A Tracy Flick doesn’t come around every four years
The scrappy underdog from Alexander Payne's Election has been misunderstood and reappraised for 25 years. That's a hell of a character.
Film Features Tracy Flick
This May, Glee turns 15. For better or worse—often both, within the same episode—the series is singular. It ushered in a wave of musical TV shows, and with it a new era of merchandising. Its young cast might not have become Euphoria famous, but they were household names for a generation and a constant presence in the pages of tabloids. There’s a case to be made that Glee is the ultimate Obama era show, running from 2009 to 2015 and championing inclusion and difference. But its pilot, the thing that made the show an overnight success, is a throwback—one strikingly similar to Election.
Election, the 1999 Alexander Payne film, remains one of the best of its genre (and a favorite of President Obama), and what Glee creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuck, and Ian Brennan saw in Payne’s script is obvious. Election is set in high school, but it is firmly a movie for adults. Glee, too, was firmly for adults, at least at the beginning. Both the film and the pilot see high school as a messy, cutthroat, downright despicable environment where some teachers deceive students into joining their extracurricular activities and other teachers sexually assault students (or are at least accused of it, in Glee’s case). At the center of both are ambitious teenage girls who possess such intense clarity about their goals that they’re both oddly endearing and completely terrifying.
Glee’s Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and Election’s Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) are introduced identically. Tracy wants more than anything to win student body president and go on to a political career; Rachel wants more than anything to lead a winning show choir and have a career on Broadway. After hearing from both of their teachers, we’re introduced to them via voiceover where they state these goals clearly. Both introductions see them storm down their school hallways and voiceovers about their goals. (Glee also recreates Tracy’s yearbook sight-gag via Rachel later in the season.) Whether the Glee audience knew they were watching an Election riff was beside the point; Payne had introduced Tracy in such an effective way that the signifiers worked as shorthand a decade later.
The difference between Tracy and Rachel, though, is that Glee takes pains to redeem Rachel over the course of its six seasons. Sure, she is ambitious to a fault, and sends a prospective glee club member to a crack house because she perceives her talent as a threat. But by the end of Glee’s (wildly uneven) run, Rachel has been humbled and purified, striking out on her big Broadway and television career, sending her home to coach her former glee club to victory. She still gets a Tony anyway, achieving her dreams in what felt like a toothless wish-fulfillment fantasy even as the finale was airing.
Tracy achieves her dreams, too, but Election never softens her; if anything, she hardens upon the realization that the world is cruel, and that people are in fact out to get her. The thrust of Election’s conflict comes from Tracy’s relationship with Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick). Mr. M is the advisor for the student government, and Tracy is running for president unopposed. He has a personal vendetta against Tracy because he holds her partially responsible for his work bestie, Mr. Novotny, getting fired for statuatory rape. (Election takes pains to paint Tracy as an active agent in the relationship with Novotny, but there is no scenario, no matter how mature Tracy may think she is, where an adult teacher and an underage student are on equal footing.) Mr. M recruits popular jock Paul Metzler to run against her, and when the results are close, Mr. M attempts to destroy the ballots that would secure Tracy’s win. Tracy doesn’t behave completely ethically—for example, she allows Paul’s sister Tammy to be expelled for Tracy’s bad behavior—but Mr. M’s actions are unambiguously worse.
In the 25 years since Election premiered—even over the years that Glee was airing—our culture was reappraising the way it treats ambitious women, women for whom Tracy had become something of an avatar. In a 2001 review of Legally Blonde, critic Michael Shilling, complimenting Witherspoon’s performance, compared Tracy to Lolita narrator Humbert Humbert; in 2019, New York Times critic A.O. Scott likened Mr. M to the same character. We as a culture are only just moving past the impulse to slot Tracy Flick in the easy role of the villain; her misdeeds are minor compared to those of the grown men around her. It’s not her actions but her personality, compared to the mediocre but friendly men around her, that earns her scorn. She does not fit the male fantasy thrust upon Lolita. Tracy’s greatest crime is that she has, as the kids say, bad vibes.
