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1* AccidentalAesop:
2** [[spoiler:Don't make an enemy of the janitor with your sloppiness if you plan on committing election fraud.]]
3** Be more careful hiding your evidence. Don't just leave it sitting in a mostly empty wastebasket where anybody can find it.
4* AdaptationDisplacement: There was a book?
5* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation:
6** Is Tracy Flick a ruthless evil politician and FemmeFatale in the making? Is she just an ambitious teenager [[EducationMama manipulated by her mother]], [[TeacherStudentRomance abused by a teacher]], and [[PickOnSomeoneYourOwnSize sabotaged by another teacher]] (who might lust after her too, if some of the sex scenes are any indication)? Or is she a JerkassWoobie who has no one to guide her in anything but becoming a ManipulativeBastard [[TheChessmaster Chessmaster]] and may never realise she doesn't have to be LonelyAtTheTop? The original ending (one taken from the book) took the stance that she was indeed the latter.
7** Is Jim [=McAllister=] simply a member of the NobleProfession whose entire life was destroyed by Tracy? Or someone who couldn't admit to himself that his marriage was falling apart, and took all his life's frustrations out by sabotaging the election of a student he resented? It was a student election; Tracy losing it would hardly stop her from moving up in the world as he told himself it would.
8*** Mr [=McAllister=] also seems to exaggerate Tracy's FilleFatale qualities to justify his friend's unethical and immoral behavior, despite the fact there's no indication Tracy was anything like that before her affair with Dave.
9*** How happy was Jim in his position and life prior to the election? For all his insistence that he loves teaching and never wanted to do anything else and his talk about how much he loves his wife Diane, he often comes across as bored and disinterested and has an affair despite being supposedly content. Tracy says she feels bad for how he has to see students go on to better things while he's stuck teaching the same stuff year after year, and the ending shows that Jim has a tendency to cover up his resentment of his place in life with blind optimism that borders on self-delusion. It's hard not to imagine that Jim sabotaged the election -- a fairly meaningless role that ultimately wouldn't hinder Tracy much, a fact which Jim was likely perfectly aware of -- not out of duty or civic principles, not even because of hatred of Tracy, but because he was deeply unhappy with his life and wanted an excuse to start again.
10** How pre-meditated were Dave's actions? Mr [=McAllister=] sees Dave as a harmless ManChild despite the fact he had sex with an underage student of his. But having sex with a student is a ''huge'' professional and ethical breach even when the student is of age, due to the power differential. ''New York Times'' critic A. O. Scott [[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/movies/tracy-flick-reese-witherspoon.html comments]] that, in Tracy's flashback to her affair with him, Dave's behavior is "a textbook case of predatory grooming." Dave's insistence that they were in love could be more about justifying it to himself then anything else or even getting out of jail time by [[ObfuscatingStupidity pretending to be the bumbling victim]] and ManChild Mr [=McAllister=] thinks he is, who did something stupid rather than a predator who knew what he was doing was illegal and wrong but did it anyway. If he ''is'' so dimwitted that he doesn't know why he shouldn't have a relationship with one of his own students, he definitely shouldn't be a teacher.
11*** In every state teachers are mandatory reporters, so Jim was also committing a crime and should be in jail or at least lose his teaching license.
12*** The original novel eventually revealed their first sexual encounter and makes it ''very'' clear Dave was the person with power over Tracy and Tracy is clearly scared and disgusted by what happened. It's very clear that even though Tracy talks herself into thinking this was consensual, Dave knew exactly what he was doing. The sequel novel takes this a step further by going through Tracy's coping later in life with realizing she was in fact a victim of sexual abuse and how realizing her own lack of power in a situation she had believed she had control of still affects her.
13** At the end of the film, [=McAllister=] takes a dislike to a ''prepubescent girl'' visiting the museum because she's eager to answer questions; it's implied she reminded him of Tracy. While some might say the child was genuinely annoying, it's also not hard to interpret this as [=McAllister=] hating outspoken women and girls no matter what their age.
14** Is [=McAllister=] actually meant to be seen as sympathetic just because the film is largely told from his perspective? All the films characters are [[UnreliableNarrator unreliable narrators]], we already see evidence that [=McAllister=] himself has unsatisfied sexual urges for Tracey that are driving his grudge against her, and [=McAllister=] always tries to spin the consequences of his own escalating bad actions as the fault of other characters. It's not hard to come up with an interpretation that he's a VillainProtagonist who will never understand that his own victimization complex is going to hold him back (for example, he's ''still'' so obsessed with Tracey years later that in addition to the incident where he harasses a child that reminds him of her, he throws a drink at a car Tracey is riding when he sees her happy and successful.)
15** Did Lisa care for Tammy but was just too deep in the closet to admit it, or was she just using Tammy to get to Paul?
16** Has Tammy found love with her new girlfriend, or is this just [[HistoryRepeats history repeating itself]]?
17* {{Applicability}}: The story was originally written as a RomanAClef satire of the 1992 US Presidential election, with Tammy's run for StudentCouncilPresident in particular based on H. Ross Perot's firebrand independent campaign. However, many critics and political journalists revisited it during the 2016 election, arguing that it worked just as effectively as a sendup of the ridiculousness of ''that'' election. UsefulNotes/HillaryRodhamClinton in particular saw many, ''many'' comparisons to Tracy Flick, to the point where both Reese Witherspoon and Clinton herself [[https://variety.com/2015/film/news/reese-witherspoon-hillary-clinton-tracy-flick-produced-by-1201508768/ made note of it]] when the two of them met.
