Why Anora is the Disney Princess We Need

the sixth season of my podcast rehash is out I co-host it with my friend Hannah and it's all about internet phenomena that get us all up in arms only to forget about them within a week so we rehash them as they say this season is about internet subcultures the stories of how they arrived thrived and sometimes died we talk about everything from weebs to furries to Emos go check it out back in 2017 when the Florida project came out people were divided about whether or not Shawn Baker had stuck the landing on this film as

people watched little Mooney and her friend jansy run away from the grasp of child services out of the Magic Castle in and into Disney World reactions were mixed some thought it was genius some felt Baker had taken the easy way out by slapping on a quick fantasy sequence that was at odds with what was otherwise a grounded movie some thought Mooney had literally escaped and ran away which made no sense to them so as I sat in a totally silent theater during the final scene of Anora Baker's latest feature film as the titular character Annie

breaks down sobbing in the middle of intercourse with her white night Igor a sober in contrast to an otherwise fast-paced screw ball film I knew that people would again be divided and I was right Anora is about a sex worker named Annie a shortened version of the movie's title who meets a 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch named Vana at the strip club she works at and gets swept up in a life of opulence after vona hires her to be his girlfriend for a week and then marries her only for it all to come crashing

down once vona's family finds out about their illicit Union and sends their goons to get the marriage anold the final scene happens after Annie discovers van who they've spent the entire night chasing down after he unceremoniously runs away never really cared about her at all and clearly misbehaves like this all the time in this scene Annie is being dropped back home to her regular Life by a goon named Igor is the only person in the movie to show Annie any Humanity likely because he has a crush on her excuse me I have to get dressed

can I have some privacy please before Annie gets out of the car eigor stops her and gives her the engagement ring which he was asked to confiscate earlier on Annie who has been verbally hanging Igor ever since he physically restrained her Midway through the film begins to have sex with him but then starts to punch him before breaking down in sobs as eigor Embraces her in his arms Anora has been commercially and critically well received it even won the Palm toor which is the highest prize at K becoming the first American film in over a

decade to do so but audiences have been quite split about the ending echoing the Florida project some had technical gripes with it and felt that it was tacked on others have taken moral issues with it arguing that the scene undermines the film's message by depicting Annie as downtrodden that sex is the only thing she knows a lot of people have been saying that Baker was trying to shock us just for shock's sake criticism of Anora are not new to Baker's filmography he's come under scrutiny for years for choosing again and again to depict marginalized subcultures

I've never agreed with these criticisms and I don't agree this time around either frankly the final scene is what won me over on this movie so I want to take this opportunity to explain the Shawn Baker Universe a rich intractable saturated world where marginalized people are allowed to be human even when Society is doing everything it can to take that away from [Music] them for what feels like forever sex workers in film haven't gotten the best treatment whether they're blue battered and lying in a body bag a Mary Magdalene style hooker with a heart of

gold who often dies a saint or robbing someone for all he's worth sex workers have been moralized punished and flattened into two-dimensional stereotypes but in the 2010s they got a new face one that I'd argue is just as two-dimensional as the other ones in the movement to decriminalize sex work it was imperative that people understood sex work as work because if we were to see it as another form of Labor we could chip away at the moral stigma that's followed it for centuries and during this time videos began to pop up online with dancers counting

stacks of cash or giving tips for how to enter the industry with people flooding into the comments asking how they can get started too and this is when the sex worker got a whole new look in film the girl boss an arguably equally two-dimensional Trope that goes down the somewhat capitalistic route of go girl get that bag and what's precipitated from these depictions is a startling lack of class Consciousness regardless of how class conscious those movies or TV shows purport to be obscuring the many socioeconomic reasons as to why people get into sex work and

the survival side of things in an effort to get people to see it only in a positive light but what's put Shawn Baker A Cut Above the Rest is that he's a filmmaker who has now made five films about sex workers three of which belong to what he's dubbed the sex work Trilogy and managed to maintain a holistic class conscious approach to this difficult subject by holistic I mean that his characters are neither Sinners nor Saints often when you have a subculture or microcosm that has not been represented much in in our media it's done

in a way that's very one-dimensional or or done with you know caricatures and my whole goal is to do the opposite with that to have fully fleshed out red dimensional characters that audiences connect can connect with see themselves in them even though they could they would think oh I could never perhaps identify you know with this with this uh with this group or this livelihood Merry Christmas Eve [ __ ] Tangerine follows two trans sex workers Cindy and Alexandra as they work the Hollywood strip on Christmas Eve and what's notable about about Tangerine is that

