Who Is Tracy Flick Now?
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In the dark 1999 comedy Election, the overachieving student Tracy Flick—played by an up-and-coming Reese Witherspoon—dreams of political domination, starting with the race for class president at her suburban high school. For years afterward, viewers remembered Tracy as “abrasive” and “unpleasant,” in the words of her creator, the author Tom Perrotta. Her name became shorthand for female politicians—especially, during the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton.
More than two decades later, American culture is revisiting the maligned women of the past (think ,, and ). The attention isn’t limited to real-life figures, either, as sequels and reboots into the present day. In , the follow-up to the 1998 novel on which the movie was based, Perrotta whose life hasn’t quite measured up to her teenage ambitions. “It just felt right to say that there’s a Tracy Flick in every high school and not everybody ends up being, you know, the senator from New Jersey,” Perrotta staff writer Sophie Gilbert, Perrotta discussed the particular brand of ’90s feminism that animated Tracy and how the treatment of powerful women has changed—or hasn’t—since then. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
