Two decades later, Tom Perrotta’s Election deserves recognition for its lasting relevance
Why Tom Perrotta’s 20-year-old novel and its film adaptation deserve recognition today Sadaf Ahsan
WHAT MAKES TOM PERROTTA’S NOVEL INFURIATINGLY PROPHETIC IS THAT TRACY RARELY WINS THE READER OVER.
ELECTION IS A CAUTIONARY TALE FEATURING AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN.
‘Sign up for tomorrow today!” Such is the prescient slogan of Tracy Flick, the perky, preppy, headstrong heroine of Tom Perrotta’s seminal 1998 novel Election, which was adapted into a film starring Reese Witherspoon in one of her most defining roles the following year.
At the time, Tracy wasn’t much more than a cult favourite, but since then she has served as inspiration for countless type-A women of a similar brand – fictional and otherwise – including everyone from Rachel Berry to Paris Gellar to the real-life Samantha Bee. But more than anything, Tracy has become a face for the relentless rise of female ambition in a man’s world.
This dynamic plays out through her high school’s election for student president, where Tracy fi nds herself not so much pitted against her classmate Paul Metzler (a.k.a. “Mr. Popular”), but against Mr. M (played by Matthew Broderick in the film), the disgruntled history teacher who seems to have it out for her. For reasons even he doesn’t quite understand, he works hard to manipulate the election against her by convincing the much more lovable Paul to run.
But what makes Perrotta’s novel almost infuriatingly prophetic is that, while Tracy is by all rights the antihero of the novel and Mr. M very much the villain, because she finds her own ambitious personality constantly foiled by Paul’s winning persona, Tracy very rarely wins the hearts of readers.
On paper, there is no question Tracy deserves to win the election. She’s an A student, and has been dreaming of this her whole short life. But while she is post- Clinton, she is also post- Lewinsky. She likes to wear short, tight dresses because she knows the effect they have on men. She even has an affair with Jack, her English teacher, who finds himself out of a job after he can’t take no for an answer and she outs him to the principal, a scenario she believes is partially why Mr. M is irked by her. In other words, she is not only proudly ambitious, but sexual and possibly promiscuous – every bit the confident woman, but also, a man’s worst fear.
In a 2017 interview with Vox, Perrotta said of Tracy’s genesis, “I was writing about my own generation of women. I went to a workingclass high school, and then I went to Yale, and I met all these women who had been empowered in a way that a lot of the girls I had grown up with hadn’t been. They felt that the world was wide open for them. They were powerful figures, and I was both fascinated by them and a little intimidated. And then I went and I taught at Yale and Har- vard for 10 years after that. I was just teaching freshman comp but meeting all these powerful young women, and I did have this feeling of, this is something new. I didn’t know that these sort of superwomen existed. They were scary to a lot of men, I think, and at least I think I put my finger on that sort of ambivalence that came from encountering these women.”
In order to present Tracy as something revolutionary and at maximum shrill, Perrotta gave us Paul, the sort of guy who always manages to annoyingly scrape by, usually by some stroke of luck. At one point, he admits that entering the election made him feel as though he had “just opened my eyes after a 16- year nap and was wide awake for the first time ... I’d check out the news and where there just used to be a blur of names and faces, now it was like, ‘Holy shit, people are killing each other. Little kids are starving to death.’”
Paul credits Mr. M for helping him wake up, a man who considers him “the perfect candidate” – attractive, charming, nice, “without an ounce of arrogance or calculation.” In other words, Paul is everything Tracy is not.
Aggressive in her ambition, she doesn’t care about being likeable. For her, the priority has always been and continues to be working harder, even in the face of injustice. She describes it as a matter of “competence vs. popularity,” a gender paradigm not exclusive to Election but actually quite prevalent in the workplace, where men are often rewarded for sheer confidence and women are thwarted for “only” having the resumé to prove it.
While he often applauds Paul for his likability, Mr. M describes Tracy as “bad news, 110 pounds of the rawest, nakedest ambition I’d ever come in contact with. She smouldered with it, and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t find her fascinating and a little bit dangerous, especially after what I’d heard about her from Jack. She was a streamroller and I guess I wanted to slow her down before she flattened the whole school.”
His resentment is not only based on her willingness to do all of the work to get ahead, but in his attraction to her; it’s a psychosexual battle of wills for him, and yet another unfortunate power dynamic she has to fight through. The obstacles are so familiar and relentless, they become routine for Tracy, and are mirrored in today’s reality.
Inevitably, Tracy has become less of a comic monster and much more a picture of modern feminism, perhaps best exemplified by Hillary Clinton, a woman to whom she drew comparisons even in the late ’ 90s, right down to their blonde bobs. In fact, when asked recently if she would ever play Clinton in a film, Witherspoon said she already had.
In the film, after realizing Paul has decided to run, Tracy has the following voice-over: “I believe in the voters. They understand that elections aren’t just popularity contests. They know this country was built by people just like me who work very hard and don’t have everything handed to them on a silver spoon. Not like some rich kids who everybody likes because their fathers own Metzler Cement and give them trucks on their 16th birthday and throw them big parties all the time. No, they don’t ever have to work for anything. They think they can just, all of a sudden, one day out of the blue, waltz right in with no qualifications whatsoever and try to take away what other people have worked for very, very hard for their entire lives! No, didn’t bother me at all!”
It’s hard not to imagine Clinton having a similar perspective after finding herself running against billionaire Donald Trump, a reality television star who had decided to run for president on a whim – and quickly became known for a misogynist rhetoric that led to hordes of Mr. M- like supporters chanting for Clinton’s jailing or, even, execution.
When Tracy manages to get the votes and earn her win, Mr. M spots her elated reaction before the announcement, and is so reviled by her joy that he decides to pocket some of the votes. She stands up, only to have Paul’s name called: a familiar devastation, but again, a routine injustice.
At the time, Election was described as a dark comedy with a hilariously monstrous female character. Today it could be considered a cautionary tale featuring one in an increasingly long line of ambitious women, discomfiting solely because such a characterization was once so uncommon. In 1998, Perrotta’s novel was a singular take, not only on that character but those power dynamics, despite how prevalent they already were. In 2018, it’s a narrative that has become impossible to avoid, already defining a new generation of women, and motivating their own campaigns for office. Tracy would be proud. #PickFlick.