While I know I’m a little late to the (Oscars after) party, I want to take a moment to comment on the way 2025 has thus far served us with two very different but striking modes of entertainment that have vocalised and challenged the currency and urgency of our present political and cultural climate. First, Kendrick Lamar with his powerful SuperBowl performance and now Anora, which swept the Oscars in a historic five nomination win, a film about a sex worker who gets wrapped up in a fairytale week of impulsive indulgence with the son of a Russian oligarch. Why do these two artistic narratives feel so important at a moment such as we are facing with all the uncertain political change and global unrest? This discourse will primarily focus on the latter, as this is the realm in which I have the most insight and first hand experience.
I remember visiting the US for the first time in 2017 and wading blindly into a striking awareness of how thick the pollutant of racism was. I wandered around the streets in shock and disbelief as the eye watering stench of the invisible fog of inequality rushed in and out of my nostrils. This visceral sensation teamed with the perturbance I experienced with witnessing the disproportionate wealth divide that racism has not only enabled but also exacerbated into a inescapable abyss of generational poverty. Perhaps age, a sheltered upbringing and the illusion of Hollywood had shielded me from this very apparent reality, but as my foreign perch became common locale with people living this miserable truth, an anger started to awaken inside of me. How was anyone without access to generational wealth, white privilege or standardized views of beauty supposed to survive, let alone thrive, in these systems fashioned by men clinging to a toxic hybrid of masculine and feminine energy?
This is where the story of Anora collides not only with the political tones of the era we’re living in but also across the backdrop of the astrology of this moment, which among a maelstrom of other transits, a Venus retrograde in the sign of Aries.
Before we traverse any more territory, a little background. Venus, named for the goddess of love and beauty, is the planet who rules over the themes of love, sensuality, relationships, money, diplomacy, justice and all the things we cherish and value in our lives. Venus is a little magical as her orbit in the sky treks the pattern of the five petals of a rose, or five points of a pentagram. It takes her eight years to map out this formation, across which time she becomes an evening star, and then switches to a morning star as she makes inferior and superior conjunctions to the sun, completing her retrograde and direct journeys. She moves through a retrograde cycle once every eighteen months and is retrograde for roughly 40 days, which echoes numerically important time frames in historical texts. When Venus goes retrograde she emulates the journey of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who was plunged to the depths of the underworld and met with her shadow self. Thus, we are all called inward during retrograde phases, and are subsequently asked to ponder the true nature of our relationships, of our value systems, of how we generate worth and what we do to in exchange for money, love and beautiful things. This Venus retrograde falls in the sign of Aries, the constellation that delineates the brave warrior, the impulsive, spontaneous, bushy eyed brat who is full to the brim of bodacious energy and keenly seeks out a duel or competition. Aries is a sign that exudes confidence, assertiveness and often impatience but also the courage to pioneer unchartered terrain and run, with a tiny, passionate spark of a flame into an entirely new world. Venus in the sign of Aries is actually in detriment, as Venus natally rules Libra, the sign that represents diplomacy, equality, balance, fairness, charm, beauty, refinement, socialising and popularity. In other words, Venus in one of her home signs, loves love, loves being boo’d up, loves parties and dancing and chic decor but knows that for relationships to work, there must be equality and balance. Venus is classified as being in detriment in Aries because Aries is natally ruled by Mars. Venus in a Mars ruled sign is either a scorned or defiant femme. She bucks the societal norms of femininity. She’s not dainty or cute, she’s brash and loud and overtly sexual, she doesn’t dress for the male gaze, because just like a man, she does whatever she wants. She maintains an innocence that comes with childlike playfulness which of course is also accompanied by impatience and lack of temper control. Impetuous like the Fool in the Tarot, she jumps gallantly off into new ventures and colours masculinity with the femme shaded brush of a warrior princess who fights her way through life. Venus retrograde in Aries asks us how we maintain our independence, autonomy and unfettered expression of self in a world that is violently struck with expectation to be a primal iteration of a male or female. We are implored to reflect on, revise, restructure and reimagine what that an equalized gender plain would look like, amid the fractures of the landscape upon which we operate, that has managed to seed and root a vial of centrifuged, power mongering white supremacy that we are now tasked to fight off and kill, one grotesque, monstrous arm at a time.
At the beginning of Anora, we are introduced to this beautifully confident, spirited young woman making her money in the strip club, moonlighting as an escort, living a blue collar life in Queens only to be enamoured by a Prince sheep who wants to steal her spark, borrow her freedom and smudge out her power. He promises her “his” world in the shape of a four carat diamond ring during their paid week together, which ends in a freezing, inane goose chase around New York City. Prince sheep fucks off at the first sign of his escapist fantasy bubble is threatened, proceeds to morph into a literal and figurative escape artist when he hears his parents are on their way to overrule his immature decisions by annulling their marriage and forcing him to return to Russia to assume his adult responsibilities. Here we witness a gloriously astrologically mirrored reversal of events, as the couple are dragged by his authoritarian parents back to Vegas to have their marriage effectively cancelled. The story begins to turn on its head as we discover the true nature of Anora’s client (read husband), along with his less than chivalrous intentions, which are blotted with selfish and shallow motives. The impact of a retrograde often reveals previously unseen details of a situation, as the planet, under the illusion of moving backward due to the earth’s orbit, has actually come to a slowed halt, and has slipped behind the warming light of the Sun.
