Weinglorious

Viewing the documentary "Weiner" in 2026

Dear friends, film-watchers, and people who followed politics in the 2000s and 2010s,

It takes me a long time to get around to watching most movies or shows. True to that custom, I recently watched “Weiner,” the 2016 political documentary by Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman, for the first time.

This fly-on-the-wall-style documentary begins as an account of a political comeback: Anthony Weiner, a seven-term Congressman from New York City who resigned in disgrace in 2011 over a dick-pic scandal, runs for mayor in 2013. His wife, Huma Abedin, is by his side. Her support is significant not only because their marriage survived a spectacular scandal, but because of her status as a close aide and honorary second daughter to Hillary Clinton.

After enduring some brutal publicity and jokes on late-night TV, Weiner pulls ahead of his rivals, connecting with voters and winning some early polls. A Bronx resident yells at reporters in frustration, demanding they let Weiner talk about housing in her borough and not his penis. The Big Apple looks ready to move on, even if the New York Post isn’t.

You may remember what happened next: A new sexting scandal erupted, upending Weiner’s campaign, sinking his hopes and straining his marriage anew. The cameras catch it all in intimate detail as Weiner, Abedin and the campaign staff seem oblivious to their presence. There is one instance when Weiner asks the photographer to leave the room, and another when he testily asks why a “fly on the wall” is asking him questions.

It’s not all cringe comedy, however. Seeing how Weiner’s behavior and last name draw reporters and comedians like flies to shit shows us something about those flies, too, and even the documentary’s audience. What are we doing here?

“Weiner” is deft, presenting the ever-shifting melodrama with no voice-over narration, relying on snippets of newscasts and comedy shows for context, also presenting the tone of Weiner’s news coverage and the opaque surface of Weiner’s personality.

Weiner does not hide his anger or pain from the filmmakers. His sense of humor, which presumably helped him through his years in public schools with Weiner for a last name, is always warmed up. We’ll pass on the obvious jokes about exposing himself, but suffice it to say that, alone with the cameraman in a car or at home, he is unguarded and vulnerable as the wheels fall off his cart before our eyes.

Throughout the film, the theatrical elements of crisis response and political messaging, including daily displays of humility and contrition, are openly discussed and shown in action. We spend so much time watching Weiner apologizing and trying to find his way back to campaign issues, as the political performance assimilates his real pain and distress.

We see Weiner undergo the horrendous Lawrence O’Donnell non-interview on MSNBC, the infamous “what is wrong with you?” ambush, a shoddy pretext for O’Donnell to shout at Weiner for eight minutes on cable television that I regarded at the time as O’Donnell’s second-worst moment. (The first was his treatment of Julia Ioffe as a guest panelist on his show just weeks earlier.)

Getting jumped by O’Donnell draws an unseemly outburst from Weiner, who is plainly exhausted and blowing off steam through the shouting match. When Weiner chuckles over the replay the next day, Abedin looks on aghast and it feels like the election is already over for him. Yet Weiner laughs, the duty of prideful humility lifted and Weiner enjoying any chance to hit back.

Perhaps losing the mayoralty was best, seeing these glimpses of the man’s personal health. Bill De Blasio wins the election. The cameraman asks, “Why did you let me film this?” And there is no clear answer. Weiner looks blank, as if frozen to his soul.

Tragedy, this is not

Journalists like to write articles describing Weiner’s rise and fall as in some sense tragic.

Some of these writers apparently conflate “tragedy” with the merely self-destructive or mistake farce for tragedy. Up until he involved a child, Weiner’s sins were the bawdy peccadilloes of a silly man embarrassing himself, his donors and his more professional and ambitious spouse. That’s where “Weiner” the documentary leaves off.

Shortly after the film’s 2016 release, Weiner’s foibles graduated to criminal exposure when he was charged with sending lewd messages and sexually explicit material to a teenager, knowing how old she was. Emails recovered from his computer tainted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in an email server controversy that ultimately boosted Donald Trump. Weiner pleaded guilty over the online interactions with a minor and went to prison, now a lifetime sex offender. Abedin left with their child. Much of the documentary’s comedy now feels dissonant and sad.

Weiner headed a kitchen countertop company after prison and stepped into the podcasting waters. Last year, he ran for city council again, saying he had assumed responsibility for his actions and sought treatment for addiction. He told one reporter, “Now I can be of service. And I'm a damn good politician." But the voters weren’t interested.

He was arguably “a damn good politician” once, albeit an abrasive one who screamed at Republicans and even alienated some of his fellow Democrats. Like many in his party, he was an initial supporter of the catastrophic and malignant Iraq War who later repented. There was that time he tried to bar a Palestinian delegation from the UN. On the other hand, he was a full-throated champion of “Medicare for All” or some system of single-payer universal coverage in the years that the Obama administration was appropriating Romneycare.

But this was not an inevitable fall, a lamentable fate befalling a more or less noble figure. It does not evoke pity for Weiner so much as prurient curiosity: What’s up with this guy and what other shoes might drop?

The age of internet obsession is suffused with ghoulish voyeurism, to be sure, but can such a debased chorus of data-mined, overstimulated online looky-loos and smartasses with sensibilities so radically reshaped by digital media ever feel the exhilaration of tragedy?

The farce of Weiner, and the not-farcical awful thing it would become, owe little to tragedy and much more to the internet’s milieu, the ubiquity of online porn and culture of oversharing as devices and interactive websites gobble up our emotional lives, intellectual energy and relationships with others.

Rather than tragic resonance, the aftertaste is a feeling of being hollowed out all together, our laughter exhausted and a pin spot sitting on a miserable man, out of words and without his phone, looking into space and seeing no reflection.