Tracy Flick vs. Toxic Masculinity

Election, the satirical movie directed by Alexander Payne, met with critical euphoria when it opened in 1999. Election the satirical novel had occasioned less fuss when it came out the year before; indeed, its then-unknown author, Tom Perrotta, had barely managed to get it published. (“People don’t know whether it’s YA or adult,” his agent had told him. “They don’t know what to do with it.”) Both works used a gladiatorial high-school election to send up the national kind. But the movie had the magnificently chipper Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick, a relentless candidate for student-body president who was both drill sergeant and object of sexual desire. “A buzzing flytrap of determined overachievement … ambitious to the point of dementia,” Wesley Morris wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. “Machiavelli-minded” and “pitiless,” Manohla Dargis wrote in LA Weekly. Roger Ebert compared Tracy to Sammy Glick, the protagonist of Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, and the Broadway musical of the same name. Sammy Glick was shorthand for “backstabbing Jewish Hollywood operator,” until the anti-Semitism of the stereotype made it unacceptable. Tracy Flick, however, still has name recognition. If you want to say that a female politician is ruthlessly ambitious, you call her a Tracy Flick. The first Tracy was Elizabeth Dole. This year’s is the up-and-coming Republican representative Elise Stefanik. The ultimate Tracy, of course, was Hillary Clinton.

But then the Clinton-bashing became terrifying—“”—and the #MeToo, 20 years after the film came out. Jim McAllister, the history teacher who narrates the movie along with Tracy and happens to be the groomer’s best friend, doesn’t touch the girl. Still, enraged by her brazen competitiveness and her red, red lips (and distraught over the firing of his fellow teacher), he slut-shames her and tries to sabotage her campaign by lining up a popular jock to run against her. The actor Matthew Broderick gives McAllister a bumbling charm, but watch the movie now and the charm comes off as oily; he’s more of a Humbert Humbert than an endearing screwup. Like , Scott observed, “invites misreading in a way that puts readers’ souls at risk.”