phallus returned to destroy the possibility of being as the Other in the sexual relationship; she was unable to become a part of Galina’s symbolic structure through her faith in God; and when she abandoned that Galina had the power to cast her aside because of a supposed low status. All of these examples fail because they attempt to reconcile desire in the same way —through the discourse of the master where the split subject is repressed (Lacan, “Four Discourses” 21-4)— and each newfound attempt at resolving castration has just been moving from one master to another. What we stand to learn from Ani’s final tragedy, is that we must not try to resolve castration, or look to fulfill desire by finding a new master, but, instead, alter our very conceptions of desire. As Zizek writes, “the only way to resolve the tension, is to directly identify with the symptom, to become one’s own symptom” (“The Minimal Event” 312). What would it look like if Ani, instead of repressing her split subjectivity, assumed the partial subject, perhaps in the form of identifying most as a sex worker?

Works Cited

Anora. Directed by Sean Baker, Neon, 2024.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Edited by Salman Akhtar, 1st ed., Routledge, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429477904.
Lacan, Jacques. “In You More than You.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by, Alan Sheridan, First edition, Taylor and Francis, 2018, pp. 263-76.
---. “Production of the Four Discourses” The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, Norton paperback edition, WW Norton & Company, 2007, pp. 11–26.
---. “The Subject and the Other: Alienation.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by, Alan Sheridan, First edition, Taylor and Francis, 2018, pp. 203-15.
---. “The Vanished Partner.” …Or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price, English edition, Polity P., 2018, pp. 78–94.
ŽZizek, Slavoj. “Coke as Objet Petit a.” The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, Verso, 2000, pp. 21-40.
---. “Notes Towards a Politics of Bartleby: The Ignorance of Chicken.” Comparative American Studies An International Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, 2006, pp. 375–394,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477570006071756
---. “The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Shakespeare and Beckett.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek, edited by Russell
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Sbriglia, Duke University P., 2017, pp. 290- 315, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sn1bn.15. ---. ‘“You Only Die Twice.” The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 2008, pp. 145–67.