Election

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https://tenor.com/view/pickflick-election-gif-19057132

Poll here: #unspooled-polls message

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<@&961324191204925460>

[dusk bison]

This was such a good performance from both Witherspoon and Broderick

[pallid valley]

I love this movie so much. It's kind of like the opposite of last week.

Rocky Horror is a bad movie with a huge cultural impact. Election is an amazing movie with almost no cultural impact.

It would easily make my list of top 100 movies. Probably even in my top 20. But overall quality of the movie itself doesn't necessarily make it space worthy. This movie, sadly, was a flop. People who know about it love it, but most people I know have never seen it or even heard of it. It has had very little influence and cultural impact. While a cult hit, it doesn't have nearly the culture surrounding it that some other cult classics do.

[rancid moth]

I disagree with you on two counts. First of all, Rocky Horror is not a bad movie! It's a very good movie. 😛 And among people I know, Election is definitely very well remembered and influential for a movie that's a quarter century old and lost money on release.

Moving on to the pod: Mr. McAllister doesn't hate Tracy Flick for some unclear reason, as Paul said. He makes it quite clear that he fears if she is elected he will have a sexual affair with her, get caught, and lose his job or worse, like his friend did.

[pallid valley]

Election is fondly remembered, yes. We love it. Movie buffs love it.

But I would bet that the majority of people are unaware of it. It's just not well known in mainstream society.

Also, I never got the impression that McAllister feared a relationship with Tracy. I got the impression that he just found her irritating and hated the obnoxious over achiever types.

[dense sigil]

I had no idea there was this re-evaluation of Tracy Flick who, to my mind, is a megalomaniac for sure who believes she deserves things independently of her work ethic and will one day undoubtedly play up & weaponize her “Up from ‘Nothing’, hard-working individualist unlike the Paul Metzers of the world” self-image either blithely unaware of or actively downplaying her advantages and portraying herself like she’s the political version of Eminem from 8 Mile.

That being said, I think the re-eval of McCallister is totally warranted. I think that the changing of thinking about Tracy might be coming from the David-Goliath fallacy, in this case the idea that because he is the adult and has more power, that she is less bad. He’s absolutely villainous for what he does. But she’s still got some real issues.

Hillary Clinton as Tracy and Barack as Paul is certainly a take though lol

[dense sigil]

Yeah I also don’t know if he felt he was in danger of acting out with her in real life (at least not from what we see in the final film. Extra footage may have hinted at that Idk). I think maybe he, though he clearly knows and understands that it was his friend who crossed the line and abused his power and took advantage of this person, he may have the feeling that Tracy has the capacity to be a, for lack of a better word “opportunist” because of what went down with the friend and maybe that makes him feel, for lack of a better word, vulnerable.

I totally agreed with Amy that he sees her as a wOmAn as he sexually projects onto her, but, though he certainly exaggerated the interaction at the car, I’d disagree that he completely mentally fabricated her vibes. Something about the way Reese is playing it makes me think that she as a precocious person has the thought kicking around in her head that maybe this older teacher man is, to use her word, “mushy”. (This is Ofc not to try to cast her as Sexpot Temptress Who Knows What She’s Doing just as a description of possible psychological nuances)

[rancid moth]

Wow, I thought it was really quite clear. Whether she was going to actually "seduce" him or not, he has this vision of her doing so and immediately gets all panicky and starts looking for a way to deny her the win.

[visual tangle]

This film contains multitudes! I also remember thinking Tracy was the villain the first time through, then over time reversed my opinion to think that McCallister is the villain. But over that time I had forgotten about the conversation where Tracy sticks the knife in about McCallister being unable to get his wife pregnant, where she makes it pretty clear that her intentions are not pure.

In terms of actions, McCallister does the worst stuff: cheats on his wife, throws out votes, throws that drink at the car. But was he WRONG about Tracy? Probably not!

I love how much the film utilizes the difference between what the characters say about themselves and what actually happens on screen; all the biggest laughs come from that. Another absolute gem from 1999.

