“[Tracy Flick is] a person. A strong person with a strong personality. But that’s how I see all the characters in my movies. They’re people. Because I have to understand them and see what makes them tick.” -- Alexander Payne (2019)
The most exciting, and terrifying, part of writing a book is how vital pieces of knowledge and insight can turn on a dime—this is especially true when writing about a current subject that is consistently evolving. I got spoiled by several years of a historical project on Hawai’i representations in Hollywood, one safely buffered within the middle decades of the 20th century. Only the occasional new research lead—another film, another article, another book—to steer me on a new course.
Sometime near the end of the process on Blossoms & Blood, probably mid-2011, I became aware of The Master’s (2012) imminent arrival. A new Paul Thomas Anderson film is only a problem when you just finished a book on the topic. Luckily, with finished manuscript otherwise in hand, University of Texas Press gave me a small window in the fall of 2012 to write a brief, additional chapter on the film. Having only watched it twice in theatres (no on-demand option back then), and a few free October weekends to write, I managed to churn out a modest but I feel effective final bit of commentary on PTA’s post-WWII film as a reflection of his stories and themes to that point. It didn’t hurt that The Master might be my favorite film of his, in hindsight.
So why the nostalgic detour? Last weekend, while in Edmond, Oklahoma, I was with a friend, perusing the shelves of a local bookstore. It was only then that I became aware of the fact that Tom Perrotta had written a sequel to Election, the late 1990s high school satire which was adapted by Alexander Payne and his team into the cult movie classic of the same name (1999).
The new novel is titled, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, in reference to the original’s now iconic cultural touchstone of a character, the ambitious high school senior, Tracy Flick. I thumbed through the first few pages—Tracy’s reflection on life after the Me Too Movement, and how that connected to her experience as a survivor of statutory rape while a student years earlier. Tracy is herself now, as I understand it (safe to say, the book is near the top of my 2023 reading list), back in a public high school working as an assistant principal.
That news was surprising to see—and imagine my magnified surprise this morning, finally with a little bit of free time from end of the semester grading to research more on the book, to discover that a) Reese Witherspoon had already agreed to reprise her role in a movie version, and b) no less than Payne himself was also apparently back on board as well as director and co-writer with his original collaborator, longtime partner, Jim Taylor.
Wow. There’s a lot to unpack there. Where to start?
First off, I might be burying the lede here. The Stranger from Omaha, my book-length manuscript on Payne’s films (see links for more info), is in solid shape at the moment, though as I mentioned towards the end of last summer, I do not have any time during the semesters to work on my writing (and this semester was probably the most exhausting of all). Indeed, the only reason I can write what you are reading now is because its December 13th, semester lesson plans are behind me for now, and I have one foot in winter break at the moment.
The timeline for Stranger remains in place—having had some time away to reflect on the manuscript, I will finish revisions next year in May and early June and then send out proposals to publishers after that. My goal remains to have the book in print sometime in 2024.
Of course, in the meantime, there’s no small matter of The Holdovers as well—Payne’s reteaming with Sideways’ star Paul Giamatti, which has been getting some solid early buzz, is set to appear sometime next year. The irony of this project on Payne is that when I began it I was think of Payne's career, much like the films and characters themselves, as a charming anachronism (only one film in nearly the last decade), and now I am faced with not one but potentially two promising new films to account for.
My project will have to be revised once that film appears in theatres. I’m not too worried about incorporating that new material in the existing manuscript when the time comes, however, because unlike my previous auteur books, Stranger from Omaha is neither chronologically organized, nor are the chapters structured around individual films. It is a “travel narrative” (in multiple ways) through his body of work so far, so any new insights on The Holdovers would presumable slide in well. The key themes of his films are pretty solidly laid out as is, and so the latest would fit in those pockets where it seems to both reaffirm and also hopefully challenge many of the critical perceptions of his body of work as it already exists (I am not trying to be reductive or smug; it’s just a lucky by-product of a book project that is theme and narrative-structured, rather than individual film-based, the latter of which also has its value. For example, I remain proud of how Blossoms & Blood is a collection of cultural and industrial histories as much as a larger, coherent “auteur” study).