And Tracy’s impact hasn’t been locked to fiction either: Hillary Clinton, a woman whose own reputation, public image, and approval rating has fluctuated wildly over the past 35 years, has long weathered comparisons to the character, especially during her 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns. This isn’t a compliment; Tracy was still firmly in villain territory here. But it’s indicative of how rare and how derided this female archetype is that both Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Dole, two women who have little in common with Clinton, earned the same comparison. Election itself, though, gives us a pretty straightforward analog to the real world. Tom Perotta, author of the novel that the movie is based upon, modeled the scenario off the 1992 presidential election, and it doesn’t take a detective to figure out who is who. Tammy is the spoiler; Ross Perot. Paul is the popular, affable guy who sounds a little doofy; Bill Clinton. Tracy is the wonk, the bad-vibes inevitability; George H.W. Bush.
What makes Tracy such an enduring character, and where imitators like Rachel Berry have faltered, is the refusal to make her anything but a shameless careerist. There are no warm fuzzies in the epilogue where Tracy discovers the power of friendship. At her dream school, Georgetown, she is just as alienated from her classmates as she was at Carver High. The last we see of her, she’s getting into a Republican congressman’s limo. Tracy may have grown up financially insecure with a single mom, and may have been mistreated by powerful men in her public school, but those experiences clearly didn’t turn her into an activist. They turned her into someone who put her own security above all else, even when that “security” involves orbiting the same older men who have dismissed and despised her. While “Tracy Flick” has become shorthand for a caricature, those are the details that make her feel all too human.
Tracy isn’t a character that wins a ton of sympathy, though she deserves some. Bad things happen to and around her, and they don’t make her better. She doesn’t turn the other cheek, she accumulates power. She doesn’t slot neatly into hero or villain, agent or victim. She is so self-assured that the men who mess with her know they were actually just footnotes to her life—that she has surpassed them, and they hate her for it. Maybe you know a person or two like this, but in pop culture, a character this real (especially a female one) is rare. When they do exist, like Rachel Berry, they always seem to get softened sooner or later. Maybe we really are scared of Tracy Flick after all.
17 Comments
Tracy Flick is not the villain of Election, she is only the villain to Matthew Broderick’s character, who is very clearly the one who is in the wrong and is thoroughly punished for his misdeeds. This is not some secret, subtextual reading – it is the explicit plot of the film. Flick wins, Broderick loses, justice is served.
In the legal sense, yes. But it is clear that we are supposed to identify and sympathize with Broderick’s character and find Tracy insufferable. Although the sequel novel (not filmed) corrects some of this and makes her more human.
Well, sure. We identify with Broderick and then spend the arc of the film learning about what happens if we follow the dark path of temptation. And by watching Broderick’s character bottom out, we realize that Flick wasn’t the villain after all. His extremely petty revenge at the end of the film underscores this – his character still hasn’t moved on, but the audience has. Flick being presented as insufferable is how the audience learns this lesson. I certainly don’t think Election is a better movie if it’s a Horatio Alger story about a noble, ambitious young girl achieving success through hard work.
The film is all about the ways people lie to themselves. Mr. M. blames Tracy for his own evil thoughts and deeds, and for the evil deeds of his friend. Tracy denies that her relationship with the teacher was ‘looking for a father figure’ when that’s what it obviously was.
Pretty much every major character in the movie was lying to themselves.
I’m not sure she was looking for a father figure. I think her mom had turned her into such a striver that she was willing to go along with a teacher’s advances without much thought or emotion if there was some gain to be had from it. It’s part of what makes her such a complex character. Tracy’s mercenary, but somewhat understandably so (and clearly let down by people who should have known better).ETA: Speaking of lying to himself, I love Broderick turning to offer some fond farewell to the principal who just fired him, who has already nudged the door shut and moved on. Dude couldn’t care less about Mr. M.
