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\n Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Netflix, Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n
An English professor is standing at the front of a lecture hall, trying to lead a seminar on Daphne du Maurier\u2019s Rebecca. One of her students interrupts, declaring that she can\u2019t \u201crelate at all\u201d to the book\u2019s treatment of \u201ca mousy-ass woman married to a toxic man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the professor \u2014 played by Rachel Weisz<\/a> in Netflix\u2019s new series Vladimir \u2014 can relate. Her husband has been caught sleeping with his undergrads, facing a Title IX hearing and a potential expulsion. And while \u201cmousy\u201d is the last adjective I\u2019d use to describe Weisz, her character grapples with the insecurities of aging \u2014 along with the sexual and professional irrelevance that comes with it \u2014 by developing an all-consuming infatuation with a hotshot younger colleague. \u201cCan\u2019t we connect to the universality of the story?\u201d she pleads.<\/p>\n This moment aims to be cutting culture-war commentary<\/a>, where debates about literary misogyny mirror arguments about campus sexual misconduct.\u00a0But I rolled my eyes. The too-woke undergrad calling out her jaded, Gen-X female professor has become one of Hollywood\u2019s most tired Me Too<\/a> tropes. In Sorry, Baby, a student calls Lolita \u201cdisgusting.\u201d In After the Hunt, a graduate student dismisses The Odyssey as \u201cothering.\u201d In T\u00e1r, 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.<\/p>\n Films and series like Vladimir, The Chair, T\u00e1r, After the Hunt, and Sorry, Baby use their university settings to critique the Me Too movement\u2019s first wave. Earlier movies like Bombshell,\u00a0Spotlight, Promising Young Woman, and\u00a0She 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 \u2014 usually women \u2014 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 na\u00efve optimism of earlier Me Too narratives by dwelling in the gray areas. But does this onscreen complexity actually deepen our understanding of sexual misconduct?<\/p>\n These university-set dramas didn\u2019t emerge in a vacuum. Many of the highest-profile sexual-assault cases of the late 2010s unfolded on campus. More recently, thousands of Epstein\u2019s emails reveal deep university ties, from helping Soon-Yi Previn get her kid into Bard<\/a> to giving Harvard president Larry Summers tips on picking up his mentees<\/a>.\u00a0Together, 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the real repercussions happen outside the Title IX office.\u00a0Students threaten their professors with \u201ccancellation,\u201d 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\u00a0and moralizing, mullet\u2019d zoomers confront each other in entirely different languages. Students rely on pop-psychology terms like \u201ctriggering\u201d and \u201csafe spaces.\u201d Their professors counter with highfalutin academic jargon, even in lowbrow contexts. (In Vladimir, for example, Weisz\u2019s character describes reality TV as \u201cphenomenologically and ontologically\u201d opposed to Greek tragedy.)<\/p>\n This cartoonish treatment of the campus culture war makes sense from the perspective of these stories\u2019 middle-aged protagonists. In Julia May Jonas\u2019s 2022 novel that inspired Vladimir, the protagonist recalls her daughter comparing her silence about her husband\u2019s misconduct to that of \u201cGermans who said nothing during the rise and reign of the Nazis.\u201d 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 \u201cget off my lawn.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019 cluelessness is played for laughs \u2014 like Roberts\u2019s character Alma shouting, \u201cThey, go away,\u201d at a nonbinary protestor in After the Hunt \u2014 these jokes about students\u2019 ripped-from-Tumblr sexual identities, from \u201cpangender\u201d (T\u00e1r) to \u201cgynsexual\u201d (Vladimir), by now feel old hat.<\/p>\n Thankfully these stories don\u2019t 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\u2019s transgressions could upset students. \u201cSurvivors are not believed by enablers who are often older women,\u201d she says. The protagonist strains to seem sensitive and politically correct in public, but in private she insists that her husband\u2019s 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\u2019s professor character by saying, \u201cSome women pretend to be allies but are not doing the work.\u201d Even the gentler Sorry, Baby pokes fun at the university\u2019s clumsy, vacant gestures of support as a pair of administrators brush off the protagonist\u2019s accusation: \u201cWe know what you\u2019re going through. We are women.\u201d<\/p>\n This skepticism of solidarity gives these campus-set dramas a distinctly nihilistic bent. By the end of the season, Vladimir\u2019s protagonist has roofied her paramour, blackmailed one of her husband\u2019s accusers, and attempted to seduce an administrator. The protagonists of T\u00e1r 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\u2019s character, who sets off the film\u2019s chain of events after confiding in her mentor about a gray-area interaction with a professor played by Andrew Garfield, abandons the very \u201cidea of justice\u201d; in Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor\u2019s character, Agnes, chalks up her assault to the general \u201cterribleness of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n This bleakness reflects broader exhaustion with the Me Too movement as backlash continues to surge. According to a 2024 Tulane survey,<\/a> rates of sexual harassment and assault remain about as high as they were at the movement\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 T\u00e1r while the film still had a male protagonist. Todd Field, who directed the film, later explained that the story would be more \u201cnuanced\u201d and \u201cuniversal\u201d if T\u00e1r\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This results in a shifting narrative focus from sexual misconduct to the women who manage it. In Vladimir, the protagonist\u2019s 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\u2019s After the Hunt character reports her student\u2019s assault to the dean only to be accused of \u201cnot being supportive enough\u201d 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\u2019s rapist exits the film entirely after the assault, and she suffers the consequences alone.<\/p>\n Displacing the perpetrators from the story allows these films to explore the contradictions and complications of women\u2019s inner lives. But at times the ambiguity feels too contrived and distorted. In Vladimir\u2019s finale, the protagonist\u2019s cabin burns down. She rescues the stack of legal pads containing her new novel, leaving her husband and her lover potentially trapped inside. Lizzo\u2019s \u201cTruth Hurts\u201d blares \u2014\u201cTurns out I\u2019m 100% that bitch\u201d\u2014 as she smirks at the camera. The moment is staged like a triumphant act of you-go-girl anti-heroism, but it\u2019s never clear whether the fire is real or a scene lifted from the novel she has been writing.\u00a0The moment feels like a narrative shrug, sidestepping the consequences of the protagonist\u2019s actions in favor of another provocative moment scored with an on-the-nose needle drop.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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 \u201cdeliberately indifferent,\u201d<\/a> a standard that can be satisfied by simply asking the offender not to do it again. Female perpetrators like Lydia T\u00e1r or Vladimir\u2019s 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 clich\u00e9, real-life cases of assault are plenty nuanced \u2014 the offender might seem like a nice guy, or the victim could seem morally gray \u2014 and in fact, that nuance often thwarts actual convictions in the courtroom.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cfeminization\u201d of the university<\/a>. These fictional administrators and their students \u2014 most, if not all, of whom are women or gender nonconforming\u00a0\u2014 conduct vicious departmental catfights about rapes that are barely depicted onscreen, if at all. In T\u00e1r, Vladimir, and After the Hunt, it\u2019s 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, \u201csomething really bad,\u201d as Agnes vaguely puts it in Sorry, Baby. No wonder it seems like there\u2019s nothing to be done.<\/p>\n Stay in touch.<\/p>\n The latest in style, self, culture, and power in your inbox.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n