Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Netflix, Everett Collection

An English professor is standing at the front of a lecture hall, trying to lead a seminar on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. One of her students interrupts, declaring that she can’t “relate at all” to the book’s treatment of “a mousy-ass woman married to a toxic man.”

Unfortunately, the professor — played by Rachel Weisz in Netflix’s new series Vladimir — can relate. Her husband has been caught sleeping with his undergrads, facing a Title IX hearing and a potential expulsion. And while “mousy” is the last adjective I’d use to describe Weisz, her character grapples with the insecurities of aging — along with the sexual and professional irrelevance that comes with it — by developing an all-consuming infatuation with a hotshot younger colleague. “Can’t we connect to the universality of the story?” she pleads.

This moment aims to be cutting culture-war commentary, where debates about literary misogyny mirror arguments about campus sexual misconduct. But I rolled my eyes. The too-woke undergrad calling out her jaded, Gen-X female professor has become one of Hollywood’s most tired Me Too tropes. In Sorry, Baby, a student calls Lolita “disgusting.” In After the Hunt, a graduate student dismisses The Odyssey as “othering.” In Tár, a Juilliard student refuses to play Bach because the composer slept around. In The Chair, a student derails a discussion of Moby-Dick to mention that Melville beat his wife.

Films and series like Vladimir, The Chair, Tár, After the Hunt, and Sorry, Baby use their university settings to critique the Me Too movement’s first wave. Earlier movies like Bombshell, Spotlight, Promising Young Woman, and She Said told straightforward stories of crime and punishment that chart the winding process of bringing abusers to justice. Newer campus-set narratives seek to complicate that moral clarity. Their protagonists — usually women — play multiple, often conflicting roles: wife, seductress, confidant, student, teacher, victim, perpetrator, witness, bystander. In the wake of a sexual assault, they must reconcile their place in institutions that enabled it and weather the crisis of sexuality, power, and ambition that ensues. These character studies aim to correct the naïve optimism of earlier Me Too narratives by dwelling in the gray areas. But does this onscreen complexity actually deepen our understanding of sexual misconduct?

These university-set dramas didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Many of the highest-profile sexual-assault cases of the late 2010s unfolded on campus. More recently, thousands of Epstein’s emails reveal deep university ties, from helping Soon-Yi Previn get her kid into Bard to giving Harvard president Larry Summers tips on picking up his mentees. Together, these incidents underscore that sexual assault is a systemic problem, perpetrated not only by individual predators but by cultures of silence, professional insecurity, and rigid hierarchies that enable and protect them.

This new wave of campus Me Too narratives reflects this shift in focus, taking aim at institutional cowardice and hypocrisy. In Vladimir, the protagonist becomes the subject of the same kind of sanctimonious close readings she complains about in the classroom. Her colleagues and students interpret her refusal to comment on her husband’s Title IX hearing as an implicit endorsement of his behavior, and her department threatens her with expulsion to protect its reputation. She retreats into an obsessive crush on a hunky young colleague, who becomes a blank canvas for her fantasies and frustrations, a welcome escape from the suffocating faculty potlucks and departmental meetings that make up her everyday life. Universities in After the Hunt, The Chair, and Sorry, Baby behave the same way, making public commitments to DEI while handling scandals behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, the real repercussions happen outside the Title IX office. Students threaten their professors with “cancellation,” wielding protests, course evaluations, op-eds, and town halls as a kind of vigilante justice. Blazer-clad professors played by greats like Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett, and Sandra Oh and moralizing, mullet’d zoomers confront each other in entirely different languages. Students rely on pop-psychology terms like “triggering” and “safe spaces.” Their professors counter with highfalutin academic jargon, even in lowbrow contexts. (In Vladimir, for example, Weisz’s character describes reality TV as “phenomenologically and ontologically” opposed to Greek tragedy.)

This cartoonish treatment of the campus culture war makes sense from the perspective of these stories’ middle-aged protagonists. In Julia May Jonas’s 2022 novel that inspired Vladimir, the protagonist recalls her daughter comparing her silence about her husband’s misconduct to that of “Germans who said nothing during the rise and reign of the Nazis.” Rendered in first-person summary, this remark could be a literal quote, a flippant gloss, or even a misinterpretation. But in the show, her daughter recites the line from the book verbatim, flattening this exchange into another version of “get off my lawn.”

The relentless skewering even scans as homophobic. Pretty much all of these moralizing buzzkills are nonbinary, trans, lesbians, or all of the above. Even when the older characters’ cluelessness is played for laughs — like Roberts’s character Alma shouting, “They, go away,” at a nonbinary protestor in After the Hunt — these jokes about students’ ripped-from-Tumblr sexual identities, from “pangender” (Tár) to “gynsexual” (Vladimir), by now feel old hat.

