The Subtle Condemnation of the Deplorable

'Anora,' 'Husbands,' and moral depiction in film

[This article contains spoilers for Anora and Husbands]

Mikey Madison in Anora (2024), courtesy of The New York Times.

I haven’t seen Anora (2024, dir. Sean Baker).

This year’s Best Picture winner and the Academy’s favorite film follows a “young sex worker who meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch,” according to the film’s synopsis. Despite knowing that the film would naturally involve gratuitous sexual content, and appraising the climate of growing appreciation and support for sex workers in society, I was unsure how the film depicted its once-taboo topic.¹

That changed when I watched the Oscars back in March.

Flustered, overwhelmed by the critical acclaim and widespread applause for Anora, Mikey Madison (who plays the titular character, “Ani”) walked on stage to accept the award for Best Actress. “I want to recognize and honor the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally.”²

Ironically, Anora’s story cuts to the heart of what it means to be human—to have value and dignity. While not operating from a robust understanding of the Imago Dei, that’s precisely what Ani’s arc is about. Anora’s story and message are about human value, love, marriage, and class and power dynamics in society. For Providence, Smith writes:

That even a woman like Ani is born for something more than this could not be clearer. It’s not about judgment, it’s about her value, something denied to her by nearly everyone, but never forgotten by her […] Anora is a pathetic, funny, and sad tale, but ultimately one that captivates its audience not with the debauchery of a strip-club nor the holier-than-thou abuses of privileged bullies, but with the genuine connection that draws humans to each other, and to God.³

Due to this review, and others⁴, I cannot simply write the film off as reveling in its sexual content, as so many over-sexualized films do; yet, Smith notes that Baker’s depiction of sex work in the film is neither cautionary nor approving; it’s “simply an honest portrayal of this kind of life.”⁵ The tension—and, I believe, moral contradiction—comes when considering his and Madison’s comments about this industry beyond the film.

This is another film that hinges upon some sort of desire for wrongs to be made right, for people to be treated with dignity, and for fidelity to be championed in relationships—even while promoting the industry which only ever perpetuates the abuses it condemns. Baker depicts Ani’s world as it is, and unwittingly pronounces that all of creation groans under the bondage of sin’s curse (Rom. 8:20–22).

There’s condemnation of injustice in Anora, but not in the places you’d expect it to be. Systems of oppression, objectification, and power are despised while the sex-work community is portrayed objectively on-screen (one of the common points praised by critics) and lauded by the film’s cast and crew.

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John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk in Husbands (1970), courtesy of Criterion.

I didn’t enjoy myself for most of my viewing of Husbands, John Cassavetes’s 1970 comedy about three men who forsake their family lives in the wake of a close friend’s death.⁶

Despite having stable careers and families—living the American dream—Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter Falk), and Gus (John Cassavetes) seem to be undone by grief. As their foundations crack, they neglect their own responsibilities so they can navigate life, death, and freedom. The result is a catastrophic spiral in which the husbands attempt to rekindle their youthful freedom and do things from which they feel barred in their current lives. They start by rough-housing on the subways and streets of New York City, playing basketball, and swimming in a closed pool—which are not self-destructive acts, but are indicative of their descent into immaturity.

Then they spontaneously fly to London with the loosely mapped-out goals of gambling, drinking, and cheating on their wives. Each step of their continued abandonment of livelihood in pursuit of fleeting moments displays the anguish they’re avoiding in a more heartbreaking light. (A few times, they lash out in fits of rage, their sanity hanging by threads.)

There are only a few moments throughout Husbands which show that this isn’t merely Cassavetes directing a personal daydream of abandoning his family and ruining his life in the span of a few days, and they subtly disrupt the film’s near-constant capture of smiles, laughter, booze, dance, song, and play. At the outset of the film, Archie tells Gus: “The truth will never kill you. Lies will. Not cigarettes, not alcohol. Lies, Gus. Lies and tensions. That’ll kill you.” The rest of the story unravels the tragic art of lying to oneself. Life drowned in dreaming, distractions, and vices proves to be worse than vanity—it’s self-destructive.

Here, Dostoyevsky comes to mind:

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.⁷

Much later in the film, after the husbands have attempted to sate that bottomless hunger for vice that inevitably rumbles at the onset of grief, Archie tells Gus, “We gotta go home.” It’s a miniscule moment in a torrent of distractions, but the emotion welling deep in Archie’s eyes—truth rising to the surface and separating from self-deception like oil from water—hints that the husbands have neglected what they’ve known all along. Everything they left behind is all they have left, and all they ever needed. They’ve abandoned and ruined it, and can’t run from their self-destruction forever.

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If I haven’t yet made it abundantly clear, here’s my point: Despite Cassavetes’s somewhat tamer approach to the depiction of fidelity, power, and even sex work, both Anora and Husbands condemn the immorality of their subjects with subtle, but stark clarity.

