But through it all, you’re nagged by guilt your head knows that what you’re watching is an unethical and illegal act.Īs Vanity Fair’s Sonia Saraiya wrote in her review, the series “toys with the viewer’s embarrassment, or conversely, their voyeurism” in these scenes. The sex scenes might turn you on, as sex scenes tend to do. As it looks like they fall in love, you root for things to work out. In the early episodes, Claire hardly appears to be a predator. FX worked with RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, on providing resources for viewers, and Fidell spoke with psychologists who specialize in sexual assault to ensure that the series was accurate in its depiction of the long-term toll an experience like this would take on the victim, as well as, in a rare example when it comes to TV dramatizations, the realities of “grooming,” the manipulative behavior used to coerce the younger victim.īut a key participant in A Teacher is the audience, who becomes somewhat complicit in the affair. “Doing research for the show, I was really shocked about how often something like this happens, and then how often it's quickly forgotten and not covered again.”įirst-time showrunner Hannah Fidell translated the FX on Hulu series from her 2013 indie movie. “The media and our culture has sensationalized these stories in headlines and clickbait,” Robinson says. Claire grapples with her “mistake,” but struggles to understand the true weight of it as she, post-prison release, attempts to restart her life in a haze of bitterness and shame. Eric is first lauded as “the man”-he bagged the hot teacher!-but, as the timeline fast-forwards years, you see how he’s turned into a zoo exhibit, then, ultimately, irreparably damaged by the abuse he mistook for bliss as a teenager. There’s an abrupt shift halfway through the run. Just when you’re whisked away on the honeymoon phase with them, the anvil drops. But the passion and the sex is so great that she uses her position of control to break her own rules.Īs the series alternates perspectives, you see how each justifies their participation in the relationship. She’s the adult and he’s the minor, so she’s firm on the rules and the boundaries. What follows is an affair as it might play out in a romance novel. But later, at the homecoming dance, she leads him to her car, tells him to get into the back seat, and initiates sex. She pushes him away with a scold for his impropriety. Eric reads what he thinks are signs and eventually kisses her. They go on a campus visit together another weekend. Claire bails him out of trouble one night. Tutoring turns to friendship which turns into flirting. But ultimately you watch the series and you see the consequences of this type of sexual assault and power dynamics at play.” “We wanted it to be complicated for people,” says Kate Mara, who stars in and executive produces a new series that attempts to subvert the ways we’ve been conditioned to take in stories about teacher-student relationships. Lost in all of this, however, is the reality of the situation for the actual humans involved, whose lives are impacted long after the affair ends, the media interest wanes, and the swirls of judgment start to evaporate. It’s a pop-culture trope.īoth in society and in pop culture, the teacher-student affair has become unfortunately ubiquitous, alternately bastardized in “hot for teacher” celebrations of machismo and exploited-even fetishized-in media-circus scandals that mine salacious details for clicks and ratings. It’s a grotesque, criminal form of sexual predation and abuse.
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