Over the weekend, my sister, mother and I settled in for a Saturday night movie together. We opted to watch Election, which had been on my list for a while but I never remembered when looking for something along that line of “high-school/coming-of-age”. I think Election falls more under the category of political satire, but I think it qualifies as both a coming-of-age film and a political satire.
Since a recurring theme in my posts this month has been a topic surrounding women, what with it being Women’s History month, I wanted to vent about this movie. Throughout the movie I could barely contain my eye rolls and disgust at some of the behavior in the film, most of it from Matthew Broderick’s character.
HARK! Spoilers under the cut!
The two sentence summary: Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is the classic overachiever running unopposed for president of student council. Jim McCalister (Matthew Broderick), a respected civics teacher and the faculty advisor of student council, encourages newly injured/former footballer Paul Metzler to run against Tracy.
It’s a story of fighting dirty, secrets, and yes, politics. I have to admit, I wasn’t sure where the story was going to go with the eventual, eponymous election, but I was very pleased with the outcome.
What bothered me was that after watching the movie, my mom and sister said they “didn’t know who to root for,” because “all of them were terrible.”
This movie was fresh off the heels of the Clinton impeachment (with source material inspired by the 1992 presidential election), and I think everyone and their mother had their own opinions about Hillary Clinton at the time (though public opinion of her went up after she stuck by Bill through it all). Of course there are clear similarities to Hillary Clinton in Tracy Flick: the short blonde hair, the perky adherence to rules, the intelligence matched with a twinge of arrogance (the “know-it-all”, if you will), and the near-bloodlust for excellence and, foreshadowing alert, the presidency. To continue on with the comparison and it’s foreshadowing, I think it is very fun that Tracy is pitted against someone with no experience that people seem to like a lot, despite him having no idea of what it takes to be president. Apparently, Hillary is well aware of the similarities, too.
I knew exactly who I was rooting for in the first ten minutes of the movie. I’ll be honest: would I want to be friends with Tracy Flick? No. She seems like she’d be a real buzzkill and make me feel mediocre if I wasn’t a straight A overachiever like she was. I’ll put it like this: I try to be friendly towards everyone, so if I had a class with her, I’d be nice, but I have the feeling that if we were in the same classes she wouldn’t think very highly of me. She also isn’t a very nice person, quickly passing judgement on Paul and his family, and even lying and taking advantage of another student who takes the fall for an act of “sabotage” later in the movie (WE WILL GET THERE).
That said, if I had to pick someone to run the student body, I want the person who has been involved for years and knows how the process works. Paul brings to the table ideas for a charity carnival and a homecoming theme, which are fun, earnest ideas, but anyone with even a semblance of understanding how event planning works knows that sort of thing calls for budgeting and planning. Paul couldn’t pull that off, even if his family is one of the more wealthy families in their small Omaha suburb.
I want someone smart and experienced in charge. Not the lovable goof with good intentions.
Meanwhile, Paul is clearly (to the audience, and not overtly to those in the film) championed by Jim McCalister, who seeks for Tracy to be taken down a peg. He admits that she is a whole other beast of intelligence and ambition, but can’t stand the idea of her going out into the world and destroying anyone who gets in her way. This is shaded by the fact that prior to this election year, she was caught engaging in a relationship with Dave Novotny, who was a close friend of Jim’s and a faculty advisor to the yearbook committee (on which Tracy, of course, was an active member). Novotny lost his job and his wife Linda, but Tracy emerged unscathed without the entire school catching on to the affair.
Jim assures in his narration that he is happy in his life, with a great wife and a teaching career he treasures. Tracy, in her narration, says she feels sorry for Jim, because he is “stuck in the same little room saying the exact same things year after year for his whole life, wearing the same stupid clothes, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money.”
Jim must agree with her on some level, because while trying (and failing, on his part) to start a family with his wife, he goes on to have a pitiful affair with Linda, sabotaging his own seemingly loving and happy marriage. Clearly, he is longing for something more. To me, this is Jim, trying to gain back some of the youth that Tracy, on some level, took from Dave.
