When studying film theory, you broach the idea of semiotics; that images and symbols represent and communicate a certain idea, a certain mythos, a certain rhetoric. That the most innocuous of objects have a rhyme and a reason for being there. It's what makes a red cap inextricably linked with Donald Trump, or how a blaring alarm prescribes the idea of danger (or to wake up the protagonist in every student film ever). This idea of semiotics is intrinsic to filmmaking. It feeds the visual and emotional language of a film through how audiences are supposed to respond to certain triggers.
It is the "show, don't tell" sentiment, to place a layman's term on it. It is more or less the opening instruction of Filmmaking 101. Audiences shouldn't have their emotional journey told to them, they should experience it. Semiotics is also why films that reuse certain cliches or sound bites (the Wilhelm scream, for example) can seem quite overly familiar and passé, or even be subverted. The danger that these nigh-on unavoidable symbols impose, however, is that they utilize and invigorate stereotypes, to a degree that can make them a poor representation of the factions of society on display.
Take noted socio-realist Andrea Arnold and her latest film Bird. Reviewing the film for Movies We Texted About, Manuel São Bento describes the film as "an intimate exploration of marginalized lives." The film is "about" a marginalized life, where a young girl named Bailey (electric newcomer Nykiya Adams) lives in squalor in south-east England. But how do we know she lives a marginalized life? This information is elucidated through images of strewn lager cans; that she has hoodlum friends dressed in hoodies, who perform acts of vigilantism and ride scooters like they're trying to be chava Marlon Brando; a heavily-tattooed drug dealer father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), who conceived her at 13; or the graffiti-endowed staircase that ascends up into the tower block of flats she calls home, where spousal arguments pierce the floor that her mattress lies on and mold streaks across dirty glass windows. Bailey is living a marginalized life because every single image presented about her life reinforces the idea that she lives in squalor. It is in the very text that she, a young Black girl experiencing gender dysphoria, is living in depravity.
As cited in a 2018 interview for The New Yorker, Arnold grew up on a Kent council estate, exploring the chalk pits and fields and woods but she also left at eighteen. Arnold's filmography is almost entirely composed of her life experiences. The Cannes Jury Prize winning Fish Tank is semi-autobiographical of her teen years while growing up on a council estate, while American Honey was in part inspired by her own travels across the American Midwest. In Bird, we are not invited into an environment that acknowledges existing barriers. Since she escaped her council estate upbringing thirty years ago, what about the environment that she manufactures is accurate to her experience anymore? Arnold's kitchen sink realism appears warped; her idea of social-realism is now merely voyeuristic. The contemporary society depicted within Bird feels like the kind of poverty porn that was churned out by middle-class British media in the noughties.
It appears that this is because, as the narrative of Bird supports, Arnold is not interested in the social mechanisms that are put in place that lock characters like Bug within their means. Bug sired a child at 14, in a parallel to his own son doing the same. If this is a commentary on the cyclical nature of existing in poverty, it is an empty gesture. The questions that Arnold doesn't want to ask or investigate are: was their education not inclusive of contraception or abortion rights? Is Bailey's androgyny unrecognized as dysphoria because they don't have access to information around it? Are they on a waiting list for a house or flat that isn't the home of squatters? Does Bug have issues keeping a job and that's why they're selling drugs? I'll be the first to criticize Ken Loach when his films turn into saccharine, blinkered socio-realism, but at least his films are aware of the structures that have placed the characters where they are. Without this awareness of systems or giving the characters aspirations, Arnold is only ever invoking stereotypes of poverty as a symptom of their own doing and by doing so, validating this limited portrayal.
In Bird, characters are used as propagation of standard lower-class stereotypes. They might not be as egregious as the brashness of the stereotypes in something like (Best Picture winner) Green Book, which uses magical negro tropes and whose narrative lens is placed on placating white guilt, but the lower class stereotypes in Bird are on full display constantly. Bailey, her father Bug, and half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) are observed by Arnold's camera in handheld verité shots, like the bougie audience at its Cannes premiere are social tourists and Arnold is their tour guide, existing safely behind the tempered glass of a camera lens and cinema screen. Tapping at glass is a powerful image invoked in Bird but the metaphorical glass ceiling that exists above Bailey and her squat-dwelling family is barely acknowledged, the barrier existing transparently between them.
Now, to clarify, Bird is by no means "bad" because of this; few films mentioned within this article can or should be perceived as such just because they represent their characters atypically or without nuance. It might not seem like it from the previous thousand words, but Bird is a great film that irresponsibly handles class portrayals. But does Arnold truly have the responsibility to represent her characters, her art, in more complex ways? Ways that represent the world that we — and they — live in? It can be argued that this burden is placed upon them subjectively, each individual audience member choosing to accept or reject the portrayals within.
