Ignore ‘Anora’
Okay, quiz fans, if you think Europe is in trouble, think again. There is always Hollywood, the place where megalomaniacal, pompous, boastful, self-entitled, bald, untalented jerks are taken seriously. The embarrassing but saccharine cesspool that is the Oscars has just voted Anora—a sanitized, voyeuristic movie about a hooker—as Best Picture. I have not seen it and do not plan to. I have nothing against the oldest profession, but now that I am of a certain age, I find it the most humiliating and enslaving line of work ever invented by man or woman.
The ladies now go by the euphemistic name of sex workers. We used to call them hookers, named after the brave Union General Hooker during the Civil War, who always traveled with at least ten of them in his camp. Critics raved about the movie’s “authenticity” and its “fresh perspective.” What bullshit. There is nothing authentic about being a prostitute, and there are no fresh perspectives about going to bed with some disgusting, fat slob in exchange for the root of all evil.
Pretty Woman was fun to watch some thirty years ago, although not to be believed. It was a fairy tale, a glossy cover-up of the dirtiest profession outside murder. The trouble with making a movie that turns a whore into Cinderella is that it makes us forget the exploitation that involves prostitution. And then there’s the prurience. The film is made because the greedy ones know that men will salivate and pay for it. Voyeurism is a male disease, and the Hollywood scum know how to exploit it. No wonder Mother Earth had a quake hit Los Angeles just as the vulgar beings who vote were coming up with an—I am told—unwatchable one. The movie’s star is Mikey Madison, and I’m sure she’s enjoying her moment in the limelight. But if anyone thinks that it helps the real victims, I’ve got a bridge that connects Brooklyn to Manhattan that I can sell you at a very low price.
“There are no fresh perspectives about going to bed with some disgusting, fat slob in exchange for the root of all evil.”
Mind you, I’m no angel where the oldest profession is concerned. My only excuse is that it was during my youth. And it took place mostly in Paris, where the famous Madame Claude had probably the best whorehouse ever. Claude Grudet took a liking to me when my friend Porfirio Rubirosa first introduced me to her. She later told me that her girls—among the prettiest and best behaved in the City of Light—had ranked me among their favorites because I was always kind and very polite. The irony of the Claude girls was that whenever anyone from the tight and closed French society married someone unknown or an outsider, no sooner had the rice stopped flying than the rumors began: “She is definitely a Madame Claude girl, I would recognize her anywhere,” and that sort of thing. That’s where I came in. On three occasions, and concerning three rather grand French families, I was asked point-blank about the lady in question, and on all three times I had to answer in the negative. Not that I would ever have given the lady away, but all three times I answered truthfully that none of them was ever a Claude girl. Not many believed me.
Oh well, now that we have Hollywood making prostitution legit and a nice thing for one’s daughter to do, no use for me to say anything that might detract from the oldest profession. The movie apparently contains 471 “f–k”s, living proof that the writer oozes talent. According to Tinseltown, prostitution is ranked far above patriotism, at least in the most boring movie I’ve seen in a long time, one that won the leading man an Oscar this year. The Brutalist goes on and on, with the rich Van Buren family being the bad guys, while the Hungarian Jewish refugees are all saints. What struck me was its anti-American message. Rich white people in Pennsylvania are secret rapists and manipulators of poor Jewish émigrés. It is not enough that we have every lefty writer and poet chronicling the mythical and brutal enslavement of American blacks today, we now also have untalented Hollywood types preaching to us via the movies how rotten the U.S. really is.
The post Ignore ‘Anora’ appeared first on LewRockwell.