So, back to Tracy . . .
It is hard to say too much on this, of course, because I just found out the news—and I’ve neither read the book nor (duh) seen a movie that’s still in pre-production. And of course it’s entirely possible the film never gets made. In the age of the streaming wars, it’s difficult to see what value (purely in terms of subscription rates) a sequel to Election really brings to Paramount+. In other words, who is going to sign up for the service just to watch this film, and if that’s the case, might they have second thoughts? No doubt though there would be buzz, and Payne’s relationship with Paramount goes way back, and his reputation with keeping productions under budget has served his career well.
The catch, though, is what a cultural icon Tracy Flick has become in the twenty-plus years since. Elisabeth Donnelly articulated it reasonably well just a couple of years ago in an article (Vanity Fair no less) on the character’s legacy:
One of Payne’s strengths as a filmmaker is the gift of observation, and of empathy. That is why, at their peak, his films foreground three-dimensional characters who eschew easy labels (hero, villain) or simplistic arcs and journeys.
I do think that is a big part of understanding Tracy, along with one of Election’s defining themes—people’s spectacular capacity for self-delusion, nowhere better expressed than in the film’s singular, biting use of voice-over narration. None of the characters in the film are particularly sympathetic, and they are all at times their own worst enemies.
One idea I am interested in pursuing but has rarely been touched on in the discourse around Election and Tracy Flick--that of all the characters a younger Payne might have identified with personally in the film while making it in the mid-1990s, Tracy is as good a suspect as any. Like Payne, Tracy was an incredibly smart, observant, and ambitious high schooler who was "stuck" in Omaha and looking ahead to bigger and better things beyond. There is also the class resentment she expresses towards the other entitled rich kids, like Paul Metzler.
And, oh the irony, that Tracy herself might end up back in Omaha after all those dreams and journeys . . .
Still, the idea that Tracy is only a “person” elides Payne’s difficulty in juggling ideas through story that perhaps carry more political weight. Downsizing is perhaps the most infamous example, though I’d argue The Descendants and, to a lesser degree, Citizen Ruth, suffer from this as well (it was difficult not to rewatch Ruth last summer, as I did, and not reread its satire—the focus on a militantly determined Christian Right, up against a humorously self-important and hopelessly disorganized left coalition—in a complete different light, post-Dobbs). In short, the films seem unsteady about the larger ideas they evoke.
In the same article, Payne expressed ambivalence about Tracy’s political legacy: “Every four years, when some gal is running for president of something, they dredge out the Tracy Flick comparison [. . .] It might be Kirsten Gillibrand, or Hillary Clinton, or who knows who. Then I’m called to make some comment about that. I say, well, it’s like she entered the popular culture, like Archie Bunker. You could never foresee those things.”
One wonders why Payne might want to return to this terrain—of course, partly what’s so fascinating alone about this news is just the near unprecedented rarity of an American director of such critical stature doing something as conventional as a sequel to their own film from over twenty years ago now (imagine the extreme unlikelihood of PTA doing a sequel to Boogie Nights, which came up only a year or so before Election, only Dirk is now the aging, self-important producer confronting some young, narcissistic upstart? Hey, I’m sure HBOMax would pay for that).
Of course, it’s hard not to read this news (or the opening pages of Perrotta’s new novel) as well outside the allegations against Payne himself two years ago. Part of the impact of today's news too has been the lingering question I’ve had on how to address this in the book. For the time being, that situation seems to have passed, but it’s a serious charge and the filmmaker is too smart a guy not to be mindful of that context by returning to this subject.
As Donnelly notes, Tracy is a tabula rasa for society. Maybe that’s why she “can’t win.” But it may also be why folks who put so much on her as an allegory for our culture and our politics can’t win either—and why telling her story again is such an intriguing, and risky, step.
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