There may be no better showcase for the sociopolitical contortions our culture’s made in the last two decades than what the #MeToo ethic makes of the campus novel Blue Angel, by Francine Prose. Recently adapted—honestly but shallowly—into a movie starring Stanley Tucci under a toupee, the limited release last month inspired disapproval the source material never did.
Blue Angel and its adaptation, titled Submission (not to be confused with another problematic cultural work), tell the story of a happily married but professionally washed-up novelist—his books are out of print, his creative output on permanent pause—turned tenured creative writing professor, Ted Swenson. After years of reading comically bad student work, he falls in love with an awkwardly admiring, sullen sophomore as she delivers him chapter after chapter of her surprisingly good novel about a high school girl having an affair with her music teacher. Swenson’s student, we slowly come to understand, relishes his ruin.
At satirical high points—the unique delights of a campus novel—the hero snarks at the sexual harassment handbook and his third-wave-feminist colleague’s deconstructionist reading of the canon, both of which will have a hand in his downfall. In 2000, a student-teacher femme fatale storyline felt fresh in the context of campus hysteria: Swenson’s estranged daughter is a rape crisis counselor at the state college she attends, while his colleagues at the private college where he teaches puzzle over their students’ demands to feel “safe.”
In 2018, it’s catnip for a certain class of critic. “[The filmmaker] seems content to stay on the surface of #MeToo-era button-pushing for its own sake,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday. “In a New Movie Totally Coming Out This Year, a Middle-Aged Professor Is Seduced by an Ambitious, Duplicitous Co-ed,” sneered The Village Voice’s headline. “By making a none-too-convincing femme fatale the source of its drama, Submission comes off as an antiquated and rather reactionary campus parable,” said Variety’s Owen Gleiberman.
Prose tells me she never really set out to satirize sexual paranoia and campus politics. “It wound up being about campus politics and so forth,” she said in a recent interview, “I had no intention of writing a book about campus politics. I thought and to a certain extent I still think that I was writing a love story—let’s say an inappropriate love story—that happened to take place on a college campus.”
The novel’s climactic final scene was informed by a true story, in fact. When she hadn’t written Swenson’s sexual harassment hearing yet, Prose traveled to testify as a character witness for a friend, an academic who’d been accused at Syracuse University. “He’d had an argument with a young woman at a party, but it was not sexual harassment”—and yet, Prose recalls, “The trial was even more extreme than the trial in the novel or the movie. It went on for hours and hours and hours, and people testified with great fervor.”
While we ride out the aftershocks of the Weinstein Effect, the film’s release capitalized on sexual harassment controversy, but coincidentally: Submission was years in the making. Whatever their political context, the timeless problems that men and women always have and always will fall into informed her true subject. The dramatic template, after all, was the 1930 German film Blue Angel, in which Marlene Dietrich as nightclub singer seduces and destroys a professor.
The film retraces this same structure, but thinly. Swenson’s acidly funny inner world—wracked by self-destructive temptation and, even at its consummation, a heavy self-loathing which he wears lightly—drives the story of his destruction, yet is all but invisible in the film. So submissive is he, that “He could be one of those unfortunate girls who manage to get pregnant while convincing themselves they’re not really having sex,” he thinks, at one crucial point in their dalliance. “It’s like being charmed by a snake, not a king cobra, obviously, but a tough little adder, weaving slightly, holding him in her unblinking stare. Isn’t it the snake who gets charmed?”
Prose teaches at Bard College—literature, not creative writing. And she knocks on wood when she tells me that her students haven’t risen in protest of the politically incorrect novel she wrote before most of them were born. Theoretically, her having written the novel at all, and daring to defend it now, could inspire a complaint. But, in her classes, which are always over-subscribed, allowing for vetting of students, “It just doesn’t happen.” Blue Angel—the 1930 film and the novel both—flipped the #MeToo script long before there was one. So, for that matter, did Salome, Cathy Ames, Becky Sharp, and life itself. Why does it seem so radical, I wonder, when Prose says, “It was completely understood, until now, that people ruin themselves for love, that men could ruin themselves over women”?
The dominant story of the #MeToo moment, which Submission appears to counter, says that men ruin women. It isn’t untrue; it’s just half the truth. The film’s reception is sour in a way the novel’s wasn’t because the whole of this timeless human truth—that men and women, in love, are equally capable of doing each other great harm—is harder to accept. Whatever revisions our contemporary moment demands, the heart of Swenson’s story abides. “People fall in love, and they do insanely inappropriate things even though they know better,” as Prose puts it. They always will.
“A lot of the reviews that have come out have been have accused the film, and I think by implication me, of being insensitive to sexual victimization,” she adds. The harshest critics of the film have been men, an imbalance oddly consistent with the gender dynamic that plays out in the novel. While straight men are mostly suckered by the strange young seductress, women remain wary of her. Though they don’t say so when Swenson most needs their knowing intervention, women can tell that she’s lying at least a little.
Today, on the other hand, the storyline is less credible. “I think it would’ve been different for Ted Swenson,” she says. Were he teaching in 2018, he would be far more conscious of the consequences of an affair with a student. “Whether or not all the forces that inspire him to do what he does would’ve been completely dismantled by this awareness, I’m not sure.” One hopes they would be. So does Prose, personally. The current movement to ruin men who’ve done what her hero’s accused of is a righteous reckoning. At its core is a familiar story, a more common—and, therefore, less interesting—one than Blue Angel.
