A high-school classroom is drenched with club lighting. Electronic dance music thumps as an overgrown, hoodied boy pads over to a desk, where his lustful teacher awaits him. She drops to her knees, a swift demonstration of her style of authority. Suddenly, an audience of students materializes. Confusion replaces pleasure, and the expression on the boy’s face lasts well after his alarm clock rings.
This dream sequence opens the third episode of “A Teacher,” a promising but emotionally vacant exploration of an illicit student-teacher relationship, based on an indie film of the same name. (Both were created by the filmmaker Hannah Fidell.) The miniseries, on FX on Hulu, wishes to splash cold, purifying water on a permitted perversion, a subject of memes and giddy Post headlines: the sexual abuse of boys and young men by women.
Claire Wilson (Kate Mara) is a new English teacher at Westerbrook High School, in Austin, Texas. Even though all the trappings of suburban life are available to her, she is unhappily married to a man named Matt (the heartbreaking Ashley Zukerman). The one thing that’s missing is a baby, which Matt seems to want more than Claire does. It’s not the most imaginative backstory—Claire is the daughter of an alcoholic, the suggested source of all her problems—but Mara’s muted physicality makes the character believable. Claire is a woman who is not in touch with her body, and, as a result, is not in touch with herself. She does not understand why she gets a thrill from swiping a tube of lipstick from the grocery store, or why the stares of the boys at school make her blush.
Claire has attracted the attention of one student in particular, Eric Walker, the captain of the boys’ soccer team, who is portrayed by Nick Robinson. The twenty-five-year-old actor, here playing a high-school senior, has starred in a number of teen films (most notably, “Love, Simon”), usually as the subdued heartthrob—the kid who is not popular but, rather, adjacent to popularity, and therefore good at keeping a secret. As Eric, Robinson projects the fragility of a young man who feels emasculated by his lot in life: the absence of his father, the fact that he must work at a local diner in order to keep up with his wealthier friends at school. (Although there are virtually no Black kids at this school, the soundtrack to the students’ party scenes consists entirely of Top Forty rap hits, a detail that feels both canny and racially loaded.) Claire takes a special interest in Eric, agreeing to tutor him for the SAT, for free, outside school. “You can call me Claire,” she tells him.
The series is set in 2013, which is when the original “A Teacher” premièred at Sundance. In the chaotic, intervening years we have reached a deeper understanding of the spectrum of gendered sexual violence, and the show wears its 2020 politics on its sleeve. There are ten episodes, each bookended by content warnings that “sexual situations as well as depictions of grooming that may be disturbing” will be on display. But sharing politics with a viewership is not the basis of a successful show: the disclaimers convey both an admirable sense of responsibility and an alienating timidity.
Maybe “A Teacher” will stir awareness of the insidious patterns of abuse, but its storytelling doesn’t rise to the complexity of its subject matter. Claire and Eric feel like stock characters who have been designed with a post-show roundtable discussion in mind. They are sophisticated banalities—improvements on past tropes, but banalities nonetheless. It seems wrong to watch “A Teacher” on anything other than a TV cart that has been rolled into fourth-period health class.
That’s not to say it isn’t watchable. It is—compulsively so. Mara and Robinson are both excellent at committing to their characters’ delusions. The series is also stodgily linear, more like a film than a collection of episodes, and so getting sucked in is a simple matter of gravity. There is a compelling friction, too, in the occasional clash of genre; the grim drama sometimes drifts into a register of campy degradation that’s reminiscent of Lifetime movies and We TV shows. I found myself clinging to every jock’s clichéd invocation of Ms. Wilson’s hotness. Satire can be a defter tool than condemnation.
Unlike her male counterpart, the female sexual predator is an aberration. We don’t know what to do with her, how to make the style of her abuse distinct without fetishizing it. In 2013, Alissa Nutting published “Tampa,” a caustic first-person novel about Celeste Price, a deranged middle-school teacher who molests a fourteen-year-old student and hides behind the veil of conventional beauty. The book is stomach-turning, but it is also gripping, in large part because of the sociopathic charisma of its narrator, who has no affection for her prey. By being entirely unapologetic, Celeste is evidence of an offensive truth.
“A Teacher” is missing that shock of confrontation. FX, which is home to other auteurish explorations of women on the edge—Courteney Cox’s workaholic tabloid editor in “Dirt,” Glenn Close’s ruthless litigator in “Damages”—should have been a natural fit for an honest examination of a predatory educator. But, wary of accidentally titillating its viewers, the series has instead chosen to keep them at a frustrating distance.
The show is strongest early on, when it allows itself to tunnel into the messy dynamic between Claire and Eric. She teases him when he is surprised that she listens to Frank Ocean; he follows her on Instagram, where she posts cryptic captions that only he can understand. Their intimacy is unhealthy. It is also real. At times, it is difficult to distinguish the nurturing from the predation. Eric dreams of attending the University of Texas, which is Claire’s alma mater, and, one day, she surprises him with a tour of the campus.
There’s an interesting opacity to Claire’s motivations. She is not a strategist, an opportunist, or a sociopath. The power of this abuser is that she is weak. When Eric kisses her for the first time, after class, she recoils and seems genuinely surprised, despite her heavy flirtations with him. Her delusions appear to be fuelled by a subscription to traditional gender roles: she uses the force of Eric’s maleness to justify their sexual relationship. He started it, Claire convinces herself. Their first sexual encounter, in her Volvo, after the school’s homecoming dance, is prefaced by Claire coquettishly asking Eric for consent. It’s a different kind of toxic femininity than the one we’re used to seeing onscreen.
This murkiness doesn’t last for long. Once Claire and Eric consummate their relationship, the series becomes much more doctrinaire, backing away from the subtler aspects of their connection: bonding over family history, Eric’s vulnerable economic position. A switch has been flipped; Claire becomes cartoonishly crazed by her desire for Eric. (After their trysts, poor Eric flexes in the mirror, grunting, “I’m the man!”) The sex scenes, while unavoidable, lack a psychological aspect, and feel more like filler. “A Teacher” is careful not to arouse; any sex is balanced out by the show’s flat dialogue and indie aesthetic, which are designed to fill the audience with dread.
The second half of the series devolves into a mess of shallow sociological observations, improbable time jumps, and after-school-special fearmongering. Perhaps “A Teacher” could have benefitted from a narrator, as “Tampa” did with Celeste. Planting the story firmly in Claire’s perspective, or in Eric’s—thereby granting the victim the perch of protagonist—would have grounded it. Instead, we are jostled between the two characters, watching the inevitable crash from afar.
Spoilers ahead: Fidell’s movie ended when the student-teacher relationship was exposed; the series continues long past that, chronicling the aftermath of the affair. For this, it deserves credit. Claire and Eric’s final rendezvous trembles with a desperation and an ugliness that is difficult to watch. Claire is ostracized, and Eric is fetishized. She can’t get a job, and he can’t keep his grades up. Sex, for both of them, is sexless. Strangers expect deviance from the boy who fucked his teacher, and from the teacher who fucked her student. Their sexual partners expect them to act out a role. No wonder. ♦