Jim is able to see Dave as the adult who acted inappropriately with a child, but fails to see Tracy as a victim. I don’t think Tracy feels she is a victim either, but when she reflects on their relationship in comparison to her absentee father, there is clearly a moroseness to it all. When Jim and Tracy discuss, in so many words, the affair, Tracy says “if certain older and wiser people hadn’t acted like such little babies and gotten all mushy, everything would be okay.” For all her planning and bookishness, Tracy clearly had no understanding or plan for what would happen with Dave if the two hadn’t been discovered. She was a brilliant and ambitious girl, but still a child who was manipulated by a teacher. The same teacher is shown working a lower-than-mediocre job after the ordeal, with no ambition to write the novel he was so excited to write when Tracy told him she’d like to read it when he wrote it.
I don’t think this movie is anti-man, but it does show off the lecherous tendencies of weak men against a strong woman. Dave pursues the underage Tracy, and Jim attempts to sabotage her future out of his own self-loathing, jealous of the opportunities she has waiting for her that have long since dried up for him and Dave.
I knew who to root for the entire movie. Tracy wasn’t likable, but she was destined for greatness. She has a great line about destiny in the beginning of the movie: “You can’t interfere with destiny. That’s why it’s destiny. And if you try to interfere, the same thing’s just going to happen anyway, and you’ll just suffer.” Suffer doesn’t even begin to describe what Jim McCallister experiences in the final quarter of the film.
Tracy’s story made me think a lot about Taylor Swift’s song, The Man. If she weren’t a perky blonde girl (and Dave has some choice words to describe her body that I won’t quote here), but instead an intelligent male student, Tracy would have won even with competition.
I’d be a fearless leader, I’d be an alpha type…
Halfway through the movie, Tracy commits an act of “sabotage.” While working late in the yearbook office (she’s an overachiever. We’ve established that by now, right?), she notices one of her posters is hanging crooked on the wall. In an attempt to fix it, she accidentally rips part of the poster off the wall. She explodes in a fit of rage and tears down her poster, along with all the posters near her of Paul’s. After ripping them to shreds, she sits on the floor, crying in the mess of torn colorful paper and tape.
I didn’t see this as sabotage (I don’t know who would. It’s a small school. You know who you’re going to vote for in the student election. A poster isn’t going to change your mind one way or another. Posters aren’t the be-all, end-all for a student election). I saw this an outburst from a broken teenage girl. She has no friends, an overbearing mother, and now all her hard work will be for nothing because of yet another disappointing male figure in her life.
I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man…
Tracy eventually wins the election, graduates to an Ivy League school, and is last seen getting into the limo of a state Congressman working for him as an intern. It’s left ambiguous as to whether or not their relationship is strictly professional. Jim McCalister happens to spot her while visiting DC, and angrily wonders what she’s doing and who she thinks she is.
To translate in “little man baby” speak: Why does she get to go on and have a good life after everything she’s done?
They’d say I hustled, put in the work, they wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve…
Guess what, Jim. She was a child. A brilliant, ambitious child. She didn’t do anything but get taken advantage of, more than once, by men who never really grew up at all.
At the end of the movie, Tracy reflects that while she got everything she wanted: the presidency, the scholarships to the ivy league school, the grades, she didn’t feel happy. She was mostly lonely, but accepting that is how life normally is at the top.
Tracy wasn’t likable, for sure. That’s probably because, typically, to be liked, you have to be loved. Tracy never truly felt love.
To the people out there who don’t want to vote for the Tracy Flicks of the world, but don’t want to be stuck with the Paul Metzlers of the world as their leader, remember to practice love and encourage respect.
A plotline I left out in this musing was that of Tammy Metzler, Paul’s younger sister who runs for president as a way of exacting revenge on her ex-girlfriend, who dumps her and immediately starts dating her brother. She runs on the ballot of promising to dismantle the student government, claiming it useless and meaningless. She takes the fall for Tracy’s act of sabotage, getting her disqualified from the race (and getting her put in an all-girls school, where she quickly moves on and finds love again). During the vote count, it’s revealed that Tammy received more votes than Paul and Tracy. Had she not been disqualified, she would have won.
Clearly, what we need most is a change in the system.