While Arnold depicts her characters as finding happiness in their impoverished surroundings, director Sean Baker provides a transatlantic reflection of this depiction of class in the caterwauling screwball drama Anora. Anora follows a sex worker named Ani (a marvelous Mikey Madison) as she enacts on a Cinderella story where her glass slippers fall off mere days into her shotgun marriage to wealthy Russian prince/man-child Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn).
Baker made a concerted effort to represent sex workers well, having ex-sex worker Andrea Werhun consulting on the film. Between Werhun, Baker and Madison — who conducted her own research into the work-life of strippers — the sex work on show is nuanced and vibrant. It collates the experiences and dialogue that sex workers encounter, like "does your family know you're here?" and variations on it from judgmental clientele. Baker uses these words as a window into the judgement held by society when it comes to sex work.
Anora doesn't judge, however. When Ani is originally hired by Vanya to have sex with him, she discusses putting condoms on him, which is a common move made by sex workers to appease clients around contraception use. So where exactly is Baker's burden here if he is representing sex work more progressively and positively than the majority of sex work focused features? The burden, almost unfairly, put on him is that he is so preoccupied with being sex work positive that he neglects the sex worker. There is such attention to detail around Ani and her life as a sex worker that the script struggles to find a balance between representing sex work empathetically and bringing Ani to life as a sex worker. Madison's performance is the oxygen that sets Ani ablaze but the script is so narrow that her career as a sex worker is what defines her character. One moment where Ani tells her sister and roommate that she is leaving for the week is the closest we get to a more holistic characterization, a brief glimpse into the less glitzy life that she lives outside of stilettos and lingerie.
Baker has made a name for himself by telling stories about people on the fringes of society, usually revolving around sex work in some capacity. Red Rocket is a provocative picture that focuses on an award-winning former porn star attempting to worm his way back into the industry at the cost of a young girl's innocence. The Florida Project covers a child staving off homelessness by way of thievery after her mother is fired from her stripper position and is refused benefits. The latter is an indictment of how society refuses to acknowledge sex work as an authentic means of work (set in the literal capitalist shadow of Disney World Florida), while the former shines the light on abuse that exists within the porn industry.
For Baker, he seems insistent on conflating the idea of sex work with lower class. But when we combine the idea of sex work with class structures, we are reinforcing the idea that sex workers are a part of a lower class. This is as constrictive and as reductive as the Cinderella fairytale that Anora mimics, especially when it pertains to the real people who engage in sex work, placing them in metaphorical boxes. Anora might be a zany gust of screwball comedy, but the world it exists in is grounded reality for many people.
The line between Ani the sex worker and Ani the human are blurred to the point of non-existence. That she doesn't use a significant pseudonym for her work can be seen as Baker attempting to validate her career but therein lies a problem: Ani the sex worker is all that there is to her. The hobbies she partakes in during her time in the mansion are Vanya's, and the sex they have is lensed through his pleasure and her subservience, even after the power dynamic shifts from sex worker to wife. By reducing the characteristics of Ani down to just a sex worker — even one that is a sprightly, live wire type — we aren't getting sex work representation that truly matters.
Ani's whirlwind romance to a Russian oligarch is Baker wielding the stereotypical narrative that the only desire a sex worker can have is to no longer be one. Which is not accurate to the real world as there are sex workers who are content in their position of self-employment, the role allowing them freedom to make their own hours; while some also find it empowering to take back control of their sexuality that has been predominantly catered to the male gaze and to male sensibilities. In comparison to Hollywood sex work narratives that came before Anora (the review pull quote "makes Pretty Woman look like a Disney movie" is a shallow comparison at best), you'd hope that one with adequate research would be less content with riding the coattails of stereotypes, playing out a stereotypical sex work rags-to-riches narrative.
Such banality in narrative can be seen with how little Baker appears to allow Ani a real sense of agency. The first hour covers the couple's lusty hysteria and Ani's dream of marital decadence; the second half of Anora is a hubbub of stress as Ani, under the thumb of Vanya's Russian henchmen/babysitters, searches for Vanya through the streets of Brooklyn. For a film that desperately wants to be liked, wants to be socially progressive and viewed as transgressive, this is remarkably trite when we view it through a feminist lens and within historical narratives around sex work in film. That Ani spends so much of Anora being orchestrated, shimmied around by men is what snuffs out the flame that Madison breathes into the character. It just seems that even with how much Baker wants to approve of sex work, he can't quite bring himself to approve of the sex worker.
But does positively representing class or sex work matter in art? The very idea of separating art from both politics and the artist involved is such an alluring, enticing concept. Art should encourage conversations and be free of extraneous factors and sociological and economic expectations. It should be able to dissect and subvert contentious topics in a myriad of exciting ways that can make them entertainment, even if it is problematic. But simultaneously, and contradictory to this complex topic of discussion, art has to be accountable. An important trait of film criticism must be to navigate and observe this accountability. This is because real lives eclipse art. A serial killer murdering ten people and erecting their corpses as a sculpture should still face criminal charges for their actions.
