DOG EAT DOG

I thought ANORA was a really well-done piece of film. I think it had something to say about class underneath all its shenanigans and the quite good comedy of it all. The lead character played by Mikey Madison is this really tense person. I think she’s putting on airs most of the whole movie and almost every time she speaks is this really delicate line tread between blustery bravado and the insecurity of someone who’s living hand-to-mouth and could lose it all. Either she’s shakily asserting herself against these mafia guys trying to keep her footing with this rich kid she married, or she’s at the strip club putting on airs, smiling, flirting for some tips. You get a lot of the interiority, the insecurity and the sorrow, in the rare quiet moment the film affords her. Little scenes where she’s sitting on a porch stoop or walking behind everybody else. It’s powerful stuff. Subtle, the direction and the acting just playing off one another like atoms exploding.

I heard a few people online saying they thought the character didn’t have much of a personality or you didn’t see much of what she was thinking. After seeing it, I think that’s by design. She’s out there fighting to make money and survive. There’s no room for anything else. It’s a real Maslow hierarchy of needs type of deal. She doesn’t have the space in her life to grow and develop as a person because she’s fighting for scraps in this brutal capitalist economy in the modern U.S., where everything’s expensive, where day to day all you can think about is how much you have and when’s the next time you’ll get any more pay.

I was reading this Esquire feature about an ex-news reporter who’s been homeless for a while, riddled with various ailments. It goes into the whole thing of escalating crises and decay. The guy just does his best to get by every day but once you’re falling through the cracks it’s hard to get out of that spiral. Dental work, medication issues, it all costs money. Nothing’s free because that doesn’t create value for the shareholders. It’s a pretty bracing read if you have the time, though I understand if you don’t. The guy’s a good writer and he lays out his struggles pretty plainly. And maybe life shouldn’t be that hard all the time. Maybe a lot of it comes down to needless red tape that doesn’t have to define the world and yet does anyway.

In the election that just ended, there were plenty of people raising the alarm about fascism. Somehow I was a bit numb to it all. I didn’t want Trump to win, but somehow when he did, I just didn’t really care all that much, not like the first time. If your country is one that routinely leaves people dangling off the cliff of death via things being too expensive to live, then the leap to fascism wasn’t far off anyway. It’s all a lot of nihilism and death either way, is all I mean. If your country is one that lets faceless corporations buy up the housing and makes the people spend all their income on unaffordable rents where the landlord can just cut ties if he feels like it, what’s worth defending?

The reactions to this healthcare CEO getting shot down in the street have been pretty crazy to see, mostly because I would’ve expected it to be a lot more temperate than it was. A lot more people than I thought were clowning on the guy and on the draconian, soulless meatgrinder of the insurance industry. I suppose that’s one of the easiest things to get radicalized on. These stories about bills in the tens of thousands for ambulance rides where you were unconscious. It’s not that hard to be against. And a lot of people are hurting. It’s expensive to breathe these days. Paychecks don’t go so far and jobs feel more tenuous, layoffs imminent like stormclouds. It’s tough for a lot of people to see a reward for participating in society.

In a world where things were more fair, nobody would deserve to die for being a business CEO, but the world as it is is hanging on by threads and rubber bands and paperclips. Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t fundamentally change anything from what Biden was doing, and people didn’t want “no fundamental change.” Not right now.

People are making the jokes and reposting the memes bashing this guy because there are impenetrable, monolithic institutions that are making the world a brutal hellhole. In the absence of any reform or chance of relief, well, sure, they’ll make the jokes – this is the world these titans of industry were fine with creating. Too bad.