That’s a generous assessment of a character who thinks to herself: “Now that I have more life experience, I feel sorry for Mr McAllister. Tracy’s only sin, by the ethical calculus of this reappraisal? “She cares, about her own interests and those of everybody else, so insistently, and so aggressively – indeed, so ambitiously – as to blur the line between the two.” (She’s introduced mid-affair with a lecherous married teacher later, McAllister fetishizes her severity during sex with his own wife.) Tracy’s been wronged, the argument goes, devolving into a cudgel that male commentators can use to trivialize preparedness and perfectionism in distaff candidates. These articles identified Tracy Flick as a vessel for a determination and self-sufficiency that frightens men when not actively offending them, a reading more than borne out by the film’s active interest in exposing the ugliest, pettiest sides of the adults undermining and taking advantage of her. These details were foregrounded in essays around the 2016 lead-up to the Presidential vote, pieces with titles like The Very Uncomfortable Experience of Rewatching Election in 2016 and Hillary Clinton, Tracy Flick, and the Reclaiming of Female Ambition. Clinton herself has told the star that even 20 years out, people still ask her about Election all the time. At the time of the original release in 1999, audiences already knew to read Tracy as a stand-in for Hillary Clinton Witherspoon herself has reinforced the comparison, claiming just last year that she would never portray Clinton in a movie because she already had. Which makes it all the more curious that posterity has cast Tracy Flick as an avatar for liberalism. Reese Witherspoon in Election Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MTV PRODUCTIONS In the intervening years between graduation day and the pathetic DC run-in – in an act of impotent rebellion, McAllister hurls a soda at Tracy and Geiger’s car, then scampers away towards the White House – it’s easy to see Tracy rising through the ranks of the GOP, where ruthlessness and an unslakable thirst for power are just habits of highly effective people. Her bedroom walls are adorned not with posters of inspirational women, but with her own awards and motivational platitudes like “Catch a dream and run with it!” and “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it!” Her mother, a divorcee channeling all her vicarious hopes into her daughter, spends her spare time writing letters to Connie Chung and, more tellingly, Republican leader Elizabeth Dole. She imitates the habits of studied politicians, hitting her cadences and singling out her working-class constituents to score pathos points.Īll the while, her focus remains on success rather than any particular ideology that might take her there. It’s not like dictating lunch block policy requires a nuanced platform, and still her stump speech goes heavy on upbeat vagaries over substance. But the dirty secret about résumé-padders like Tracy is that their only real commitment is to the act of staying involved. She’s invigorated by the nuts and bolts of the voting process, and as is the case with all of her numerous extracurriculars, she throws her entire self into running for class president. In her school days, Tracy Flick is “political” in the same holistic, imprecise sense that Burning Man attendees can be “spiritual” without subscribing to any formal religion. Payne doesn’t like picking sides, he’d rather withdraw in disgust, so it stands out that he picks one for her. A minor detail, perhaps, but for a character as invested in the trajectory of her own future as Tracy, it’s a significant one. He encounters Tracy years later in Washington DC, where he glimpses her getting into a limo as a staffer to the fictitious Representative Mike Geiger, identified as a Nebraska Republican. After McAllister has torpedoed his professional and romantic lives by sabotaging Tracy’s campaign for office at Carver high, after the scandal’s dust has died down, he engineers a second act for himself in New York City as a museum guide. Payne narrows his blanket contempt for the two-party system in only one moment, just short of the credits.
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