After the election was over, I was eager to turn off the television after I somewhat unknowingly became addicted to MSNBC and CNN. I figured that the easiest way to ween myself from the tube was to watch some fictitious elections so that my body might still recognize the glowing images bathing my skin as the assumed form of both hope and change. During the primaries, Slate released this video splicing together a scene from Alexander Payne’s Election (1999) with some footage from the Hillary Clinton campaign trail. With this in mind I decided it was the right time to re-watch this excellent movie, set on the “real American” stage of an Omaha, Nebraska high school.
If you’ve seen the movie or watched the Slate video, you noticed the primal screams/tribal-like calls that are dropped in throughout the movie during crucial heated moments in the election within Election. With touches like this, Payne quite successfully distills the motives, petty maneuverings, and unapologetic manipulation inherent in every democratic election, whether at the secondary school or presidential level. In addition to the Hillary-esque Tracy Flick character, Election gives us Paul Metzler, a role perfectly suited for Chris Klein’s meager acting capabilities, which prevent him from concealing his extreme effort at *pretending*. Paul is a cheerful, simple, idiot – which makes you love him like you would a dog – who is a less self-informed Bush/Palin hybrid. (One of his campaign slogans is “Paul Metzler – You Bet-zler!”) Paul only enters the race at the urging of teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick). Paul’s sister, Tammy also joins the race to get some revenge, and ultimately get expelled so that she can attend Immaculate Heart, which she believes will be teeming with other lesbians.
The election satire may be spot-on, but the movie provides an even more accurate satire of suburbia in general. In Payne’s hands, Tom Perotta’s book is fully realized and expertly altered to convey a truer microcosm of American life. Bringing the setting to Nebraska was crucial in giving this movie some real credibility in this vein. (The novel was set in New Jersey). The midwestern accents, the ranch house “country” decor, Jim McAllister’s hatchback, the Younkers department store…all of the details were accounted for and make this a rich, believable, detestable community. The sex scenes are grotesque in their boring realness, and Jim’s swollen eye is an unavoidable, disgusting stand-in for a prim scarlet ‘A’. The Midwest is real, it is (hideously) boring, but there is no hiding – you are all out in the open to be judged.
The director’s take on New York is a bit harder to pin down: Jim calls it a “refuge from troubled lives” but what is the value (and what is the cost) of his anonymity? New York offers culture, education, opportunities, but Jim’s optimism and enthusiastic pursuit of his “dreams” strikes me as false. His new life is equally pathetic: he lives in an overpriced studio apartment and he is a tour guide. I don’t think the message is simply ‘you can take the person out of the place, but you can’t take the place out of the person’, but to a certain extent we know that this is true.
