The eye is immediately drawn to the apple. In the US, the apple is associated with teaching; more specifically as a gift from a child to a teacher, as a symbol of goodwill. More pertinently than this though, the apple is a Biblical symbol of both corruption and knowledge, encompassing both sides of the eponymous “Bad Teacher”, presumably the woman holding the apple. This apple immediately creates the teacher as an Eve figure, a woman who has come across some kind of forbidden knowledge and who will tempt innocent men to follow the same path. The ‘apple’ symbolism as The Forbidden Fruit when taken in conjunction with the apple as the Gift for Teacher creates further darker questions. The apple has a note affixed to it: “Eat Me”, but who gave this apple to Teacher? In the bible, Eve does not eat the forbidden fruit under her own volition, so who is trying to lead this woman astray? Two men stand behind the woman in the advert; but are they the tempters or the tempted? In the story of Alice in Wonderland, a similar “Eat Me” note is fixed to food. Alice grows far too tall, gaining a powerful, intoxicating authority, but also an inability to fit properly into her surrounds and an unfortunate resemblance to a snake. In the presumably more naturalistic “Bad Teacher”, we can see already that the teacher is going to have trouble controlling the power and authority which she experiences as a result of the knowledge which she has gained. I, for one, am interested in seeing what conclusions this darkly symbolic piece brings to our cinema screens.