[indigo garnet]

Anyone over 18 is indeed legally an adult. The trend over time has admittedly been toward infantilization, with fewer teens getting drivers licenses or working part-time jobs to prepare them for adulthood, and more going to college as a form of extended adolescence.

[deep kestrel]

They’re all morally complex unreliable narrators. If there’s any hero, it’s the guy who insists on a recount. He seems mostly concerned with a fair election and accurate count. With everyone else, it’s harder to say that they’re fully victims, villains, or heroes. (Though Tammy, the outsider, is a woman after my own heart. I’m glad she gets a happy-ish ending.)

[deep kestrel]

I’m not sure what this comment refers to. Tracy Flick was about 16 when her teacher seduced her. McCallister knows what his friend did was immoral and illegal. Yet, on a more primal level he still blames her for his friend getting fired. As Amy said, the film invites you to take his perspective and villainize her. Now viewers are looking back and realizing the other teacher abused his position and there’s no excuse for that. Do you disagree with that stance?

I wouldn’t say teens today are infantilized. They just face a different set of pressures. I know my son’s schooling was much more academically challenging than my schooling in the 1980s. They may be a more sensitive generation, which I see as a largely positive trend. OTOH, I might see the new book bans as a way to keep them young and innocent, which is infantilizing teenagers.

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I think this is in reference to when they discussed Monica Lewinsky and how she was treated by the public for so long. Though I think there Amy isn’t claiming she was a child, just someone in a clearly subordinate position who Clinton took advantage of.

[dense sigil]

OOO I always hated that kid. He’s my own personal biggest reappraisal lol

[rancid moth]

Right, and Amy also characterized Tracy's affair with the teacher as her getting "sexually assaulted". To me, this kind of talk flattens out a spectrum of wrongdoing. He engaged in an inappropriate sexual relationship with a teenager, particularly given his responsibility as a teacher, and was rightly fired. I don't think anyone disputes that, including his best friend played by Broderick. But calling it "sexual assault" goes too far and conflates it with other more dire situations like a coach cornering one of his players in the locker room when no one else is around and forcing himself on her. There is a spectrum, which starts with inappropriate comments like "You sure look good in that skirt", but we shouldn't use "sexual assault" to describe everything along the spectrum. There are things teachers should be prosecuted for, things they should be fired for but not criminally charged over, and things they should be disciplined for but not fired for if it's the first offense.

[quiet imp]

Been a while since i saw Election, but im surprised ppl thought Tracy was a "villain". She's just a kid who we don't know will grow into something else. Always found Macalester as a very accurate human who takes out their frustration and personal struggle on someone for reasons and he's not sure why. Always thought it was similar to American beauty where the main character are seeking something in a teenage girl to reinvigorate themselves. While american beauty didn't grow, election grew a lot, the more i thought about it. Going into space for me. 🚀

Oddly enough, i consider Election an accurate feeling high school movie along with Napoleon Dynamite. Captures that weird dynamic of teacher and student where they're butting heads for reasons.....and a teacher commits statutory rape. We had some stories and rumors like that.

[soft pollen]

The scandal Amy talked about was not in Minneapolis- it was in Eau Claire Wisconsin - I went to that high school a decade later and the legacy was still strong. The principal was fired after the voting fraud, but the faculty advisor for the student council who actually did the ballot burning was saved by the union. I had her as a teacher although she could no longer have anything to do with the student council and was largely an outcast from the rest of the faculty for what she did.

It was a huge deal - Eau Claire isn’t a tiny town. About 75,000 and a university of 10,000 or so undergrad. But having the national media like the Today Show and Oprah feature April and the continued follow-out covered in nightly news was very strange.

As for the movie - it would be on my personal spaceship for sure. One of my 45 or so Five-Star movies in Letterboxd. This episode of the show did a masterful job of covering the angles on the films construction and layered meanings. Not to mention they managed to capture the films humor pretty well too. On top of this movie being genius, it also probably in my top ten most often quoted movies too.