Of course, I'm not accusing Bird or Anora of doing anything criminal. Nor will either of these films really impact the lives of sex workers or those we unjustly distinguish as lower class. They are "just a movie," right? But ask any critic, any cinephile or any film scholar and you'll be inundated with stories about how film changed their life in some meaningful way. Even in real world contexts, films have influence and power: Bambi had such a strong cultural effect that it adjusted how hunting was perceived and led to a cultural shift away from the activity, while even something as innocuous as Aardman favorites Wallace and Gromit loving Wensleydale cheese helped to stave off bankruptcy for the Hawes company that makes it, saving hundreds of jobs in Yorkshire. Such is the power of film.
Which is where we get to September 5. Tim Fehlbaum's newsroom-set thriller revolves around the 1972 Munich Massacre. The film follows a news crew as they broadcast live, for the very first time, a terrorist attack as it unfolded, one where members of a Palestinian militia took eleven Israeli athletes hostage. It resulted in the tragic death of all those involved. Fehlbaum is cited in Deadline as saying "we don't want to make a political statement on that" in reference to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that has been ensuing since Israel's occupation of Palestine began in 1967. The events of the Munich Massacre, as portrayed in September 5, are directly influenced by this conflict. But this conflict, and the precursive genesis of these events, is written in invisible ink within Fehlbaum's script.
Contrarily, what is written within September 5 as bright and as brash as the graffiti on the Berlin Wall is German guilt over the holocaust. This infiltrates the dynamics of how the newsroom interacts with German police, who are hesitant to announce the potential death of Jewish folk on their land out of fear the optics would be poor. This aspect makes September 5 feel like Fehlbaum is not interested in Palestinian lives. Consequently, the film indirectly commits the act of "othering" Palestinian people with its actions. The taut thriller induces conversation around specific language use, where at one point news anchor Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) describes the Palestinian group inciting this terror as "guerrilla Arabs," after being instructed to use the term terrorists. September 5 appears to want to investigate journalistic ethics, while seemingly being phlegmatic about those very moral ethics.
The film has a postscript with the discussion point that over 900 million people watched the event. What is quite frustrating about this is the reality that for many people across the world in 1972, this may have been their introduction to Palestinian people. What is too apparent in this postscript is Fehlmbaum's incuriosity — that the ramifications of live-streaming this act of terrorism would be catastrophic in how the public image of Palestinians and Muslim communities were and continue to be perceived. The now iconic single image of a Palestinian person in a balaclava that the film makes constant use of became the image of the event, their identity stripped, their message for freedom lost across the airwaves.
The message, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it demand, relayed in the film is the release of 236 prisoners. The television team at the heart of September 5 don't care about this motive because they're only interested in the spectacle. The same can be said for Fehlbaum, as he has a character speak the line: "this isn't about politics, it's about emotions." He is more interested in making his art entertaining, which September 5 is; an excellently performed, simmering, bustling pot-boiler. But right now, and for the past several decades since occupation began and the Munich Massacre occurred, there is genocide occurring and Palestinian lives are being lost at a tremendously harrowing rate. September 5 won't do anything to change the outcome of the war in Gaza, but it also has no interest in doing so. The media team that broadcast the event, and sprung terminology used to harm Muslim communities, had the excuse that they were unaware of the effect their actions would have, but hindsight allows Fehlbaum the option to reframe and acknowledge the struggle of a population that is being murdered. It is an option that is refused to be exercised.
As such, the electric Anora, the rapturous Bird and thrilling September 5 can only ever be failures relative to their relationship to the factions of people they represent. Each one is really solid, entertaining fare but the myopic views they each possess about their subjects — to varying degrees of culpability and intent — make them conflicting pictures. No one should expect art to always compliment society or have a sense of world-changing causation about it, but representation that encompasses the full picture is important.
If art is to make substantial, positive change, like saving a factory in Yorkshire or inciting a resurgence in a fading language like has happened with Rich Peppiatt's Kneecap, then it must take into consideration the minority affected by it and it cannot be free from accountability. Filmmakers must be mindful that when they reinforce stereotypes that punch minorities down, they are actively enforcing their position on that so-called bottom rung of the social hierarchy. Those in poverty are no less deserving of having genuine and resonant stories told about their lives; sex workers deserve better, richer stories than the one shown in Anora; and Palestinian people, at the very least, deserve their genocide to not be portrayed as a translucent footnote. Art — progressive or regressive, good or bad — has a lifespan of as long as it incites discussion. The side of history that Arnold, Fehlbaum and Baker land on with Bird, September 5 and Anora shall only be revealed by the weathers of time, but within contemporary context, one can not expect this to be with fondness.