Baker doesn't shy away from showing us the uglier sides of Cindy and Alexander's personalities for the duration of the film we watch Cindy brutally drag a woman she believes to have slept with her pimp boyfriend all over the city Barefoot at the end we find out Alexandra slept with Cindy's boyfriend something she's been keeping from Cindy this entire time but Baker never places a scornful eye on them instead asking us to extend to them a bit of Grace and understanding spliced into the action of Tangerine are also very tender moments particularly this ending where as

Cindy storms away from Alexandra after learning about her betrayal and receives a face full of urine after being attacked by a group of transphobic men in a car the two women sit quietly in a laundromat waiting for Cindy's clothes to dry and Alexandra offers Cindy her wig same goes for Haley in the Florida project we watch Haley do some questionable if not outright of horren things in this movie refusing to punish Mooney for setting fire to an abandoned condo complex allowing Mooney to be in the motel room while she solicits sex for money and viciously

beating her best friend Ashley right in front of Ashley's son this caused a lot of debate among viewers as to whether Haley is a villain but cheat isn't and that's thanks to Baker's empathetic and accurate portrayal of class baker has cited Italian neorealism as a major inspiration for his films and that checks out Italian neorealism was a movement that came about in postwar Italy after the fall of melini and it placed a documentary esque focus on workingclass subjects and the difficult material conditions of their lives you could say the same for just about any of

Baker's films and especially his films about sex work red rocket is the film that most closely embodies Italian neorealism particularly with its use of Crash zooms it's also one of Baker's most cynical films given that its main character is a Charming bottom feeder named Mikey an ex- adult film star who exploits just about every relationship he has in order to crawl his way back into the industry the people Mikey takes advantage of namely his ex-wife Lexi and her mother Lil do not exactly have much to give Lexi and Mikey both enjoyed success in the adult

film world but Baker aptly shows how quickly that success can come crashing down due to the availability of drugs in this industry this is something he also explores in his 2012 feature Starlet we see how Lexi's life before the start of the film spiraled out of control and came crashing down around her to the point that she now lives with her mother also an addict and is forced to solicit on Craigslist in order to pay their rent it's a harsh reality little needs to be said from the women in Tangerine for us to get a

sense that they're struggling the very fact that it's Christmas Eve and they are working from day to night tells us all we need to know their approach to work is matter of fact and their on the jness never really stops Christmas Eve we're going to go our separate ways because I think that's a lot easier than calling our family family and then coming back to Haley Haley was a Teen Mom she loses her job at a strip club with the start of the film because she refuses to sleep with clients and tries desperately to find

any sort of income that will help keep her and Mooney housed at the motel the movie is marked by frequent scenes of Haley going into the motel office to pay rent scenes of she and Mooney walking around the nearby hotels to sell whatever they can to survive but as things get more precarious for Haley she ends up having to solicit out of her room to make ends meet when she arrives at Ashley's room before beating her it's out of desperation and likely Lon less too immediately after the attack Haley runs back to the room and

throws up in the toilet disgusted by her own actions Mom are you okay this is a person who has been pushed to her limits in every possible way like I said this attention to workingclass subjects has drawn some negative attention to Baker over the years from people who argue that his interest in these subjects is fetishistic I've even seen people compare Anora to that atrocious Nicola Anne pelts film Lola that came out earlier this year but Baker himself has been very careful to avoid languishing in the suffering of others he once said in an interview

with film comment back in 2015 that he didn't want to make a plight of story that he was attempting to tell Universal stories that anyone could relate to with universal themes and I think the way he achieves this is through an element of fantasy while it would be somewhat insulting to pin Baker's films down to a single genre I'd say the closest thing they come to is something like realist fairy tales for a director to enter into a subcultural community and rebel in their suffering would be to diminish the universal quality of that film because

it exposes an inherent power differential between the person with the camera looking and the people being depicted fairy tales however are designed with a universal element in mind literary scholar Jack zipes has this great quote about the purpose of fairy tales where he says no matter what the plot may be the tales all celebrate our capacity as readers and potential transmitters of tales to wonder we do not want to know the ultimate resolution we do not want to name God God's goddesses we do not want to form Craven images we do not want to have

