Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The first voice you hear, somewhere off-camera, belongs to Jesse Moss, the filmmaker. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnything you want to make sure that I ask him?\u201d <\/p>\n
By this point, Moss has spent 11 months with his subject, filming him backstage at events, in his home, in his car, at the airport, in every session of debate prep he held with his campaign advisers. But as the new documentary \u201cMayor Pete\u201d opens, the director is asking for help. The person seated across from Moss is not Pete Buttigieg, but his husband. <\/p>\n
Chasten, holding the couple\u2019s one-eyed puggle upright in his lap, tells Moss to ask Buttigieg about his identity. \u201cHe did everything to climb every ladder without being his authentic self,\u201d he says. Buttigieg didn\u2019t come out of the closet until 2015, when he was 33, already mayor. \u201cYou spent so much of your life hiding who you really were \u2014 did you feel like you were able to be your true self on the campaign trail?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you think he\u2019s ready to answer that question?\u201d Moss asks. \u201cCan he answer that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe should. You can try.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buttigieg walks in the room. Before he leaves, Chasten turns to his husband.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t bull—- us, Peter,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
Two and a half years after his run for president, Buttigieg has managed to hold America\u2019s attention and fascination. Roads and bridges have apparently never been so interesting. The beat-like coverage of his arrival in Washington this year \u2014 of his new kids, his aides, his role in the Biden administration, his presumed future presidential run(s) \u2014 is not typically commensurate with the job title of transportation secretary. Now a feature film by Moss, director of the 2020 film \u201cBoys State,\u201d aims to fill the lingering curiosity gap about a candidate who has shaped his own unexpected political identity, first in South Bend, Ind., and now in Washington. But peeling back the layers, Moss found, could feel like an impossibly frustrating task.<\/p>\n
The proposition he interrogates in the film, built on cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9-style footage from inside the 2020 campaign, is that when it comes to Buttigieg, what you see is what you get. In one sense, this is proven true. For 96 minutes, in scenes ranging from public events to the privacy of his own home, there is Pete, acting like Pete: reserved and calm, a sweet husband, a nerd (\u201cDid someone say pivot table!?\u201d he asks in one scene, exuberant at the chance to help format an Excel spreadsheet), an introvert. He does not, by his own admission, have the \u201cgregarious charisma\u201d of Bill Clinton. You can sense there is constant activity happening, not on screen, but somewhere inside his head, far off and out of reach. At points, Moss says, he felt confounded by his own subject, turning to Chasten to bring Buttigieg emotionally within arm\u2019s length. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was very stymied by that,\u201d Moss told me ahead of the film\u2019s release this Friday. \u201cThere were moments where I threw up my hands in frustration and despair.\u201d <\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the underside of Moss\u2019s premise, the dilemma in his film on constant display: It\u2019s not exactly that Buttigieg is \u201cbull—-ing\u201d us, as Chasten says in the first scene, or even that what you see is not, in fact, what you get. It\u2019s the feeling of an inaccessible interior \u2014 of watching a person who is still becoming comfortable with himself and doing so on the biggest stage imaginable. The real drama that unfolds on screen is not about the ups and downs of a campaign, or even Buttigieg\u2019s political prospects, though he states plainly in the film\u2019s final scene that he could run again: \u201cTime is on my side.\u201d What you see instead is more basic: a story about personal identity in politics \u2014 a man, then 37, a presidential candidate, a breakout star, now the most prominent member of President Biden\u2019s cabinet, who at every turn was unsure of how, or exactly how much, to share himself with the world. Always, he erred on the side of less rather than more. Always, it was against the urging of his own husband and campaign team. <\/p>\n
The sharpest moments of tension come when Chasten and campaign aides push Buttigieg to open up, including about his identity as a gay man. In one subtly heartbreaking scene, Chasten is in their Des Moines hotel room, watching live coverage of the Iowa caucus returns. Bernie Sanders is on TV, speaking on stage surrounded by his wife and family, when Chasten says from the couch, \u201cYou\u2019re gonna be the only candidate that didn\u2019t have your spouse standing next to you.\u201d Buttigieg doesn\u2019t really respond. In a seated interview for the film, Chasten recalls the early days of their relationship. \u201cI would say, \u2018What\u2019s going on in that head of yours?\u2019 And he\u2019s grown a lot, being able to verbalize. I think he\u2019s learned to allow personal narrative to have more impact,\u201d he tells Moss. \u201cOpening up.\u201d <\/p>\n