The words that keep echoing over and over in my head are those Anora screams at intermittent intervals during her various stages of entrapment, “But I’m his wife, I’m his WIFE,” as though the sins of the father do not apply to her. Is she so cavalier that she considers herself to be above the laws of rich, powerful men, in believing one of them to be different, or considering herself to be special, or, did she inevitably scream to life the internalised misogyny of the Madonna whore complex that lives in us all? The Cinderella story sold to us, from a very young age, that every mystical, bokeh’d lens of a man made fairytale is actually a stark black and white reality that any prince coming to save us, or promise us an escape from a life that is a struggle because of systematic indifference and otherness, is either trying to control us, use us and undoubtedly let us down after the rose coloured plume of promise dissipates. This effectively leads us into a disillusioned life that denies or strips us of choice and independence. This narrative is literally designed to pressure put on both men and women to sit in toxic masculinity and broken femininity doesn’t support the deep emotional connection that creates the love that sustains not only the honeymoon period, but renews after conflict resolution breaks open wounds and makes the available for healing.
Anora, or Ani, as she prefers to be referred to, is the quintessential Venus Retrograde in Aries story. Confident, loud, sassy, brash and deeply cheeky in expressing her sexuality, Ani rocks the strip club she works in. Her meeting with Vanya, a similarly ostentatious, impulsive and cocksure adolescent is interestingly triggered by the fact that she knows how to speak Russian, which perhaps points us to a clue about her roots, what she values, and what she ultimately wants for her life. She is naive, still tethered to the sweet bird of youth, or perhaps brazen to think that centuries of the subjugation of the feminine simply doesn’t apply to her. Femme oriented sex work is so brazenly stigmatised because it defies the distorted pendulum of inequality in our post modern world. Women using their bodies to have sex for money instead of for creating life and fueling the male pleasure gaze severely disrupts the preordained order of power that has been assigned to the masculine. Prostitution is literally written into American law as being in defiance of moral turpitude. I’d be remiss, if not to mention, at least briefly as a side note, the irony of having a president that is in fact a descendant of German brothel owners and is married to a woman who is a presumed “model” and immigrant from eastern block Europe. Conveniently, she cannot seem to stand this man, and their marriage quite frankly screams, “fuck you, pay me,” as all of us watch as her husband descends deeper and deeper into a stronghold for maniacal power over any thought or idea his unhinged mind clings onto. Naturally, an affinity for a like minded dictator who has assuaged a country to violently armour itself with a culture that reveres strict patriarchal principles is hardly be surprisingly. Conan O’Brien, who hosted the Oscars this year, lightly joked about the fact that “Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian,” and I can hardly contain my wide mouthed stance over the inherent political and cultural dissidence that this film canvasses.
Theoretically, if a sex worker consciously uses her socially conditioned femininity in the performative nature of her work into inherently disrupting the hegemonic structure of society, the saviour complex designed by white men should technically die a slow death. This isn’t what happens in Anora. Our fierce Aries queen gets swept away with someone who matches her fire with the things she wants more than money. Love, emotional security, familial safety. She thus surrenders her seductive feminine power over to a completely undeserving suitor only to find that the sassy whore she’s found a home inside of will almost always be shoved into a rich man’s projection of shame, and thus will fail, time and time again, to be a acceptable mate, let alone mother. No whore is allowed to be a wife in a world dominated by men who impose a dogmatic approach on gender roles and thus reject not only the inherent equality between men and women but also the beautifully measured strengths and weaknesses of all sexes. The closing scene of the film illustrates this degradation of power so viscerally as she proceeds to sad fuck one of the inconsequential men involved in her plight. We see her crumble into a puddle as she the carpet pull of the reality finally sinks in. She has been maimed with a stamp of being unfit for aristocratic life; painfully put in her place by the powers that be.
Anora was a revolutionary display of how deeply society has been penetrated by the seductive illusion of the saviour complex, which subsequently entices us to buy into the lies that we can’t be loved and remain autonomous, sovereign and empowered. It was excruciating to bare witness to the punishment that occurs when compliance rejection of the factory produced standards for a female is exhibited; essentially an experience of being cast out and marginalised, judged for having choice over what we do with our bodies. If a sex worker still falls for a trick in a male obsessed/dominated world she purposely tries to play, what does that say about our conditioning as females pitted against our biological urge to procreate as a species, racing alongside our collective souls evolutionary desire to heal through love? Ultimately, if a sex worker who knows the manipulative man drill still falls for the knight in shining love bullshit, what hope do the rest of us have in discerning when someone is offering us something real or if when the lights come on we’re not stuck singing “Goodluck Babe” by Chappell Roan?