A not-so-crucial election Any aspect of high school is potentially interesting because we all lived through those years. We didn't understand them very well at the time, and we may still carry unresolved issues--thrills, disappointments, embarrassments--that we might like to reexamine at a safe distance, by viewing them through the prism of somebody else's parallel experiences.
Furthermore, it
may be true that a campaign for high school student body (nowadays called "SU") president, the subject of Caroline Suh's unvarnished documentary, is a microcosm of American politics and elections, or at least a glimpse of leadership in fledgling form. Evidently, if you want all the fun of vicious manipulation junior grade, Alexander Payne's caustic fictional version
Election is still the place to go. After the mud-slinging of a national presidential campaign, the decency of this teenage version chronicled by Ms. Suh is a relief. But to find any profound meaning in the story she tells is a stretch.
To begin with, being elected to the office of SU president is an accomplishment that, now as in the past, generally matters much only to the candidates. In this particular one, it even seems to matter much only to
one of them, who, luckily for him, is the winner. He's Astoria, Queens-resident Greek-American and future Harvard freshman George Zisiadis. A faculty adviser for the elections comments that at first George may seem "creepy." But after watching George in a number of scenes I'd say the choice to use that clip only reflects the filmmaker's unfortunate tendency to caricature each of her main personalities. More accurately young Zisiadis is a political geek, who calls up other students he doesn't know very well on their birthdays, traps voters in a "lounge" set up by his hall locker, pours them a glass of San Pellegrino mineral water and asks them what they think. His campaigning never flags. Another candidate, Alex Leonard, is a jock who signs up on a whim, neglects even to give out flyers, and disappears early from the race. A more easy-going boy from Bensonhurst, Russian-born Mike Zaytsev, who was sophomore president, is too confident he'll win and gets eliminated in the primary. The ultimate runner-up is Hannah Freiman, a dancer, head cheerleader, and actress from the Upper West Side who was in Todd Solandz's
Palindromes, no less--but despite her social skills and ability to think on her feet, she has no SU experience and too many activities.
Hannah almost does better than George in the televised "debate," but some think George emerges as more practical and serious. He's certainly more competitive, even a little mean, in that appearance. And anyway, he afterward gets the student newspaper's endorsement.
This is Styvesant High in lower Manhattan, the "most competitive high school in the country," they say. Yes, it is competitive: each class has 25,000 applicants; 3 out of 10 get in. And in the
US News and World Report analysis last year it ranked 15th in the country. The school population has more girls than boys and overall about half are Asian, so the male candidates all have Asian female running mates. But does this desire to succeed and preponderance of high scorers make the school more like others, or less? Certainly the students are smart, and going somewhere. The winner gets to put "student body president" on his college applications. But that's true anywhere, and when you get to one of the top 50 colleges, just makes you average.
Caroline Suh, who's done TV work, dredges up a student who supports Bush; a teenage political analyst; and, considering she's Asian herself, gets surprisingly perfunctory interviews with Asian students about what's going on. Ultimately this isn't a microcosm of anything much--or particularly unique either. Surely other schools are just as competitive in one way or another, and may wage more intense popularity contests in their class politics--which in more snobbish schools may have a real element of "class" in the (in America) forbidden sense. Despite the intensity of Manhattan school life, maybe students elsewhere, less focused on where they're going next, might ultimately put more into this kind of election.
And yet, since politics is largely about wanting to win, picking a super-competitive school like Styvesant makes sense. It just doesn't guarantee that this was the most interesting political event in an American high school this year. And it's an obvious fact that a high school student union president election isn't a very hot documentary topic. Nor is this a very remarkable film. It's unfair to guess how much effort went into it, but a good deal less, I'd be willing to bet, than Nanette Burstein devoted to her study of a gallery of classic personality types at a midwestern high school in this summer's
American Teen, which seems much richer in human and social content. Suh combines viewpoints well, but the image quality of the DV, the light, and the sound aren't always up to par, and the editing is for cuteness rather than revelation.
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