Utopia designated for us we want to remain curious startled provoked mystified and uplifted we want to glare gaze gawk behold and stare we want to be given opportunities to change and ultimately we want to be told that we can become kings and queens or Lords of our own Destinies we remember Wonder tales and fairy tales to keep our sense of wonderment alive and to nurture Our Hope that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds zeip says that traditional fairy tales rarely end unhappily they're meant to end on a utopian note

the happily ever after note where the story is really just beginning and the struggle is over but this doesn't mean that fairy tales do not have a social purpose sure they offer an escape from reality but historically these kinds of stories quote could serve to stabilize conserve or challenge the common beliefs laws values and Norms of a group so while many fairy tales can cement the status quo others can challenge it and Zees explains that especially in the early and mid 20th century they began to serve a social function as well in Germany especially writers

like Herman Hessa and Thomas man were writing fairy tale stories that contained political and philosophical themes zipes also uses the example of JRR tolken The Hobbit an explicitly pacifistic tale that was written in response to tol keen's experiences as a soldier and World War I The Hobbit ends with Bilbo returning home but the series to which it belongs Lord of the Rings ends with his nephew Frodo leaving home deeply affected by his experiences on the way to destroy the ring and unable to return happily to his humble old life it's not necessarily a happy or

a utopian Ending by any means zeip says that in the US especially there have been significant efforts to sanitize fairy tales in order to protect kids from their less utopian elements we can thank Disney for that so it's easy to see why people would look at Baker's films and say hey that's not a fairy tale Baker's films don't end on a happily ever after note they often end with our characters the same if not worse off than they were before but that doesn't mean these films can't take on elements of the fairy tale as well

or fit the mold of the social or political fairy tale I know baker has said he's emulating Italian neorealism and in many ways he is but his films also soften the harsh realities of their subjects by allowing for moments of tenderness and humor sometimes even Fantastical moments too which have a social leaning red rocket is ultimately a dark comedy film a cynical character study of a prolific grifter and we're encouraged to be both impressed by his grift but also to laugh at him especially in the end as he runs naked across town to his teenage

girlfriend's house the movie ends much like Baker's other films quite abruptly in a dream sequence where Mikey having lost all the money he was going to use to fly he and strawberry to La stands at her doorstep and imagines her in a Lolita esque swimsuit a bringing to life of his pathetic delusions Ro credits in Tangerine Baker crafts for us in adventure buddy comedy where sex work is a backdrop and friendship is the focus he could easily have taken a bleak approach to the subject but Tangerine which was shot entirely on iPhone is brightly saturated

to reflect the hot Relentless California Sun It's A Day in the Life but the Antics are so absurd and could easily dulge to something much more violent especially when all of the characters end up in a confrontation at a doughnut shop but the movie opts for a gentler approach again it ends on a note of friendship rather than hardship or at least friendship in hardship poverty and survival are also a secondary focus of the Florida project that's not to say this movie is not about the horrific class disparity of Florida that's resulted in an entire

transient population referred to as hidden homeless to which Mooney and Haley belong but the movie is an homage to The Little Rascals a Depression era show but the Misadventures of children with the backdrop of economic hardship here we follow Mooney and her friends from the neighborhood as they run a muck around the eerily colorful Highway Laden area just outside of Walt Disney World we get a glimpse inside the precarious paycheck to paycheck lives of the inhabitants of the motel that Mooney and her mom live in but by all accounts Mooney and the other kids are

having the time of their lives eating ice cream whenever they want pranking neighbors and tourists and exploring abandoned buildings similar to Red Rocket Florida project ends on a note of entering the characters inner fantasy world allowing us to escape for just a moment from Mooney's fate one so unbefitting an innocent child for years Baker resisted the insinuation that his movies have elements of the fairy tale but eventually he acquiesced to the idea that his characters are chasing a happily ever after an interviewer from backstage says in his work the American dream of succeeding Against All

