from anora to melania: deciphering the 'slavic bimbo'
the american dream is a fantasy wrapped in an hervé léger bandage dress.
ON ELECTION NIGHT I drove to the local theater to watch a 4pm showing of Anora with a brown paper bag of buttered popcorn doused with nutritional yeast powder.
The movie begins with the soaring, synth-y vocals of “Greatest Day” over the opening lap dance shot, eventually panning to Ani’s smiling face and tinsel-flecked hair whipping in the cinematic slow-mo strip club wind.
Like everyone else in the theater that evening, I was watching the movie instead of scrolling election coverage.
But really, it was impossible to NOT think about our political reality watching a movie that interrogates the American Dream through the lens of a sex worker.
Directed by Sean Baker, the movie is about Ani (short for Anora), a 23 year old exotic dancer struggling to make ends meet in New York’s Brighton Beach neighborhood. One night she meets Vanya, the 21 year old son of a Russian oligarch (I could see him being roomies with Baron Trump at boarding school), and the two begin a “romance” that escalates into a spontaneous Vegas wedding. I put “romance” in quotes because the story’s tension centers on the ambiguity of their dynamic, which to me read mostly as a transaction but with justtttt enough euphoric cinematography to convince us/Ani of the potential for real feelings.
Anyways, their marraige falls apart quickly when Vanya’s parents catch wind that he “married a prostitute” and thus brought shame on the Zakharov family name. Poof! American Dream goes down the toilet—but not without Ani fighting tooth and nail at every turn in a world stacked against her in every way.
As a Californian, I’d never heard of Brighton Beach before.
But Baker does a beautiful job portraying the cultural specificity of a Slavic diaspora community. Many scenes had the allure of a Sam Youkilis photo dump: regular people at church baptisms and late night diners and Coney Island candy shops, the mundanity transformed into romance through the fairy dust of Kodak 35mm film.
This week I’ve been processing the movie at the same time as the election thinkpieces and one night, it hit me…
Ani and Melania Trump both offer character studies of the Slavic Bimbo aesthetic archetype.
I’ve read a lot of takes about how the tradwife agenda, soft life propaganda and other seemingly innocuous internet trends were, in hindsight, signs that the incel Trumpies were winning all along.
I believe the Slavic Bimbo aesthetic trend,