Weiner (2016)

Fly-on-the-wall documentary following husband-and-wife Anthony Weiner/Huma Abedin as they try to resurrect his career by running for mayor in the 2013 NYC election 2 years after his Congressional career was derailed by his sexting scandal.

Spoilers: the sexting scandals weren’t over yet. Despite being the front-runner in the Democratic primaries (and thus by extension the future mayor), more photos & women popped out of the woodwork to torpedo his run, and he finished effectively last, handing the mayorship to the current Bill de Blasio (of interest to me primarily for his long-running efforts to destroy NYC’s magnet schools like Stuyvesant/Hunter in misguided application of egalitarianism and giveaways to the African-American Democratic base). Perversely, even then Weiner’s sexting scandal wasn’t done—many a soul like myself was jarred to recall that Anthony Weiner existed after his sexting scandal managed to interfere with the 2016 US Presidential election when, because of Weiner sexting with a 15yo girl, FBI director James Comey dropped an October surprise bombshell just days before Election Day by announcing the FBI had found further Hillary Clinton emails (from/to Huma Abedin, who made her career as an aide & advisor to Clinton). That the emails turned out to be completely irrelevant didn’t matter. It’s difficult to know if the emails caused the election of Donald Trump, but it certainly didn’t help.

It is a comment on the vagaries and contingency of history that a Congressman using Twitter incorrectly in 2011 could lead directly, with a remarkably short causal chain, to the election of Donald Trump and the latest onslaught against the NYC magnet high schools. How did that happen?

Weiner can shed only a little light on that. What it can do is humanize a walking punchline. Watching it, I can hardly believe how trivial and absurd the original casus belli was—a photo of boxers with a bulge, less racy and sexy than the underwear model photographs you see on packages of briefs walking through the Walmart underwear aisle. For this the media lost its mind and Weiner his career? (At least John Edwards actually slept with a woman not his wife.)

Falling for such a reason on such a pretext hardly seems like a good way to run political life. Really, in 2011, anyone could even pretend to be appalled and outraged? Give me a break! Is what I’d like to say… Except the Weiner story goes on. (One is reminded of one of the great literary insults: “[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.”)

Weiner destroyed his career with sexting. This is an understandable and forgivable mistake. Abedin appears to have forgiven him the first batch, and he swore to his supporters and all and sundry he’d changed, and began the 2013 race and calling in favors—except that even as he was destroying his career, he began sexting some more. And not just with one person, or once, but (at least) 3. Who, predictably, came out during his race for mayor. The first woman, one ‘Sydney Leathers’ (I still have difficulty believing that is a real name), comes off as thoroughly loathsome: it takes two to text, yet she manages to be morally sanctimonious about her whistleblowing even as she attempts to exploit the scandal to launch a (apparently successful) career in pornography with stunts like hounding Weiner & Abedin at the post-defeat campaign party. (Leathers’s self-righteous cruelty make her appear to be a character out of an Ayn Rand novel: from what she says, and how she says it, her real grievance appears to be simply that Weiner had accomplished or stood for anything in his life and she is delighting in tearing him down.) Despite all this, Abedin stays with Weiner, even as the comeback crashes, and both must know that Weiner is done for good—Americans may believe in second chances, but few believe in third chances. Which makes it all the more incredible when you consider that Weiner doesn’t even cover the third sexting scandal post-2013, the one with a minor, which lands Weiner in jail (for almost two years! He was only recently released) and finally makes Abedin divorce him. It offers a sharp, detailed depiction, with some retrospective interviews with Weiner, of just the second scandal. So much for the how. But why did that happen?

It’s hard not to wonder, as Weiner does, if it would have been such a scandal if he had not possessed that most cursèd of last names, a name and scandal with which to cow unbelievers in nominative determinism. I suspect that, like the Howard Dean yell or Richard Stallman or John Schnatter, it has far less to do with the gravity of the offense (so absurdly trivial, so eagerly prosecuted by those who had surely committed saucier sins), than it does with providing a Schelling point for internal enemies & external critics: Weiner is your stereotypical New York City Jew, in every point, sharp-elbowed and delighting in populist grandstanding in Congress & social media, aggressively appealing to his base. Making a lot of enemies can be an effective strategy and was working well for Weiner, but of course, then you’ve also made a lot of enemies. Given a chance & coordination, they can all pile onto you. Which is precisely what happened to Weiner. ‘Live by the (social) media, die by the (social) media.’

A pile-on can explain the first scandal, but not the second or third. Any normal person would be so profoundly burned by having torpedoed a brilliant career (and one it is easy to imagine leading to the White House, as doubtless Weiner & Abedin permitted themselves to secretly fantasize about), that they would never so much as take a dubious photograph or permit themselves the most slightly off-color jest ever again. Instead, Weiner does it again and again and again. Why? To call him a ‘sex addict’ is to explain everything & answer nothing.

The repetition also raises further questions. Knowing the penalties, Weiner did it anyway. “It is worse than a crime—it is a mistake.” Perhaps the first sexting was indeed trivial, but the more important thing is that he knew it would be a scandal and did it anyway. What does that imply about a man? Perhaps it implies he is unfit for any position of trust, because there is something wrong with Weiner that he cannot avoid stumbling into scandal. The inconsequentiality of sexting is a feature, not a bug; the slighter, the better, as a shibboleth & costly signal.

Abedin maintains a professional veneer throughout, conscious of the camera, but Weiner (so straightforward, so stentorian) is silent when it comes to the sexting. “Why are you letting us film this?”, the cameraman is finally forced break his silence and ask. Weiner wearily shakes his head. Why? This is the question Weiner won’t, or can’t, answer. Weiner, it seems (like Walter White or Ross William Ulbricht), won’t change, can’t change, and like Oedipus, is burdened by himself. (“…That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin…”)

Weiner takes the form of a Greek tragedy, hamartia sans anagnorisis , the hero whose fall ruins those he loved & who loved him; the action is laid in Hell, but the characters—I don’t know why—all have American names.