When Clara calls to tell Lucy that she’s been hired for some jobs, for which she’ll be paid exorbitantly, she cautions Lucy not to treat the income as stable. “Think of it as a windfall,” Clara says. “Pay off some student loans.”

There’s a remarkably open acknowledgment here that Lucy is in debt to a third party. The modern labor relation is not supposed to include employees’ consumer debt; whether they have credit cards is not the boss’s concern. A worker’s indebtedness is supposed to come up as a source of employer leverage only in shady criminal dealings when it’s owed to the boss: drugs and immigrant smuggling, or in the sharecropping fields and company towns we learn about in history class. But with student debt so prevalent, young workers are assumed (known) to have loans they’re compelled to pay, making them even more vulnerable on the market.

If our conception of what it means to be a worker relies on having a bargaining place at the table with the boss — that is, with certain classical notion of workers’ power — then Lucy isn’t a worker. She isn’t a worker, even though all she ever does is work, as in the four stills from the film above. She’s not going to unionize her coffee shop, nor her fellow sex workers, nor the assistants at her office (from which she’s fired), nor the other medical subjects, and certainly not the students. If she tried, she’d be terminated or worse: Clara threatens her with vague but menacing consequences if she misbehaves. And what does the doctor care if she goes on strike? He’ll pay someone else and stick a tube down her throat. A strategy of resistance against precarious wage labor can’t be “unionize your Starbucks,” as valiantly as the Wobblies have tried.

I don’t know exactly what a successful strategy looks like, but I think it has something to do with the penultimate shot in Sleeping Beauty. Lucy wakes prematurely after a dangerous drug interaction to find an old man’s naked corpse in bed with her — a client who paid to die there. She opens her eyes with a kiss of CPR breathing from Clara, and sits up like the princess from whom the film draws its name.

She opens her eyes and she screams and she doesn’t stop.