In debate prep sessions, when Buttigieg rehearses his response to a police shooting of a Black man in South Bend, his senior adviser Lis Smith says, \u201cHe\u2019s comin\u2019 across like the f—ing tin man up there.\u201d When he talks about his experiences as a gay man, she tells him it\u2019s like he is \u201creading a f—ing shopping list,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019re not, like, f—ing, an anthropologist here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is, like, a thing that you feel,\u201d she says, as if literally reminding him.<\/p>\n
It was only late into the project that Moss discovered he was watching a candidate\u2019s \u201cjourney\u201d to express himself in a more fundamental rather than political way. That journey is the invisible framework of the film, and you have to look carefully for signs of the scaffolding as the camera tracks Buttigieg moving swiftly through the benchmarks of a national campaign, from his launch in April 2019, to his rise via CNN town halls and debates, to the night he wins the Iowa caucus and, just four weeks later, stares down the reality that \u201cthe numbers\u201d are \u201cjust not there\u201d with Black voters. But what Moss does manage to reveal between the action tells us more about the man himself, and his limits. <\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes people who participate in documentaries don\u2019t fully consciously know why they do it,\u201d Moss told me. \u201cThere is a complicated relationship that is formed with the filmmaker, and there’s a need that you fulfill.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe film may have functioned as a part of that self-questioning. It may have been wrapped up in what Chasten recognized to be the larger project that Pete was on \u2014 to open up.\u201d <\/p>\n
The first time I met Buttigieg<\/span> was at a Sheraton in Phoenix in January 2017. He was still mayor of South Bend, a city of 100,000, a new entry in the race to become chair of the Democratic National Committee, his first introduction to the national stage. As an aide led me up to his suite, she told me he was \u201cthe next John F. Kennedy.\u201d<\/p>\n This being a DNC candidate forum, an unglamorous and musty affair, it was quite the claim. Inside the room, I asked Buttigieg about how he wanted to lead the party, and he quickly steered us into a conversation about what it means to lead a city with \u201cvalues\u201d \u2014 specifically, he said, the values of trash pickup services.<\/p>\n “The values of trash pickup?” I said.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah. It\u2019s connected to the meaning of life, in the sense that whatever the meaning life is \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n “Trash pickup?” <\/p>\n “Yeah,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause what’s the meaning of life for you?”<\/p>\n I stammered.<\/p>\n \u201cWhatever it is, whether it\u2019s your professional growth, or faith and family, or you\u2019re building a business, you will not be able to meet that life of your choosing if there\u2019s not clean, safe drinking water for you, or a road to get you where you\u2019re going \u2014 or if the trash isn\u2019t getting picked up.\u201d<\/p>\n Buttigieg could do that, even back then \u2014 turning a mundane question into a larger-than-life answer. He could sell his record in South Bend as a national model. His view of politics was philosophical, esoteric. He presented voters with a view of one era bleeding into the next \u2014 the New Deal era lasted for 50 years, he\u2019d tell voters, then came the Reagan era, and he wanted to define the era that came next. As transportation secretary, he is President Biden\u2019s most prominent messenger, on the Sunday shows nearly every weekend, talking up the infrastructure bill that will finally become law after a vote late Friday. In policy and politics, he is a skilled narrator. <\/p>\n The film \u201cMayor Pete\u201d documents the way his personal narrative, on the other hand, boiled down in the Democratic primary to a collection of outr\u00e9 biographical data points that delighted reporters at every turn: Maltese American, left-handed, gay, war veteran, Episcopalian, mayor, millennial, fluent in eight languages (including Norwegian), reads French poetry, loves James Joyce, prefers blue Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens (medium point, 0.7mm), played a minor role in a possible bread price-fixing scandal in Canada and so on. \u201cPeople want to fix you onto a spectrum and find a box to put you in,\u201d Buttigieg once told me before he ran for president. \u201cI spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my boyfriend\u2019s father. Identity buckets aren\u2019t comfortable places for me to be in.\u201d<\/p>\n Buttigieg had only just launched<\/span> his exploratory committee when Moss, still editing \u201cBoys State,\u201d approached the campaign, then just a team of a few people. His producer had pitched the idea. Buttigieg was interested. Moss was skeptical. \u201cI said no, actually,\u201d he says. \u201cIt sucks to cover campaigns.