Mayor Pete (2021 | USA | 96 minutes | Jesse Moss)
The first time a lot of people, self included, learned of former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg was through this viral tweet in 2017:
It was an appeal to a certain type of Democratic voter (yay troops! boo gun violence!) but it also alarmed a lot of pacifists (again, self-included) by seeming to convey a message that gun violence is okay if it’s directed at foreigners in their homeland.
Watching Buttigieg seek the presidency in 2020 felt like watching someone molded from a young age to achieve greatness reaching the upper limits of their ambition. I do not mean this as a compliment. He went to Harvard and Oxford, joined the military, and became a consultant for McKinsey before entering public service and serving two terms as mayor, running for president and settling on becoming Secretary of Transportation. And at the time I’m writing this, he’s still two months away from his fortieth birthday. And he’s openly gay.
All of the positive things mentioned above built an incredible resume and it was easy to see why a filmmaker like Jesse Moss would be interested in Buttigieg as a subject for this documentary. Unfortunately it’s as frustrating as Buttigieg’s campaign was for me. I found Buttigieg more confounding and inauthentic with this movie.
There are few moments, if any, where the candidate seems unguarded, and that’s surely his persona, but Pete Buttigieg doesn’t appear to be more human or understandable. He always talks like a politician, even offstage or off camera. Yet we don’t even hear him talk about any policies at a level that would demonstrate any expertise. How did he become Secretary of Transportation of all jobs?
Moss leans in on Buttigieg’s sexuality heavily. I understand the importance of representation, but I found that to be one of the least interesting aspects of his public image. That might be me being jaded from living in a city that elected consecutive openly gay mayors that left office (or are leaving office) in disgrace because of scandals unrelated to their sexual orientations.
This documentary is weirdly incurious about what makes Pete Buttigieg tick. There’s no mention of the controversy about his time at McKinsey. You’re more likely to come away learning that Buttigieg is left-handed than that he worked for one of the most evil consultancy companies in the world. There was certainly no discussion of why the youngest major presidential candidate gained no traction with younger voters.
There is a scene where Buttigieg returns to South Bend to address a police shooting of a Black man and he’s berated by members of the city’s Black community, and he can’t do much but offer platitudes about how he wants more, not fewer, voices at the table and it’s the beginning, not the end, of this discussion. It is the most unflattering moment of the Buttigieg, but there’s some important context that Moss leaves out. One of the very first things he did as mayor was remove the city’s first Black police chief after a secret taping system discovered that a lot of police officers were outwardly racist.The taping system was later ruled legal, though Buttigieg tried to hide behind the supposed illegality of the taping system to give the appearance of plausible deniability on the campaign trail. I don’t even think Jesse Moss knows that happened. The Black residents had every right to be angry with their mayor, though we can’t also forget that yelling at the mayor is both fun and good.
There also were some genuinely hilarious moments that came from the Buttigieg campaign that Moss’ documentary fails to mention. Do you remember when it was thought that his campaign spokesperson Lis Smith created a sock puppet superfan account when it turned out that Mayor Pete had a legitimate fan overseas? Or when it was discovered that Mayor Pete’s husband Chasten posted a thirst trap photo of the ambitious pol on Instagram taken at a Holocaust memorial in Berlin? Amazingly, it’s still up:
I wanted something revealing, or honest, or funny, or genuine, or human from this documentary. It disappointed me for pretty much the same reasons Pete Buttigieg’s campaign did.
And please, for the love of all that is good and just, please let’s never see Chasten dance to Panic! at the Disco again.
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Mayor Pete is now streaming on Amazon Prime.