Responses to Election's Tracy Flick: A Mertonian View

On the twentieth anniversary of the release of the film Election New York Times' film reviewer A.O. Scott looked back at the movie, concentrating on the matter of public perceptions of Tracy Flick, and argued that societal misogyny has viewers of the film falsely seeing Flick as the villain of the piece.

This seemed to me to beg the question of whether or not so many people really do see this film as one with a "villain" as such in this characteristically '90s piece of Are-you-being-ironic-man-I-don't-even-know-anymore--and whether they really take Flick for that figure. (After all, as Scott points out himself, here is Jim McAllister trying to sabotage a high school student by stealing a student council election, making him the obvious "villain" (complete with humiliating comeuppance by film's end), in contrast with Flick, a young person whose sole lapse in an otherwise generally respectable life was, amid the pressure created by that sabotage (even if she was admittedly not aware of exactly what was being done to her, by who) tearing down some campaign materials and failing to prevent another student happily taking the blame for it for the sake of her own agenda.

More importantly, by making the issue gender in the unilluminating fashion characteristic not just of his reviews but the whole mentality of the Times and the stratum to which it panders, Scott seemed to me to miss what was really interesting about Flick, a point on which it is useful to reference Robert Merton's theory of anomic behavior. As Professor Merton had it society sets goals for its members, and specifies approved means for achieving them. Those who accept society's prescribed goal and means are "conformists." Those who accept the goal but not the means are "innovators." Those who don't believe in the goal but go through the motions--which requires them to at least be respectful of the means--are "ritualists." Those who want nothing to do with society's game, and pull away, are "retreatists." And those who want to change society and its prescriptions are "rebels."

In America the goal is "getting ahead"--advancing oneself economically on an individual basis. There are approved and disapproved means for doing so. Conventionally "stay in school," "work hard," "get a good job" is the approved means (while we also hear much of "entrepreneurship"). Where acceptance of the approved goal but not the prescribed means is concerned we are likely to talk of "crime," though one may also see other paths as innovation--like forgoing the thankless day job as one aspires to become a celebrity. The classic ritualist is the employee who knows that playing by the rules doesn't get you ahead but puts in their hours and does the job until they can retire. "Retreatist" is a term that well-describes those we call "hikikomori." And the rebels are those who want a society that gives its members genuine choice about how to live their lives, in the sense of an alternative to sacrificing all for the Rat Race that is really what economic individualism comes down to where day-to-day living is concerned.

Tracy Flick is, of course, a conformist, indeed an ultra-conformist, raised by a mother who writes Elizabeth Dole (?!) for advice about how her daughter can be "successful," and frankly it is this and not her personal lapse, or her gender, or anything else, that rubs people the wrong way. Much more than is admitted in this society where economic individualism is the supreme principle, the highest value, a great many people are sick to the back teeth of the whole thing, the brutality and ugliness of it, the dishonesty and manipulation and exploitativeness of it. In a society where people have more scope to question the ethic of economic individualism, to discuss it and understand it and protest it, this dislike can be articulate--but this isn't one of those societies (indeed, it is not for nothing that Americans call such individualism "pursuit of the American Dream"), any such questioning utterly anathematized as Authority barrages us with its propaganda for Aspiration, and Opportunity, and Hard Work, and Success, nonstop, intolerably for those who believe consciously or unconsciously that it is all a cruel, life-destroying fraud for the perpetration of an unjust, ruinous inequality whose sole purpose is sustaining a system of privilege that is killing the planet and everything on it. Quite naturally they can't stand those who really do seem to believe in the whole thing, making things harder for everyone else in many, many ways--and the all-in-on-getting-ahead Flick draws their ire accordingly, just as, disproving the nonsense that this is an issue of reactionary attitudes on gender, the more in as those who can't stand Tracy Flick love the equally female (and LGBTQ+!) Tammy Metzler for the spirit of rebellion she displays when she calls out the nonsense of student council elections in the face of disapproving Authority.