\u201d After watching Buttigieg on a CNN town hall, an appearance that helped incite \u201cthe overall fascination with Pete,\u201d Moss told me, he reconsidered. \u201cI said, \u2018Well, if the access is really there, and Pete\u2019s really willing to give it, even though he\u2019s not going to go far and this might be a foolhardy effort, I’ll just go out and start filming, and we’ll see how it feels.\u201d<\/p>\n As he trailed the campaign in 2019, Moss found that although his film crew of one had access no other journalist enjoyed \u2014 to his campaign headquarters, his marriage, his living room in South Bend \u2014 Buttigieg could present an inaccessible front. The first time they met was on a train to Washington, D.C. Moss introduced himself. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018I\u2019m Jesse.\u2019 And he\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019m Pete.\u2019 And then he was back to work. I sat down on the empty seat next to him and waited for the small talk to begin, and it didn\u2019t.\u201d He stayed for \u201ctwo awkward minutes,\u201d he says, and then returned to his seat. \u201cA very awkward first day.\u201d <\/p>\n Weeks later, Moss remembers filming him from the passenger seat of a car. Buttigieg was in the back, reading or dialed into a call, Moss watching his face. \u201cIt was placid. I wouldn\u2019t say blank \u2014 that\u2019s not the right word \u2014 but it was impenetrable,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd yet I found it fascinating because I thought, what is going on? He\u2019s juggling a lot of balls in the air here. He’s obviously containing a lot \u2014 emotionally and intellectually and tactically \u2014 and all of that was concentrated right there in his face for me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an experimental version of the film, which is just him thinking,\u201d he laughs.<\/p>\n \u201cBut that\u2019s also not great dramatic storytelling, right? He is so restrained. He\u2019s a difficult, dramatic protagonist. In some ways, he’s so comfortable in front of the camera, at least in certain environments. And yet, he wasn\u2019t uncomfortable privately. But he was not revealing.\u201d<\/p>\n Moss\u2019s wife and filmmaking partner, Amanda McBaine, advised him at some point \u201cto get Pete drunk or something.\u201d <\/p>\n Buttigieg rationalizes his restraint in his own words, late in the film, quoting a poem<\/a> by Carl Sandburg, written from the perspective of a father giving advice to his son: \u201cIt says, \u2018Tell himself no lies about himself \/ whatever the white lies and protective fronts \/ he may use amongst other people.\u201d Everybody \u201chas thought about that,\u201d Buttigieg tells Moss. \u201cWhat\u2019s the difference between the faces the world makes you put forward and your shifting understanding of who you actually are?\u201d<\/p>\n Moss learned to rely on Chasten. Really, the two colluded in the project. At one point, Moss is trying to interview Buttigieg \u2014 \u201cand I could see he was slipping into this mode of like, \u2018I’m talking to any reporter,\u2019 and it\u2019s just unusable.\u201d So he asks Chasten to step in as the questioner. \u201cI’ve never done that before with a documentary interview, and it felt a little transgressive, but we immediately got more interesting. I thought, \u2018My God, now I’m filming them talking about this campaign together.\u2019\u201d Chasten sits down at their dining room table, behind a portrait of Kennedy propped up on a small piano. \u201cHow do you know how to do what you\u2019re doing?\u201d he asks his husband.<\/p>\n Buttigieg, in particular, laments what he calls the \u201cgamification\u201d of politics, but it\u2019s Chasten who is constantly pushing up against what he feels are the boundaries of the campaign. When he wants to start telling audiences about the couple\u2019s difficulty having kids \u2014 \u201cit\u2019s something very real and felt by a lot of people\u201d \u2014 a staffer tells him it\u2019s a bit too intimate to bring up publicly. The two briefly debate the question before the staffer says, \u201cIf you want to make it a part of \u2018the narrative,\u2019 we can have that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n Moss believes he wouldn\u2019t have been able to make the film with just Buttigieg. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t,\u201d he says. \u201cI think that I was really struggling. I thought, \u2018Oh my God, I can\u2019t make a film.\u2019 Chasten allowed me to kind of short circuit what would normally either be impossible or take forever.\u201d <\/p>\n You do see intimate moments in \u201cMayor Pete\u201d: In March 2020, after dropping out of the race, you watch him return from the campaign trail, changing into sweatpants and slippers before taking calls from President Obama and Joe Biden. At home, he does laundry, brews Keurig, types on his iPad, wrestles with his dogs on the floor, takes Chasten on a \u201cdate night\u201d to Dairy Queen (\u201cCan we eat the ice cream before the chicken gets here?\u201d he asks), plays dominoes with his family and works at the mayor\u2019s office in South Bend. \u201cOh, Mr. Bill, Mr. Regular Bill, sitting here, on the mayor\u2019s desk,\u201d he hums in a singsong voice to a stack of paper, chipper as he signs each page with his fine blue marker. \u201cThis is how a bill becomes law!\u201d he declares when an aide walks in. \u201cMhm,\u201d she says, walking out. <\/p>\n