“There’s something very unseemly about a woman neglecting her only daughter so she can slobber over a married man who is, in all probability, just being nice.” I don’t blame our nameless narrator for feeling this way when she says this: She’s just been tackled into her swimming pool by her own drunk daughter, who got dumped by her partner for sleeping with an intern, fucked some guy on the train back to her parents’, and attacked her own mom, thinking she was one of her dad’s collegiate flings. All this could have been avoided had the horny professor picked up the phone.
But I mean, would you? You’re flirting with a fascinating coworker at a time when you feel your sexual power has waned. You’re busting through over a decade of writer’s block by writing up your hot bar-bathroom fantasy about him. You’re masturbating, and hey, let he who has never ignored a text with their hands full cast the first stone. Your new friend Vladimir has reawakened a lot of things about you. I get how dealing with your daughter feels like going back to sleep.
Sid’s boundary issues, however, indicate that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree where her father is concerned. Busted with a date by the college president and his wife, who’d agreed to postpone his hearing, he’s now back in the hot seat. (His date was 28, not an undergrad, so I’m not sure it’s any of their business, but given the situation I get it.) A lawyer herself, Sid seems concerned mainly with whether her mom knew or taught any of the students John slept with. Lying, the narrator denies it.
Then she heads right to the student in question, Lila, and shares a cigarette with her. Lila assures the professor that joining the case against John has nothing to do with her, or the bad grade the professor gave her. They seem to have reached a real understanding, until our heroine — in a hurry to make a Brazilian wax appointment, about which she gets like 20 automated text-message reminders over the course of the episode — tells Lila “I appreciate you taking some responsibility for your actions.” Wrong thing to say to a woman who feels she was taken advantage of by your husband, lady!
Lila ditches her smoke and gets the hell out of there. It’s reminiscent of an earlier, similarly Tàr-esque moment, when the professor joking tells a student who doesn’t get the gothic romance of Rebecca that they’ll need to find her a lover so she’ll understand the book. That’s gonna go in someone’s file.
It’s neither her husband’s case nor her own role in it that’s preoccupying the professor, of course: It’s Vladimir. In a last-ditch effort to stave off interpersonal turmoil, she attempts to engineer a friendship with Vladimir’s beautiful, brilliant, troubled wife, Cynthia. And god bless her, but this woman could not be less interested. She trots out so many excuses for not getting together with the professor that I’m surprised she didn’t hit “I have to wash my hair.” By the time Vladimir shows up with his and Cynthia’s adorable kid for a pool party that was supposed to be a just-us-girls thing — Cynthia has a migraine, how about that — the professor can at least say “Well, I tried.”
So she spends the afternoon giggling and bugging her eyes out as Vladimir uses their diving board and swimming pool, his young body filmed in slo-mo in all its ripped, dripping-wet glory. All of this is openly amusing to her husband, John, who caps off the evening by jokingly asking her if she’s in love with the guy and getting fucked in response. All that sexual energy has to go somewhere, after all!
But it’s not all in the professor’s head. Throughout the afternoon and evening, Vladimir keeps dropping unsubtle hints that his is an unhappy marriage. There’s a lot of talk of Cynthia’s suicide attempt, snide mentions of her neglect of her faculty mailbox (the narrator stole one of her paychecks so she could look up her and Vladimir’s home address), a straight-up admission that they’re on the brink of divorce. (Both staying together and splitting up, he says, are hard, and you have to “Choose your hard.” In having an affair because my wife doesn’t understand me terms, he’s displaying like a mandrill.
A fascinating frisson arises from all this. We’re seeing everything through the professor’s eyes, so Vladimir comes across like a misunderstood dreamboat genius being neglected by his standoffish wife. But he can just as easily be described as a gym-bod literature bro who’s clearly thinking about stepping out on the mentally ill woman who nearly lost her life to postpartum depression while raising their toddler. That makes him sound a whole lot less sympathetic.
But such is the power of the professor’s gaze that we can feel what it’s like to ignore the red flags. The professor is so twitterpated by this guy — I feel like I could recreate his calf muscles from memory after watching the narrator watch him run — that even as you watch her neglect or mess up nearly every aspect of her life, you get it. Considering that this all ends with a man chained to a chair, I wonder just how long Vladimir can make us see things through our heroine’s besotted eyes.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