In an essay accompanying the Husbands 4k edition by the Criterion Collection, Andrew Bujalski attempted to make sense of it all:

Husbands, I think, is about commitments—how they define us even as we wriggle to loosen their confines. Ultimately, I suspect it is a long, rambling, soul-baring (and occasionally incoherent, as handwriting might struggle to keep up with an elevated heart rate) love letter [...] It says: “Look how lost I would be without you.”⁸

Husbands appears in the middle of Cassavetes’s filmography; he plunges deeper into surrealism, into forcing discomfort and relentlessness upon viewers while also displaying personal growth and reflection on his life and faults. Perhaps the same is true of Anora for Sean Baker. He’ll likely go on to direct several other films, but here, at the height of his career, he may be his most ponderous and disruptive.

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Why, now, have I dropped a considerable number of words on these films? One that I will not watch; the other, I know I will reluctantly return to—as if tugged back to it against my will—and by which I will be simultaneously awed and disturbed.

Because, even as these films are separated by more than fifty years of moral, sexual, social, and religious changes in our culture, they offer strikingly similar approaches to their subjects. They also serve as an enduring reminder of what cinema should do to us once in a while. Cinema should jolt us back to life. It should shock us out of our indifference, our desire for saccharine films that “celebrate unbridled hedonism and go down as smooth as light beer.”⁹

Life isn’t always as sugary as a happy-ending romance or as triumphant as a save-the-day comic book film. Sometimes the conflict runs deep; often, we’re to blame. The hardest (and, I fear, the most neglected) aspect of this is reckoning with our own propensity for self-destruction. How we live matters. How we treat ourselves and those around us matters. As Montag says in Fahrenheit 451, “We need not be let alone. We need to be really bothered, once in a while.”¹⁰

We cannot grow if we don’t engage in deep self-reflection. If we aren’t bothered, once in a while. Despite their unrelenting depiction of life at the precipice of good, even such films as Anora and Husbands function as subtle condemnations of the deplorable, expressing in their characters—and exposing in us—a deep need for truth, justice, fidelity, and love.

It’s our choice regarding how we engage those films which allow us to confront the meaning and purpose of life, the realities of oppression and death, and the weight of personal flaws. Biblical morality and ethics must govern the lines that we draw when engaging cinema, especially those films which deal in such morally taboo or deplorable topics.¹¹ Still, may we seek and ponder those films which operate as the kick that wakes us from our dream-state back into reality.¹²

1. As a matter of personal conviction, I won’t be watching this film. One critique I predict is that I’m using a film I haven’t seen (and don’t plan to see) as a core component of an article I’m writing, in which I act as an authoritative voice on the matter.

That doesn’t negate my argument entirely, nor does it mean that I can’t contribute anything of value to the conversation. (We can safely acknowledge, “[insert film here] is iconic” even if we haven’t seen it.) As such, I will rely on more critics’ reviews that I trust to make connections to the intricacies of the story. Nevertheless, I can affirm that Anora’s cultural influence is broad, and its critical praise warrants further discussion on cinematic moral depiction, even from someone outside the club, as it were.

[1a] If you’re trying to decipher which citation style I’m using, good luck. It’s my own sick amalgamation of APA and hyperlinking. I think. Please keep reading.

2. This quote is paraphrased. See Venn, L. (2025). “Read Mikey Madison’s Best Actress Oscars Speech” in Cosmopolitan.

3. Smith, C. (2025). “Anora’s Body and Soul,” in Providence.

4. See Larsen, J. (2024). “Anora,” in Larsen On Film; Hernández, R. (2025). “Anora’s Good Samaritan,” in Think Christian.

5. Smith, “Anora’s Body and Soul.” Baker’s filmography (e.g., Red Rocket [2021] and Tangerine [2015]) indicates that he is fascinated by taboo stories which hinge on deep explorations of the humanness at the heart of fringe (often sexually immoral) lifestyles.

6. The comedy in Husbands aged as well as its main characters did: not at all. Racism, sexism, and other kinds of insensitive jokes abound, but as humor that the husbands enjoy and find harmless, its true consequences become clear.

The filmmaking style, however, is immaculate.

7. Dostoyevsky, F. (1879). The Brothers Karamazov.

8. Bujalski, A. (2020). “Husbands: Vows,” in The Criterion Collection.

9. This quote is found in one of my favorite essays which covers a similar topic in relation to music. See McAllister, C. (2022). “Does Evil Have a Sound? Reflections on Vecna’s Playlist, Black Metal & the Banality of Evil” in Christ and Pop Culture. [Emphasis added].

10. Bradbury, R. (1953). Fahrenheit 451. It’s a bit ironic to quote a book about choosing literature over staring at four screened walls, but the message is still true: Don’t trade profound stories for dull, shallow nonsense. The best stories cause us to think and reflect.

11. I’ve been very clear that I don’t think there’s ever strong justification for sex and nudity in film. The moral and ethical problems are pervasive, which is why I draw the line at films like Anora, and consider Nolan’s inclusion of nudity in Oppenheimer (2023) his greatest career misstep, to list a couple examples. See Bower, J. (2023). “Is There Ever a Good Reason for Sex and Nudity in Film?” in Christ and Pop Culture; Stewart, C. (2022). “‘Redeeming Love’ Irredeemably Exploits Actors and Viewers” in The Gospel Coalition.

12. Inception reference + maybe this got Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” stuck in your head. Stuck the landing, I’d say.