Odds can make any setting seem ideal and picturesque Anora shares qualities of all of Baker's films Baker wanted to model the club that Annie works at called Headquarters after the intimate transactional nature of an old Da Dance Club because he was interested in the psychological dynamic between client and professional and from the first sequence which is improvised by Mikey Madison we see that Annie is very much a professional code switching with each man and gracefully guiding them towards the ATM machine some people were alarmed by how many sex scenes were included between vona and Annie

but Madison has defended them on the basis that it's important we see Annie doing her job and I agree the movie still holds the position that sex work is work once you give me health insurance workers comp and a fuing 401k then you can tell me when I work and not work Baker also touches on the social stigma attached to Annie's profession as the goons and Von's family frequently conflate who Annie is with what she does he shamed his family by marrying somebody like you but just because Annie is an operator does not mean she's

a girl boss and just because she's socially shamed does not mean she's downtrodden she lives in a house with her sister she buys nice clothes and has nice hair and nails she seems generally pragmatic about her job and she's not a saint either frequently falling for the provocations of her abrasive cooworker Diamond not helping her sister around the house and having a potty mouth like no other sex work scholar Lauren kersner argues that it's important we make the distinction of what sex workers actually want to escapee from she says Anora wants to be lifted out

of the workforce that all workers struggle to survive in instead of being lifted out of an inherently shameful profession and the movie very much focuses on this desire for escape a desire shared by Baker's other characters as well with the fairy tale angle so many times in Anora the film could have descended into something much more dark in another kind of movie or with a different kind of director that home invasion scene with the goons could easily have resulted in Anora being seriously injured or even dying but instead Baker oscillates between seriousness and screw ball

to preserve anora's agency what little she has of it and so the focus of that scene is directed away from Anora being ditched and ambushed and onto the patheticness of the goons kind of like that Robin Hood sequence in Shrek maybe it isn't believable that she could take these guys all by herself but critic Justin Chang argues in his review that this is an example of how the bodily control that Anora exhibits on the job seamlessly translates into self-defense situations like this one Chang gave Anora a glowing review and argues that this kind of generic

multitasking is classic for Baker's filmography he says so it is that Anora by turning a teeming Slice of Life and virtuoso F reveals itself in the final stretch as a cracked fairy tale I love sha Baker's films I think because he does such an incredible job at striking a balance between cultural authentic it grit fantasy and tenderness those are not easy things to master when I think about his films I get a warm feeling and what an odd thing to feel about films that take marginalized suffering people as their subjects that's why I think he's

one of the best directors working today but it seems like this approach has come at a bit of a cost because not everyone thinks Baker's films are humanizing in his review of Anora genre jumping quality of Anora reflects something endemic to all of Baker's films that that his characters lack interiority this is a sentiment I've seen among most attractors of Anora Brody acknowledges that Baker is empathetic towards Anora but that he refuses to Grant her a free voice and in turn his work is condescending towards her he says Anora is a film of cinematography but

not of images Baker's pictures illustrate and decorate and deliver a story but they have little identity in themselves they're secondary dependent subservient there's a significant work of art lurking within Anora but it's confined within the limits of a pot boiler I agree with Brody that anora's weakest element is these pot boiler scenes which stretch over the entirety of the second act and comprise mostly of actors improvising their lines and delivering an endless string of expletives in house they tied me they attacked me that mother was making me sit on his lap you guys are crazy

Mikey Madison said that this was her intention during these parts because she didn't want Anora to stop talking but it can get pretty tiresome shut the up and this is a weakness in many of Baker's films sometimes he doesn't know when to trim the fat but to Brody's point that because of these pot boiler scenes Baker somehow robs his characters of their emotional interior lives I'd argue that a character does not have to be monologuing their feelings at us for us to understand their hopes and desires and [Music] fears while Baker's films are not full-blown

realism they are authentic he does Street casting he Nails colloquialisms but what also makes his films authentic is that they're action-packed when you're struggling your ambition is often unfortunately pretty simple to not struggle anymore to survive my family has gone through periods of financial difficulty and when I was a kid sometimes I would say something to my dad and he wouldn't hear me he'd just be staring off into space I try to get his attention again and he jump getting pissed at me for interrupting his train of thought when I cry and ask him why

he snapped he'd explained that he's currently trying to figure out how to put dinner on the table in fact he said he was constantly thinking of that every single second of the day and that's always stuck with me in a world of precariousness and economic hardship time waits for no one because time is money so Baker's characters are not afforded a moment of rest or reflection they are always on the Move Cindy can't even have a second to recuperate from discovering Alexandra's betrayal before heading straight back to work Haley is set on a never-ending track

