Tracy Flick Never Rests

The joyful, saccharine, karaoke-inspring Glee, which premiered last night on Fox, got me wondering: What did we do before Tracy Flick? She first appeared, embodied by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's Election, a previously unidentified personality type, the driven, ruthless, terrifyingly ambitious striver who micromanages her inevitable rise to power in relentlessly cheerful tones. In the decade since Election, Flick has been transformed from a fresh, new character into an archetype, found frequently in both nature and fiction. Hillary Clinton, as Slate pointed out during the election, is a Tracy Flick. Kristen Gillibrand is the "Tracy Flick of New York politics." Amanda Lorber, of MTV's reality series about high school newspaper The Paper is "The Tracy Flick of Journalism." Amy Poehler's character in Parks and Recreation is a "dorkier version of Tracy Flick." And that's just the beginning. Tracy Flick is like the prostate—not so long ago, we didn't know she existed. Now you can scan to find her.

I bring this up because one of Glee's main characters, Rachel Berry, is a total Flick. She's a frighteningly focused performer who won her first dance contest when she was 3 months old. She gives compliments like, "You're really talented. I know because I'm really talented too." (Flick isn't the only character from Election to appear in Glee: the dumb hunk played by Chris Klein has been reimagined as a dumb hunk who sings. "My dad got killed in Iraq the first time we went over there to fight Osama Bin Laden," he narrates.) Given all these Flicks—and there are surely more to come— it seems logical that there must have been Flicks around before we got into the habit of identifying them as such. (Was Margaret Thatcher a Flick?) What did we call these women before there was a shorthand that simultaneously captured their drive and core unlikableness? Were they better off before they could be so easily labeled?

Tags: election, Glee, movies, Tracy Flick

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Willa Paskin Writer, pop culture junkie

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Clinton isn't "cute"

By: PGofHSM | Thu, 05/21/2009 - 17:09

A crucial element of the Tracy Flick type seems to be her being physically very unthreatening: a small, attractive-but-not-gorgeous woman. It's the contrast between the physical marshmallow and the mental/emotional battering ram that throws people off and makes her a particularly interesting type. Tracy Flick isn't averse to overtly using her femininity for advantage where she sees an opportunity, but in general prefers to let the dissonance between her cuteness and her drive be the tool.

Elizabeth Dole, Kirsten Gillibrand and possibly Sarah Palin could be Tracy Flicks; Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama or Sonia Sotomayer couldn't.

That's a really good question

By: jadelane | Thu, 05/21/2009 - 15:19

So I googled around and stumbled on the topic of the "dark triad"--narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Doesn't exactly answer the question, but seems like an interesting lead.