The film is genius in playing to the public’s inherent affection towards Matthew Broderick, who is very much introduced as the relatable audience surrogate reacting to the absurdly heightened political ambitions of a high school student. Over time more is revealed about his character – his cold relationship with his wife, who seems to want nothing more from him than sperm, his knowledge that his friend is sleeping with a student, later taking advantage of said friend’s (now) ex-wife’s vulnerability, and ultimately taking from Tracy what was rightly hers. Meanwhile Tracy is inherently unlikeable from the beginning. Then you see where she lives and how her mother treats her. She doesn’t necessarily become likeable, but at least understandable. And the movie doesn’t pull its punches about Novotny ending up a grocery store stockboy and McAllister leading tours in DC after both wronged her and lost.The final shot of her getting in the limo with her state’s Senator was the cold realization that sometimes naked, mercenary ambition sometimes does work (this point is first made when Klein can’t bring himself to vote for himself, thus handing the election to Tracy – who of course doesn’t hesitate). Especially in Washington. Plus based on what happened earlier in the movie there’s the suspicion that the reason a pretty college student is climbing into a limo with a Senator may be due to more than just landing a plum internship.
I didn’t think the movie was trying to make anyone a hero or a villain. Tracy and Broderick’s characters are antagonistic toward one another, but they’re ultimately both protagonists in the story the movie is telling. In the sense of “the moral of the story,” I guess you can point to the comeuppance Broderick’s character gets for his actions as proof that he is “a villain,” but we spend so much time with him, I think the audience is supposed to sympathize more with him than with Tracy.I’m too lazy to scroll up and check if the author of this piece (which was surprisingly well-written; more of this stuff please) called any character a villain first and you’re just responding to that. If so, please just take what I wrote as my two cents. ✌️
I agree – these are all three-dimensional characters with normal human emotions and weaknesses. Flick starts as the villain because let’s face it, we’ve all known or know people like her and they bug the shit out of us. We know her type so well that it only took a couple of minutes for the movie to establish her character.
It is very clear, and yet for years people chose to see Flick as the villain. I wonder why that was? (j/k I know why.)
Well, hold on a sec. What happens when Tracy becomes a MTG figure, or a Trump aide, a tradwife vlogger, or someone who horse-trades away school lunches in an earmark?She could have/should have been stopped before she became a poisoned dragon. Too late.
The teacher’s evil is petty, and contained, and limited to one person.Flick’s evil will affect thousands or millions of people. Scale Matters.
Who’s the bigger villain? The dude who aided the statutory rape of Trump’s classmate, or Trump?
I hate Rachel Berry, and Lea Michelle is insufferable. Whatever they did to rehab the character, they constantly regressed her because they couldn’t figure out anything else for her to do, so it was a cycle of being humbled and bullied, becoming a team player, being a bully to her own friends, repeat for 6 years.
Man I love this movie. Matthew Broderick plays just the most two faced scheming piece of shit on the planet. And the stakes are so low! He’s trying to get revenge on a high schooler and plow his friend’s wife. We’re only sympathetic to him since he’s so pathetic.With Reese Witherspoon’s character, there is no question to who she is. She’s a social climber who is running for student government to pad out her college applications. She’s obnoxious, but she’s also a teenager and that’s what student government is there for. There is no actual responsibility or authority and the student body knows this.
For a very interesting counterpoint to Tracy Flick, Reese Witherspoon also stars in the sadly overlooked and extremely weird “Freeway” as the illiterate and abused daughter of a junkie hooker in LA, who is menaced by an initially charming serial killer. I don’t want to say more, except that her character is the exact opposite of Tracy Flick, except in the ways that she isn’t. Compare and contrast. It’s a mind blower.
Freeway is excellent. It’s my favorite Reese Witherspoon role, with Tracy Flick a close second.What a performance!
For a great triple header, seek out “Wild”. It’s based on a book about a moving and very personal true story and is an outstanding movie.
I use this movie as an example of how people you disagree with can do what they think is the right thing in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. Even after Mr. M has been proven demonstrably wrong, years later when he encounters Flick again he still hasn’t changed his underlying feeling that he was right and everyone else just doesn’t understand that Flick is a monster.Maybe we all have our own Tracy Flicks we need to get past.