Elyse Sternberg and Josh Kriegman's Weiner opens with a quote from Marshall McLuhan - "the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers" - which we might just as well paraphrase to: may the gods help those whose names write the jokes themselves. Weiner is one of the year's great films, but audiences may never know it, because the film, the story, and the person himself, are all hiding behind a dick joke.
Or rather, a dick pic; or maybe more accurately, a dick. Weiner is all about dicks of one kind or another: Anthony Weiner's penis, which both launched him into international fame/ignominy, and whose camera-friendliness has now for the third time catastrophically ruined his life. It's unfair to make plans for another man's package, but at this point, honestly, you'd think he'd be thinking about amputation.
It's about Anthony Weiner himself, of course, who is - at various points in the film - a colossal dick. He's also a colossal loser, and oftentimes quite a compelling and charismatic guy; he uses the word "nuanced" once in a while when referring to points he or others are trying to make, and yeah, nuance is the concept that carries the day. Nuance is the exact thing that Weiner the movie and Weiner the guy proceed to demonstrate, in excruciating detail, as having left the conversation in politics in America, securing the doc's place as a painfully relevant prism of where the American political engine lives right now.
The jokes do write themselves, though. I certainly couldn't resist - look at the title of this column! In the film, Anthony Weiner himself certainly tires quickly of the degree to which the story about his dick overtakes any interest in the story of his candidacy - imagine that, a male who is frustrated because his sexual anatomy is more prized by the media than his thoughts or opinions - but honestly, the serendipity of a guy named Weiner being caught in a cock-related sex scandal is a sucking vortex of Late Show opportunity from which no political career would ever have been able to recover.
The problem at the core of this - the feeding frenzy around the sexting scandal obliterating the political career; the facility of the dick jokes taking recurrent centre stage over the things the story, and the documentary, can actually tell us - reminds me of another documentary from half a decade or so ago.
Susan Saladoff's Hot Coffee was the film about the woman who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot; the entire first act of that film was dedicated to demonstrating to the audience in no uncertain terms why the incident in question was substantial enough to merit legal action, because the talk shows and entertainment news cycle had done such a magnificent job of convincing the entirety of American pop culture that the lawsuit was stupid, frivolous, and indicative of massive entitlement and privilege.
That was the empirical, nearly mythic, "truth" about the hot coffee case, and it wasn't in any way true. At all. (If you have a strong stomach, Google the burn photos.) As often happens - as has happened with Anthony Weiner as well - the pull-quote is simply too fabulous for anyone to ever want to dig even a moment deeper into the story.
Having established the merits of its own case, Hot Coffee goes on to become an incisive and critical examination of a number of key failings in the American legal system. Weiner doesn't work as hard to deprogram the nationwide brainwashing around Anthony Weiner's dick pic scandal, but the film that follows - covering Weiner's failed run for the mayoralty of New York City in 2013, just as his second dick pic scandal erupted (seriously dude: amputation) - is a painful portrait of the failure of integrity and nuanced thought in the whole system of American politics and journalism nonetheless.
It's fascinating and horrifying, particularly in 2016, to watch this film in the context of how entertainment journalism simply can't stop selling to the lowest common denominator, and how that denominator has pretty much obliterated any sense of obligation in the United States to work through complex issues. That's basically the logline for our whole year, isn't it? "Let's talk about low-income housing..." "NO HAHAHA PENIS!"
Here's another one. Look who I haven't mentioned yet in any of this commentary: Huma Abedin, Weiner's (now soon-to-be-ex) wife, who is the yin to Weiner's yang in Weiner's narrative (and often, camera framing), and whose role in the film - and the scandal - is disturbingly on-message for how radically different our assignment of roles is for the women of any story, as opposed to the men.
There is so much effort, throughout the film, to assign narrative to Abedin. When Weiner is re-igniting his political career by launching his mayoral run, the narrative is all about how supportive she is being of her once-shamed husband. "THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING HIM," a boisterous Weiner fan screams at her. Weiner's dick pic scandal (and let's face it, his dick) is the prima facie plot motivator - in screenwriting we'd call it the inciting incident - and Abedin's role is to react to it.
Did Abedin exist before Anthony Weiner's dick pics? No idea, because that part of the narrative just doesn't seem relevant to anyone telling the story. We know Bill Clinton performed the wedding ceremony (another man with a very famous penis), but for all Weiner seems to indicate, Huma Abedin may have emerged a fully-formed (pregnant!) adult the day Congressman Weiner sent a photo of his cockbulge to The Internet At Large.
She emerged so that she could react to to the scandal, and by that reaction, show us what a wife does. She is, inherently, given a position as a secondary character in the story of her own life.
When the second dick pick scandal happens (in the middle of the documentary, of course, because maybe no one involved knew what a documentary is), the narrative assigned to Abedin changes. It goes from "thank you for supporting him" to "how could you support him?"
At best, the role Abedin is now given is a widely-adopted storyline of a badly abused and denigrated woman; at worst, it's like a kind of bizarre group hazing or shame-based social control mechanism. "How could you?" As though by dint of making her own decisions about how to feel about a deeply complicated and personal issue, Abedin is somehow failing the overall narrative of Anthony Weiner as a scum-sucking pornographer.
What these two narratives serve to do, of course, is to strip from Abedin any semblance of agency, any suggestion that as an adult woman with a marriage and a child and a political career of her own, she has more than enough standing to make her own considered choices about how to manage the crises in her life. No nuance allowed.
It's never a point that Weiner makes explicitly, but it's fascinating to watch how removing nuance from enforced narratives becomes a system of control. Dump your husband, #AllLivesMatter, build a wall. They're all sound bytes that come from the same line of reasoning: if you dumb something down far enough, there's nothing left to argue with - because there's nothing there at all.
Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on Letterboxd.