Then Democratic presidential candidate former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg acknowledges supported as he stands on stage along with his husband Chasten Buttigieg at a main night time election rally in Nashua, N.H. on February 11, 2020. (AP Picture/Mary Altaffer)
When Pete Buttigieg arrived on the nationwide stage in 2019, he appeared, at first look, to be an almost-too-perfect candidate. He had graduated from Harvard and Oxford, served within the Navy Reserves in Afghanistan, revived his Rust Belt metropolis as a younger mayor, and had lately discovered love after popping out of the closet only some years prior.
Inside months, he went from being a just about unknown pol to a frontrunner. For his deepest supporters, he appeared to embody hope in a manner that few politicians do. For others, Buttigieg appeared too good to be true. That sentiment felt significantly true on the town halls and debates; Buttigieg got here throughout as extremely sensible, but additionally a tad too properly rehearsed.
Certainly, it was his first televised city corridor that satisfied Jesse Moss, a filmmaker recognized for guiding Boys State (2020), {that a} documentary about Buttigieg can be worthwhile. In spite of everything, there needed to be one thing extra to this determine than the general public was seeing—and if Moss was given additional entry to him and his workforce, then possibly he might peel again the facade.
For essentially the most half, Moss’s makes an attempt had been unsuccessful. In Mayor Pete, launched on Amazon Prime Video final month, Buttigieg by no means actually opens up the best way that we (and presumably Moss) need him to. He stays elusive, answering even essentially the most private questions with that very same near-scripted supply.
“Possibly Buttigieg is at all times on,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his New York Occasions assessment of the movie. That’s definitely true. Moss advised Politico that Buttigieg would usually slip into marketing campaign mode throughout interviews
There are two storylines to Mayor Pete. First, there’s the underdog story of Buttigieg’s marketing campaign, of which most viewers will possible be acquainted. Within the movie’s greatest moments, that narrative feels inspiring. In its most generic moments, it seems like an prolonged marketing campaign advert.
The second storyline, which is much extra fascinating however usually buried, is Buttigieg’s wrestle with authenticity.
“I made Pete promise that we’d be our genuine selves,” says Chasten, Pete Buttigieg’s husband, early on. “And guarantee that weren’t gonna must sacrifice, you recognize, our true selves in an effort to make this venture work.”
For a politician, that’s an odd factor to count on. Authenticity, particularly in politics, is a particularly overrated idea. Politics is an inherently performative act. As Gilad Edelman famous in The Atlantic, “authenticity” is much less about going off-script and extra about “making the scripted appear spontaneous.”
Buttigieg clearly has a knack for that. “What units Buttigieg aside as a political expertise, then, just isn’t actually his mind. It’s his potential to offer a speech, or reply questions onstage, in a manner that makes it appear as if he’s earnestly pondering by way of his beliefs in actual time,” wrote Edelman in April 2019.
The movie tells us that Buttigieg was preoccupied with protecting his promise to his husband all through the marketing campaign. Throughout a debate prep session, Buttigieg’s communications director, Lis Smith, urges him to emote extra. “He’s comin’ throughout just like the fucking Tin Man up there,” she says.
“It was at all times framed as, like, ‘Let unfastened, be your self,’” Buttigieg says in an interview in the course of the movie. “However to try this wouldn’t be myself. Or no less than not be actual or genuine.”
Total, Mayor Pete appears overly fixated on Buttigieg’s self-declared existential challenges. Regardless of all of the ink spilled over Buttigieg’s authenticity downside, we see little or no of how the general public perceives him. In some way, the movie fully ignores the wave of younger progressives who noticed Buttigieg as a corporatist average and got here to all however detest him; they just about all supported both Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
As a substitute, Mayor Pete focuses primarily on the occasional homophobic protestor at a rally and criticism from the Black group. Moss devotes practically 20 minutes to Buttigieg’s response to a capturing in South Bend by which a white police officer killed Eric Logan, a Black resident. At a neighborhood city corridor after the capturing, Buttigieg stays stoic and reserved as he faces criticism from the nationwide press for not expressing extra anger.
Afterwards, although, when a reporter asks backstage how the incident will have an effect on his marketing campaign, Buttigieg is at his most emotional. “I’m sick of this stuff being talked about in political phrases, prefer it’s a present,” he says, with a slight voice crack. “It’s individuals’s lives.”
Days later, in preparation for the primary debate of the first, Smith pushes him to precise extra outrage concerning the incident, and he struggles. She finally wins out, and after lastly “letting” his guard down in the course of the debate, Buttigieg is praised by the media. It’s a telling section concerning the flaws of the nationwide press corps.
Notably, Smith by no means actually pushes him to precise something unreal. “That is, like, a factor that you just really feel,” she tells him, extra like a tough-love therapist than a marketing campaign adviser. As a result of Smith has that potential to be robust with him, she is extra profitable at peeling the layers off Buttigieg than Moss is—because the movie is faithfully sympathetic to its protagonist.
Ultimately, Mayor Pete tells us little we don’t already find out about Buttigieg and his marketing campaign. I received the sense that Moss thought he would discover some deeper story over the course of filming. However that story was by no means discovered.
Critics of Pete Buttigieg will after all argue {that a} Buttigieg documentary was doomed from the beginning—{that a} politician as robotic as Buttigieg would by no means render himself really weak or reveal his true self.
Mockingly, the moments when Buttigieg appears to disclose essentially the most are when he says he doesn’t prefer to open up. “The very last thing I wish to do is do or say one thing that’s not me in an effort to fulfill some want for me to be extra emotional,” he says. In different phrases, by refusing to purchase into the general public’s—and the media’s—thought of authenticity, he’s in some way being genuine. Who is aware of, although? Possibly that was scripted, too.