Campus tales of power and desire typically produce neat narratives of victimhood: lecherous, middle-aged male professor preys on nubile female student. Vladimir, the Netflix series adapted by Julia May Jonas from her bestselling novel, complicates this gendered phenomenon and its predictable dynamics.
The sleazy professor, John (John Slattery), takes a back seat to his sexually voracious, yet vulnerable, postmenopausal wife (Rachel Weisz) – the unnamed 58-year-old protagonist. The central object of desire is a young man: Vladimir Vladiniski (Leo Woodall), a junior colleague at their small liberal arts college in upstate New York.
The English department is in crisis after John – once its chair – is forced to stand down following multiple accusations of sexual misconduct involving students, euphemistically dismissed by his wife as “affairs”. Our protagonist, who describes her marriage as “sexually free”, is standing by her man – but it’s not that simple.
Both book and series deliver a sharp commentary on sexual misconduct in the academy – and a deeply engrossing examination of female desire, in all its inconvenient complexity. Vladimir raises difficult questions about female solidarity and the so-called generational divide between younger and older feminists in the wake of #MeToo.
For Jonas, the title of Vladimir is “a nod to novels that name themselves after the young woman who the man is obsessed with,” including, of course, Lolita. “I wanted to flip the script and have it come from a woman’s perspective,” Jonas says.
The book is just one example of post-#MeToo campus fiction that breaks the tidy binary of abuser and abused. It opens:
When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me […] What I like most about old men now, however, and the reason that I often feel that perhaps I am an old man more than I am an oldish white woman in her late fifties […] is that old men are composed of desire. Everything about them is wanting.
The delirium of falling
Vladimir is structured around two predation plotlines: one grounded in reality and the other in a fantasy that is secretly harboured, obsessively rehearsed and ultimately enacted.
The first narrative thread introduces us to the narrator and her predicament. John’s affairs, she assures us, were consensual and “conducted with [her] vague understanding that they were happening.”
As the embodiment of white privilege and the romanticised God professor of the past, John’s proclivities are – unlike his wife’s – hidden in plain sight:
Because he was a general advocate of women in academia and women writers, I, not as his wife, but as a professional, along with the rest of the college, had collectively decided to look the other way.
The second thread, which is equally complex, depicts the protagonist’s vertiginous descent into “crushing obsession” with Vlad. An experimental novelist seemingly destined for literary stardom, he awakens in the self-described “old girl” a “growing excitement and wildness”.
I wanted to be intimate with him, so deeply intimate, from that moment I saw him […] It was as if an entirely new world had opened up […] a pit with no bottom – a continual experience of the exhilarating delirium of falling.
As the plots converge, the predatory couple navigate a series of personal and professional crises that upend our assumptions about age, gender and power – reminding us, as writer Chloe Schama observes, that “moral absolutism is nothing if not dull”.
John remains resolute in his belief he has done nothing wrong, as he is hauled before a tribunal. The institutional playground of male desire is now a graveyard for men like him.
Meanwhile, his wife – complicit in his sordid affairs and unwilling to express remorse – surrenders to her excessive appetites and masturbatory daydreams. Her frenzied fixation hurtles toward a shocking act of sexual predation, in a jaw-dropping gear shift. “My prey, my prize, my Vladimir,” she muses at the critical moment.
Campus sex scandal stories
In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s satirical campus novel Disorientation, PhD student Ingrid Yang is midway through a thesis on the fictional Xiao-Wen Chou – “America’s greatest Chinese American poet” – when she discovers the literary icon is actually an old white man named John Smith, who has been passing as Chinese, using black wigs, yellowface makeup and eyelid tape.
At first, Ingrid’s instinct is to let it lie – until she remembers: “academics universally adored one thing: academic scandals”.
The university scandal – and the campus sex scandal in particular – is a perennial favourite of popular culture. In the 2003 film Mona Lisa Smile starring Julia Roberts, an Italian instructor seduces students at the elite all-women’s Wellesley College – where Hillary Clinton obtained her bachelor’s degree.
Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys (1995), and its film adaptation starring Michael Douglas (2000), follow an English professor and blocked novelist who sleeps with his students, neglects his (third) wife, and refuses to acknowledge the child he’s conceived in an adulterous affair with the university chancellor – his head of department’s wife.
Fictional professors, it seems, commonly sleep with their students or colleagues. In fact, as cultural critic William Deresiewicz observes, “lust is almost the only emotion that movie professors ever express toward their students”.
Vladimir, in this respect, is no exception.
‘It was a different time’
But Vladimir does chart new territory in its depiction of the generational divide between the prickly professor and her young female students. In one scene, she imagines them as a maddened mob, beginning “to view their utensils as tiny pitchforks that they moved up and down”.
Dark academia, a genre known for its complex themes and shadowy aesthetics, is rife with characters who cross moral thresholds. In its real and fictional accounts of abuse, students are typically constructed as victims of their professors’ sexual and political machinations.
In Vladimir, the female students are at once disempowered by their abuse and empowered by their politics. As a collective, they demand the predator’s wife cease teaching. Her presence in the classroom, they insist, is triggering. Later, they call for and secure a curriculum review of her Women in American Literature class.
Florence, a postmodernism scholar “obsessed with the idea of men sexually trespassing”, commiserates with her colleague: “You have to be so careful, you get no support from the administration […] the students rule the roost.”
The professor, in turn, both fears and distrusts her students – a mutual suspicion that quickly escalates into generational antagonism. She bristles at their “post hoc prudery” and dismisses her husband’s accusers as merely “reacting to a moment now” – rendering her, in their eyes, a woman fatally out of sync with the times.
When her daughter Sid challenges her, “But didn’t you understand there was a power dynamic?”, she responds, “Of course, but aren’t we attracted to power?” She says of her generation:
we were all still thinking about sexual liberation – about freeing women from feeling that if they were sexual they weren’t serious, or good, or that they would be judged. We didn’t think of sex as trauma.
In her novel, Jonas avoids moralising, though her protagonist’s bid for nuance is convenient – and at times, self-serving. “He didn’t drug them or coerce them,” she tells her daughter. “None of those women suffered professionally or academically because of your father.”
The irony, of course, is that she fails to recognise her own predatory behaviour – and Sid, too, exploits a power differential when she sleeps with an intern at her firm.
A reckoning?
While the Netflix series is largely loyal to the novel, its ending represents a significant departure, reframing the narrative from a dark comedy to a gothic revenge story.
When the novel was published, its conclusion was criticised as rushed, uneven and overly reliant on symbolism. While the new ending is wobbly, the ambiguity at least gives the series texture.
On screen, Weisz is magnetic in her monomania, but the adaptation is limited by its glossy handling of the subject, which is precisely where the novel excels. The series struggles to tame the novel’s slippery characters and weighty themes.
Indeed, the recent spate of campus television series that probe academic life, such as The Chair (starring Sandra Oh) and Lucky Hank (adapted from Richard Russo’s 1997 novel Straight Man), tend to flatten their characters into tropes.
In Vladimir, Weisz’s many comments to camera open a window into the narrator’s uncensored thoughts and unrequited desires. Most are transplanted from the novel, though some are new. “I’ll just keep vigil,” she tells us as things start to spiral.
As a playwright, Jonas has an instinct for conflict, and the series, like the novel, is mordantly funny. In one address, the narrator laments that, as an older woman, she will never again provoke “a spontaneous erection”. In another, she confesses: “I have always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and I’m surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.”
Vladimir, by contrast, is a superficial rendering: all breathless close-ups of his sculpted chest and lingering cutaways to his calves. Of course, this may be the point – her flagrant objectification reduces him to a stereotype. He knows it, too.
“You cast me in this role,” he tells her. “I’m just playing it out for you.”
In the same way John fails to see his students as students, the protagonist cannot grasp that Vladimir is her colleague, not her plaything.
The novel concludes: “Oh, shame.”
The article has been republished from The Conversation under the Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