Thankfully these stories don’t let their protagonists entirely off the hook. Their central figures are steely girlbosses willing to talk out of both sides of their mouths to get ahead. In Vladimir, the protagonist balks when a colleague warns that her silence about her husband’s transgressions could upset students. “Survivors are not believed by enablers who are often older women,” she says. The protagonist strains to seem sensitive and politically correct in public, but in private she insists that her husband’s students slept with him enthusiastically even when their testimonies suggest otherwise. Other campus dramas make similar points about the hollowness of institutional solidarity. In The Chair, a student admonishes Sandra Oh’s professor character by saying, “Some women pretend to be allies but are not doing the work.” Even the gentler Sorry, Baby pokes fun at the university’s clumsy, vacant gestures of support as a pair of administrators brush off the protagonist’s accusation: “We know what you’re going through. We are women.”

This skepticism of solidarity gives these campus-set dramas a distinctly nihilistic bent. By the end of the season, Vladimir’s protagonist has roofied her paramour, blackmailed one of her husband’s accusers, and attempted to seduce an administrator. The protagonists of Tár and After the Hunt fall to similarly operatic lows, suffering humiliation after humiliation as punishment for their complicity. Meanwhile, victims simply give up. In After the Hunt, Ayo Edebiri’s character, who sets off the film’s chain of events after confiding in her mentor about a gray-area interaction with a professor played by Andrew Garfield, abandons the very “idea of justice”; in Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor’s character, Agnes, chalks up her assault to the general “terribleness of the world.”

This bleakness reflects broader exhaustion with the Me Too movement as backlash continues to surge. According to a 2024 Tulane survey, rates of sexual harassment and assault remain about as high as they were at the movement’s peak six years ago. These films also land blows against the hypocrisy and hollow rhetoric of 2010s corporate feminism, exposing how universities and self-styled girlbosses alike set accountability aside to protect their reputations.

But this cynicism has as much to do with Hollywood as with academia. As mid-budget adult dramas disappear in favor of franchise blockbusters, A-list actress-producers searching for meatier roles have become instrumental in bringing them to the screen. Weisz serves as an executive producer on Vladimir; Roberts helped shepherd After the Hunt to Amazon MGM; Blanchett signed on to Tár while the film still had a male protagonist. Todd Field, who directed the film, later explained that the story would be more “nuanced” and “universal” if Tár’s anti-hero were played by Blanchett. These roles give actresses the rare chance to play morally gray, larger-than-life figures who can swing from slapstick farce to high-minded debates about philosophy and ethics.

This results in a shifting narrative focus from sexual misconduct to the women who manage it. In Vladimir, the protagonist’s husband cracks jokes and tends to the garden while his wife and daughter meet with his accusers, strategize his defense, and weather the resulting public shaming. Roberts’s After the Hunt character reports her student’s assault to the dean only to be accused of “not being supportive enough” by the victim. This allegation, unlike the assault itself, becomes national news, sparks campus protests, and sends the protagonist to the hospital. Meanwhile, the perpetrator, played by Andrew Garfield, fades into obscurity after his firing, left to couch surf in peace. Even in Sorry, Baby, the protagonist’s rapist exits the film entirely after the assault, and she suffers the consequences alone.

Displacing the perpetrators from the story allows these films to explore the contradictions and complications of women’s inner lives. But at times the ambiguity feels too contrived and distorted. In Vladimir’s finale, the protagonist’s cabin burns down. She rescues the stack of legal pads containing her new novel, leaving her husband and her lover potentially trapped inside. Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” blares —“Turns out I’m 100% that bitch”— as she smirks at the camera. The moment is staged like a triumphant act of you-go-girl anti-heroism, but it’s never clear whether the fire is real or a scene lifted from the novel she has been writing. The moment feels like a narrative shrug, sidestepping the consequences of the protagonist’s actions in favor of another provocative moment scored with an on-the-nose needle drop.

In the same way, the imposition of ambiguity on these stories distorts the reality of reporting sexual assault. The fictional universities in Vladimir and After the Hunt respond more forcefully to their students’ accusations than many real ones do, launching investigations and firing the offenders. Meanwhile, most real-world victims never report their assaults. When they do, universities are legally required only to show they were not “deliberately indifferent,” a standard that can be satisfied by simply asking the offender not to do it again. Female perpetrators like Lydia Tár or Vladimir’s protagonist, who prey on their underlings or roofie their paramours, remain rare. While directors might dismiss the standard story of man-rapes-woman as obvious and cliché, real-life cases of assault are plenty nuanced — the offender might seem like a nice guy, or the victim could seem morally gray — and in fact, that nuance often thwarts actual convictions in the courtroom.

In obscuring this reality, these stories end up replicating the same evasions as the universities they criticize. Just as administrators deflect attention from abusers by leading victims through endless bureaucratic mazes, Hollywood foregrounds spiraling administrators while quietly letting the offenders off the hook and ultimately reinforces right-wing hand-wringing about the “feminization” of the university. These fictional administrators and their students — most, if not all, of whom are women or gender nonconforming — conduct vicious departmental catfights about rapes that are barely depicted onscreen, if at all. In Tár, Vladimir, and After the Hunt, it’s not even clear whether sexual misconduct really happened, leaving open the possibility that the victims were lying or misrepresenting consensual encounters. Sexual violence becomes abstract and existential, “something really bad,” as Agnes vaguely puts it in Sorry, Baby. No wonder it seems like there’s nothing to be done.

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