of going back to the drawing board Conjuring new ways to make money by any means necessary even Mikey in red rocket who we aren't asked to empathize with is in a Perpetual state of hustling of course these characters may have begun their lives with grander dreams but those dreams have been slowly whittel down by circumstance and class oppression so we learn about who these characters are not through down moments but by the way they react to things in the up moments Cindy getting quiet when Dina tells her she's delusional for thinking her pimp is a

faithful partner Haley being amazed at how luxurious her neighbor's motel room is my favorite instance of this is when I realized watching red rocket that we aren't supposed to root for Mikey it's a scene where he Witnesses his friend Lonnie getting thrown in a fountain by a bunch of men who accuse him of Stolen Valor Mikey leaves the scene and waits for Lonnie by a car and for some reason at this point I expected him to either pretend he didn't see it out of Grace for lonie or to offer some of comfort instead Mikey chastises

him for threatening Mikey's reputation this selfishness continues for the rest of the film but Mikey doesn't think he's a selfish bottom feeder so why would he tell us so we can glean that for ourselves we see this in Anora as well throughout the film Annie is non-stop strategizing about how to ascend her ranks obtain some security and most importantly preserve her dignity all things that she's by way of class and Circumstance barred from accessing we know and doesn't have a lot of agency while the strip club is a simulation of a world where women have

control over men on the outside where class exists women and especially poor women have no control at all your life and lives of your family and friends everything will be destroyed this is most clear in that final Blow from vona where he says thank you for making my last trip to America so fun his choice of words here widens a gulf between he and Anora as big as the Atlantic Ocean he's about to fly over forvia the world is a playground and people are his play things but Anora is limited by station this was never

just fun for her so Annie seeks control wherever she can I think her choice to wear a fur coat when they embark on The Manhunt is the best example of this it's a visual attempt to prove to others that she belongs in this world they're so desperately trying to eject her from like she's Vermin so even Madison's choice to have Anora yapping for most of the film however repetitive it is makes sense Anora is loud mouth and unashamed of who she is and thus refuses to be silenced especially in a room full of men detractors

have said that we never get to know Annie that this movie is barely about her but of course it is if it was about vonia it would be an Entourage or hangover style romp where Annie would be reduced to a footnote joke guys Vana got married to a stripper in Vegas a Nora is a very different movie this couldn't be more obvious than in my favorite shot where Annie and Vana are lying in his bed and then Vana sits up at a frame to propose to Annie the camera holds on her changing from a two-

shot to a one shot and in doing so shifts the perspective and tone of the movie from the romcom it set up to be to something else altogether for the remainder of the shot we watch a carousel of emotions wheel across Annie's face fear excitement skepticism Joy what this shot tells us is that this movie is not about starcross lovers it's about a woman who has everything to lose [Music] even I caught myself wanting Annie to end up with eigor maybe I've read too many ya Nobles or maybe it's because I thought igore was sexy

but generally it's because I've probably watched too many Disney movies I was caught up in the fairy tale and I didn't want it to end in Chang's review he refers to Annie as a strip club Cinderella who gets a froggy prince in vona and a white knight in eagor and he calls the final exchange between she and eigor a moment of rare and complicated Grace a connection that goes beyond mere transaction you want it to last forever you know that it won't for both Annie and eigor it's back to the Grind Baker's characters don't stop

moving but sometimes he allows them a single moment to stand still and just her line of work and what she does she has to have a hard outer shell that doesn't really show what's Happening until the you know until it really does just come out Annie doesn't cry throughout this film there are moments where she needs to take a breath or seems like she's on the verge but even when vonia is cruy discarding her she manages to hold it together it's not until the final controversial car scene that she breaks down of course this is

the culmination of a sleepless night and heartbreak over what has transpired but also it comes from the fact that she's finally alone with someone who's her equal like I said eigor is the only person to show Annie any modum of compassion throughout this journey and is also a fellow class interloper so his presence is one that she doesn't have to put on air or perform for and so she's able to let her guards down this was the moment of interiority people had been wanting but it made them angry because in Reverse of the Florida project

or red rocket which end in fantasy Anora ends the fantasy with a cold dose of reality yeah I wasn't going to do that again no I wanted to keep it grounded that was very important for me I guess with this film because I was sort of taking us on a well hopefully taking the audience on a roller coaster ride through different tones and genre I knew that I had to bring them back to a place of grounded reality to real a sobering moment to really sit there and to see you know to feel the the