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I'm also not sure if this movie is actually OUT of popular culture as much as the hosts claimed. It's not in the top 50 most memed movies or anything, but the comparisons get brought out a lot during political campaigns, especially ones involving Hillary Clinton.

[pallid valley]

It's hard to say just how popular this movie is. With movie buffs, it's super popular and held in very high esteem. But I would bet if you grabbed 100 random people off the street, fewer than 20 would have even heard of it.

[soft pollen]

I think Paul and Amy did a good job of describing this movie’s griminess. It is gross in a purposeful way. That keeps the general movie going public at a distance. But it attracted Chris Klein and Reese people - many were like “ewww” but others probably got some nice exposure “messy” films.

[pallid valley]

Part of it's problem is that it was released in 1999, which is one of the biggest years ever of popular, big, good, movies.

[soft pollen]

It was also a cable stalwart in coming years. An HBO all star. Also pretty big in the UK

[pallid valley]

A few takeways I got from the episode. I had never noticed that Tammy had won the election. That's a great detail, and totally tracks with the reaction she got after her speech.

I've also re-evaluated Tracy, and yeah. She's not really a villain and doesn't deserve to be on the list of villains. The only thing she ever does that is wrong, is tearing up the posters.

Really, she's kind of hated because she does everything right. She works really hard. She is highly movited. She participates in class and extra curriculars. She's really doing everything that a student is supposed to do. The big issue that our culture just seems to hate people like that, ESPECIALLY if they're a woman.

Sycasey is totally right in the Clinton comparisons. Clinton is probably the most hated politician of all time, and it's not even remotely deserved. Society just REALLY hates a successful, motivated, intelligent woman.

[turbid crescent]

Every vote counts. Perhaps the most interesting vote was Paul’s. If he had supported himself instead of Tracy, the final tally would have flipped in his direction. But, he just didn’t feel right about it.

[visual tangle]

I'd say it's got moderate popularity, certainly more than you'd expect given the original box office performance.

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Yes, but this time I remembered there's more to it with Tracy, and Paul & Amy bring it up in the podcast; she gets pretty actively nasty with McCallister when he suggests that he knows she tore up the posters and speaks flippantly about her affair with the other teacher (his friend). Did she actually DO anything bad there? No, but it does speak to her carrying darker motivations.

[soft pollen]

Election
Sideways
Descendants
About Schmidt
Nebraska

Can’t wait for holdovers

[stone kindle]

When Harmon was first working on the idea of Community he always talked about Annie being a Tracy Fleck type.

[dusk bison]

Just finished the episode.

I never thought of Broderick's character as misogynistic. Or that Pine's character is obliviously cruel.

[cyan nexus]

My first time watching the movie. I need to digest it more.

[cyan nexus]

Everyone is one of bad in the movie, but Tracy is both victim and victemizer. There's a moment in worried she would attempt suicide after losing. (It doesn't help that her mom left the pills next to the bed)

[pallid roost]

Just chiming in as someone who has a general knowledge of pop culture and I've never seen this movie or really heard it referenced. Don't think I've seen it on any cable channels in my life. But I was also 7 years old when it was released. I agree that 99 was a huge pop culture year so I can see it getting drown out

[dense sigil]

Omg that would have been so dark. That would have been like a Moral Orel-level tone shift 😳

[lyric umbra]

At the moment mr m decides to throw the election he’s staring at a picture of …. The freedom riders.

[lyric umbra]

The insecurity of these men! Desperately blaming women for their own mistakes and frailties. To me the tell is when Broderick is leaving the message for Linda and says “you ruined my life!” As if he had no part in it!

That ending is so bleak. He learned NOTHING. He’s still wary of the smartest most confident girl in the room.

[sullen solstice]

Payne talked about the movie recently.
Paramount Presents (the studio's "premium" label) will release a new Blu-ray of the movie on Jul. 30th
https://open.spotify.com/episode/64rGUrXGdn8016156sp1BE

[stone kindle]

The Doughboys’ Patreon covered some Payne films this past month, including Election.

[visual tangle]

Bumping for this week's re-release.