A Teacher, the new Hannah Fidell film opening digitally and on the big screen today, explores the erotic and psychologically demanding relationship between a High School teacher and the student she is sleeping with. I cannot help but think this film would have been dead in production had the genders of the teacher and student been reversed. Not since Lolita has this sort of dark territory been properly addressed, and even then the gender descriptions played a huge role in the interpretation of the relationship. I wonder if films like this aren’t working to maintain the dominant stereotype of woman as nymphet and man as hapless victim?
Lolita is now internationally known as a term for a hyper-sexual young woman. How it got there has more to do with the film than the book. In Kubrick’s well-recieved adaptation, the 14 year old girl is generally seen as a sex object and portrayed at times as wanting to maintain that image. Therefore the struggle becomes for the man to somehow resist what are more modernly portrayed as his acceptable urges to be with this woman. This old refrain is common today. I recently shared an Axe commercial with one of my classes. In the commercial the ‘announcer’ takes on the role of a lecturer as he explains that women are getting ‘hotter’ and that threatens all men. We tend to internalize such things, sparking debates such as ‘what does she think is going to happen when she dresses like that?’ As if my gender is so weak that we’ll take a woman’s attire as an implicit request for sexual advances. In fact, many men do just that, and this is what troubles me about the new film A Teacher.
I haven’t seen the film, so I will only speak to the way it is being advertised. Everything about this film suggests a certain neediness and desire to ‘take’ the high school boy. At the same time, the only suggestion of wrong doing comes from snippets of her worry of getting caught. Moreover, she seems more concerned about the boy’s interest in other women and the boy acting like a boy by posting pictures of her than she does about the fact that what she is doing undermines long standing social mores.
Or does it?
Maybe what I’m bothered by is the implicit perception here that it is more okay for a female teacher to engage a high school student than it is for a male student to do the same. When we see this in the media, the idea of who is taking advantage of who shifts, because of the strange duality of who we call victim and when we call them victims. Or maybe I’m bothered that this portrayal won’t advance the conversation at all but instead will confuse the matter and make us second guess who is to blame the next time this sort of thing happens in our schools.