the reality of the situation and what Annie is is really living with thank you hey a scene from the Florida project that always puts a lump in my throat is when a woman at the laundry ad gives Haley a hug and Haley just stares stoically ahead completely unmoved Haley is in a more precarious situation than Annie she's hardened at a young age and so we almost never see her cry for the most part like Annie she's erupting in violent outbursts my favorite writer and cultural critic Sarah Marshall references the Florida project in a piece she

wrote about Disney for the baffler and in it she remarks on the fact that trauma and violence live inside Haley because she's never had the privilege of finding safety through submission or passivity violence is something that she has had to learn in order to survive and then Marshall says something that broke me when I read it I loved Haley when I watched the Florida project the way I loved the Disney princesses of my girlhood watching Shawn Baker's film we can see both the world that has filled Haley with a tide of sudden rages and flights

and also her ability more astounding than any of the corporate magic of the world just beyond hers to never unleash this rage or Terror on her child and to make their dangerous World feel like a harmless game Haley is to the best of her ability a good mom doing what she can with what she's got and if you're able to look past the instinct to judge her you'll see that her ability to find Grace for her child in spite of it all does make her something of a fairy tale princess that's what Baker's fairy tales

are challenging of our common beliefs the idea that a sex worker can be shrewd and hardened but if we're willing to challenge our own perceptions and look hard enough we'll see eaten them a delicate complicated inner core Annie is tough as nails but if you look hard enough you'll find that she's also very naive typically she's good at asserting her boundaries but you see that she constantly lapses them for Vana like taking her panties off during the lp dance or allowing him to sleep with her a second time in the hour he paid for or

ditching work for a week to be his PO hire girlfriend and so in spite of the fact that people have argued Annie never really liked fonia that this was a performance she does this is captured in these boundary breaking moments and also in stolen glances which are done privately and because she's swept up in the fog of infatuation both for vonia who she liked before she knew he was rich and his lifestyle she's willing to believe promises she would otherwise probably scoff at vono reveals himself pretty early to us with his goofy childish demeanor we

know this isn't a serious person but Annie can't see it she's naive enough to believe the Mansion is hers to kick people out of simply because she married him and even after vona runs away and leaves her with the goons she still believes he wants to be with her the reason I connected with Anora is because with a life so wildly different from Annie's I've felt all those same emotions the fog of infatuation ignoring boundaries being humiliated by false promises the impotence of desire unrealized and so I don't think Baker is punishing Annie in that

final scene or trying to say that sex is all she knows like they do with Jenny and Forest Gump and so many other tortured female characters like her what Baker is doing is pulling the wool from our eyes and showing us what Annie really is a human being Annie may be simultaneously attracted to eigor disgusted by him and want to repay him and Baker showcases all of this in her subsequent punching and crying it's the buildup of all the emotions she's been suppressing for the entire film because her trade forces her to Annie is not

a job she's a person a 23-year-old girl at that in that baffler essay Marshall calls back to Disney Cinderella and argues that it taught generations of girls that a dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes when you're fast asleep anything more active than dreaming says Marshall even wishing for something when you're awake and conscious enough to witness the strength of your own desires disqualifies you from getting what you want it makes you greedy it makes you bad I think this ingrained idea is kind of what guiding people's speculations that Annie never really liked either vona

or eigor while it's a well-intentioned thought it perpetuates this idea that Annie's wanting of a better life stems only from opportunism and not from anything else class oppression the hamster wheel of survival is what voids us of our Humanity doesn't allow us to stop or think or feel Annie's Humanity lies not in her dreams for money or security but in the dreams for love and companionship that go along with that Zees defines fairy tale protagonists as being naive characters who were able to succeed because they have retained their belief in the miraculous condition of nature

Revere nature in all its aspects that shot on the bed where Annie goes from scoffing at the proposal to fully embracing it is what makes her a Cinderella she's shrewd but within that hardness is a very human person who is willing to do the most difficult thing of all actively loudly and fully awake she dains to dream dream Shawn Baker Blends fantasy and realism to avoid looking at his subjects in a provocative light but what about a filmmaker like Todd salons who does the opposite who takes the most verboten subject matter imaginable and somehow makes

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