Election

Many of the greatest books and films ever made have been epics—vast, sweeping narratives that follow their characters for several years and take them across the world to witness firsthand grand changes in culture and society. Les Misérables, Gone with the Wind, and Ben-Hur, to name a few. Other great films aim to display those same social changes but do so by putting them on a tiny scale. If you want to make a statement about the leadership of the most powerful empire in the world, how can you show it on a smaller scale? An election in a single town? Smaller. How about an election at a high school?

Jessica Campbell as Tammy Metzler in Election (dir Alexander Payne, 1999)

Election is a 1999 comedy about a high school civics teacher (Matthew Broderick) who decides to insert himself in the politics of a student government election in an effort to stop Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) from winning. Taking place in Omaha, the film was almost entirely shot and filmed around the city (just a short drive from where I used to live), and it encapsulates the feeling of expanding suburbia, the American dream being spread thin, and the tail end of Reaganomics being met by the quickly liberalizing politics of what many at the time considered to be “the end of history”. The setting of Omaha is not random, by the way. Not only is it a midwestern city, but among midwestern cities, it’s middle of the pack, lying specifically in the geographical center of the country, the location of what was once the largest stockyard in the world and the starting point of the transcontinental railroad. By the time of the film’s events, the stockyards had been mostly shut down and many of the farms, co-op elevators, and agricultural land had since been converted to suburbs and shopping malls.

The setting speaks volumes not only about the characters but the topic which the film so expertly satirizes. The American dream of a small house on a quarter acre with a white picket fence had since received the bigger and better treatment that the economy of the 1980s allowed, and technological advancement, especially in agriculture, allowed far fewer Americans to farm compared to the early twentieth century. Those children of farmers who chose different professions bought homes, which were built on land that used to be cropland, and over the decades those homes got bigger and the lots on which they were constructed became more expansive until we see the contrast between Jim McAllister’s home in Election—a quaint split-level house ten feet from neighbors on either side—and the Metzlers’ house in a new development, spacious and hilly, sparsely populated by proto-McMansions (the predecessors to the modern phenomenon of large, ugly, poorly constructed houses that signal wealth but without quality or taste).

As a brief aside, I must point out that this is a common feature of great films: the setting is as much a character as the roles the actors portray.

Back to Election, within the school itself, the power dichotomy is clear: teachers and students. The students vote among themselves for a class president and the teachers simply count the votes…or do they? Jim McAllister’s personal annoyance with Tracy Flick, along with his friendship with the teacher she slept with, makes him decide that her term as student body president, should she win, would be terrible for himself and the students. Instead of letting her run unchallenged, Jim decides to convince Paul Metzler to oppose her. Paul, a popular football player with a leg injury, poses a serious threat to Tracy’s once-certain presidential future.

Jim’s intervention in the election is not as noble and altruistic as his voice-over claims. When he hides the two votes to help Paul over the victory line, he thinks about how many people would suffer under her presidency, but he really means himself. He holds Tracy responsible for destroying his friend’s marriage and allows that personal animosity to cross over into the school and into his responsibilities as the faculty vote counter. Jim isn’t exactly above moral reproach either. He plans on having an affair the day of the election, which inevitably falls through but does result in Jim getting stung on the eyelid by a bee. It gives his outer appearance the same grotesqueness and distortion of his personal morals—or would it be his personal ethics?

As much as Jim enjoys playing the role of election advisor at the high school, and his profession as a teacher, he thinks that his higher authority and superior intellect means that his morals are also superior to those of the students. After all, Tracy dated a teacher, Tammy got suspended, and Paul is dumb. Surely they need the steady hand of a wise teacher to guide them out of messy situations, even if they never find out about it. Jim has no issue playing shadow bureaucrat and puppet master, first by convincing Paul to run, then by throwing away two votes. And who was it that dealt the coup de grâce to Jim’s employment at the school? The janitor—the very man Jim pissed off in one of the film’s first scenes by making a mess in the teacher’s lounge; a man that Jim sees as lower than both the teachers and the students, so much so that he’s never even acknowledged in Jim’s prolific voice-overs.

What Election satirizes with its minuscule story (microcosmic, really) is the feeling of the loss of political power by the American people under a growing government bureaucracy. Three-letter agencies who were accountable to no voter were making policies and rules enforced just like laws, though they passed through none of the legislative processes we learn about in school (I’m sure Jim McAlister showed his students Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill”). The growing involvement of corporations and lobbying groups in the electoral processes meant that inconceivable sums of money could be thrown into the campaigns of preferred candidates and diminish the impact of grassroots movements.

Still, the common man can throw a wrench into the gears of the cabal’s plans. The film is based on the novel Election by Tom Perrotta, who was inspired by the 1992 presidential election, in which Ross Perot entered as a third party candidate and split the conservative vote—exactly what Tammy does to Paul, though she’s eventually removed from the ballot by the powers that be. Those powers (Jim and the principal) have no issue with Tammy running as a third candidate, but they do object to Tammy’s amazing speech to the student body in which she vows as president to dissolve student government no one ever has to go through the annoying charade again. When one reviews her speech, there’s nothing in the content that warrants such a punishment; she doesn’t curse, and she doesn’t threaten or insult anyone. It was certainly a nihilistic view that one would expect of an angsty teen, but nothing that deserved a suspension. Though, as Tammy later says, she loved the suspension because it felt like a paid vacation, and later covered for Tracy in an attempt to get expelled. Once again the plans of the puppet masters are turned on their heads by the commoner.

And the shadow governors absolutely despise the commoners, despite any claims that they have their best interests at heart. Jim wants all of his plans to go off without a hitch, and when they don’t he gets mad not at himself for his own poor character but at those who foiled his half-baked schemes. He’s mad at Linda for not meeting him at the motel and he’s furious with Tracy for costing him his job, so much so that years later when he sees her in Washington, D.C., he throws a soda at the car she’s in.

The elites are not confined to the teachers, however, and we must ask who exactly they are among the students. Certainly Paul seems like the elitist among the candidates—he was chosen by the shadow coalition to run against Tracy, his dad is wealthy and this adds a touch of class struggle to the narrative, and Paul drives a new truck to school while Tracy takes the bus because her single mother can’t afford to buy her a car. Yet it’s Tracy who thinks that Paul has no business running for student body president because he doesn’t work hard enough and has no qualifications. When she examines the list of signatures on Tammy’s nomination petition, she argues that it was only signed by slackers, then claims that Tammy, like Paul, is unqualified. And what exactly are Tracy’s qualifications? They’re all high schoolers, and yes Tracy is an overachiever who funnels all of her effort into everything she does, but what makes her more worthy or deserving of the presidency than Paul or Tammy? Elitism is not simply a product of wealth, is it?

Election is an amazing satire because it manages to say so much with its small, simple story. The shifting storyline, the flashbacks, voice-overs, and shifts in perspective make it all seem far more complicated than it really is: Tracy wants to be president, Jim wants to stop her. Everything else is noise, isn’t it? Color and shading to flesh out the picture and bring it to life, but it doesn’t change the subject of the image itself. That’s not to say it doesn’t matter or that it doesn’t say something profound, it just makes the world of the film seem that much more real, not despite the silly antics of the characters, but rather because of them.