18* AwardSnub: A number of people believe that Creator/ReeseWitherspoon's performance should have been nominated for an UsefulNotes/AcademyAward.
19* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic:
20** Liberal usage of the theme to ''Film/NavajoJoe'' by Music/EnnioMorricone.
21** Taxiride's "Get Set" also certainly counts.
22* DesignatedHero: Mr. [=McAllister=] with Tracy as the DesignatedVillain. He ultimately suffers from the consequences of his actions in the end but remains a misogynist character, who resents Tracy for her success. He refuses to even acknowledge a bright elementary school girl at the end of the film, merely because she reminds him of Tracy.
23* HarsherInHindsight: Part of the story is built around Jim's old colleague Dave having a relationship with a teenage student. Nearly twenty years later, Rose [=McGowan=] would accuse director Alexander Payne of similar behavior, starting a sexual relationship when she was fifteen and he was twenty-eight.
24* SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments:
25** Paul's pre-election day prayer? That his sister, Tammy, will be okay. He doesn't even care about the election, and deep down he doesn't really believe Tammy tore down his posters. "Please help her be a happier person, because she's so smart and sensitive, and I love her so much."
26** The original ending [[spoiler: where Jim apologies to Tracy, realizes he was wrong about her, and parts with her on good terms.]]
27* MemeticMutation: Many have jokingly compared Tracy to [[UsefulNotes/HillaryRodhamClinton Hillary Clinton]] -- including, at one point, Clinton herself.
28* NoYay: Mr. [=McAllister=] ends up having sexual fantasies about Tracy, despite the fact he hates her with a passion, and she's his ''student''.
29* RetroactiveRecognition: Nicholas D'Agosto played Larry Fouch, the kid who initially tallies the Student Council votes and who [[spoiler: spits at [=McAllister's=] car in the epilogue]]. He'd go on to have a prominent role in Showtime's series ''Series/MastersOfSex''.
30* SpiritualSuccessor: With its dry tone and Creator/MatthewBroderick's narration, some have seen this movie as a de facto sequel to ''Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff'', in which an older Ferris must contend with the results of his carefree youth finally catching up with him.
31* UnintentionallySympathetic:
32** Tracy gains a lot more sympathy from modern viewers (including author Tom Perrotta, whose 2022 sequel ''Tracy Flick Can't Win'' is much more on her side). AcademicAlphaBitch or not, she is still just a kid being groomed by a teacher and blamed for it, with another teacher who antagonizes her relentlessly. There are also strong implications that she's not really right in the head.
33** Tammy's framing goes back and forth with this. She's extremely angry and confrontational -- even towards her brother, who's trying to be nice. She doesn't seem to respect anyone and is mostly motivated by spite. But she does seem to genuinely understand how most of the students feel about student council, and she IS a queer teenager growing up in Omaha in the '90s, which would put anyone on edge. How you feel about her is often a litmus test for how you felt about high school.
34* ValuesDissonance:
35** Tracy's relationship with Dave Novotny is bound to be viewed in a different light after the [=#MeToo=] era. [=McAllister=] blaming a high school student for his adult friend's inability to control his behavior comes across as distasteful at best, and victim blaming at worst. Watching it today, it definitely gives a more unsympathetic interpretation of [=McAllister=], and 21st century viewers are likelier to think the injustice was not that Dave lost his job, but that he escaped a jail sentence.
36** [=McAllister=]'s ambition to prevent Tracy from succeeding (and later, refusing to acknowledge a bright young girl, whom he thinks is a lot like her) comes off as super anti-feminist on many levels.
37** On a more minor note, Tracy being an ExtracurricularEnthusiast comes off as less extreme now than in the '90s: since the college admissions process has become far more selective and cutthroat, students regularly take on that many extracurriculars and more to stand out.
38** The appraisal of who is meant to be a "hero" and who is a "villain" has changed dramatically over time even by film critics. In 1999, the general consensus was that [=McAllister=] was a sympathetic man who just made some mistakes while Tracy was an out and out villain who uses her sexuality to destroy innocent men and basically deserved the campaign of hate against her by her own teacher. In [[https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Election-Gets-Results-Teen-black-comedy-hits-2933339.php one review typical of the time]], Mick [=LaSalle=] of the [=SFGate=] chastises Tracy as "sexually amoral", insinuates that Dave was a victim of hers, and even calls her "a kind of Hitler in the crib." [=MaryAnn=] Johanson of [[https://www.flickfilosopher.com/1999/04/election-review.html The Flick Filospher]] was one of the few contemporary critics that seemed to predict that the Gen X viewers of 1999 like herself were likely to view [=McAllister=] as the hero in spite of his actions and the overly eager, smug, and obnoxious Tracy as the villain, but identified that viewers closer to Tracy's age, the burgeoning millennials, would likely see these roles in reverse. The critical reappraisal post-[=#MeToo=] included critics such as the New York Times' AO Scott, who wrote [[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/movies/tracy-flick-reese-witherspoon.html a passionate re-evaluation of her in 2019]] on the film's 20th anniversary that asked "How despicably does a man have to behave before he forfeits our sympathy? How much does a woman — a teenage girl — have to suffer before she earns it?"
39* VindicatedByHistory: The film was overshadowed by ''Film/AmericanPie'' at the box office, but TV airings and DVD sales (not to mention glowing critic reviews) helped it to build its reputation.

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