How Film Viewers Respond to Tracy Flick

Alexander Payne's Election hit theaters a quarter of a century ago, and, I think, has lingered a bit more in pop cultural consciousness than most of its contemporaries. (Thus did A.O. Scott devote a piece to it a few years back, which is characteristically Scott and therefore not worth reading, but all the same, testimony to its presence.)

Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.

My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.

Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.