"Anora," Sean Baker's alleged fairy tale, exploits the chasm between virality and vulnerability. Baker, like a latter-day Warhol, parades a candied spectacle of sex work. But where Warhol understood the emptiness of image, Baker wallows in the "authentic," filming a "Cinderella story for girls on SSRIs." This clumsy juxtaposition turns Anora into a fetishized object, not a human being, and the director into another clueless male voyeur.

Baker mistakes proximity for insight. He marvels at the humanity Igor supposedly reveals in Anora, confusing base recognition with profound understanding. The film mistakes degradation with self actualization when it reduces a woman's entire existence to being someone's muse. It renders Anora's interior life nonexistent. Her "desires" and "emotions" amount to crude punchlines for the terminally online.