In Lance Oppenheim’s new film “Primetime,” Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) reveals that he is hunting a demon. According to Hansen, while reporting on a series of child abductions in India, he interviewed a source who had come face-to-face with an otherworldly darkness. In Hansen’s imagination, it appears as a masked creature with a smiling mouth of carved teeth and huge, staring eyes. With that vision driving him, his hidden-camera show “To Catch a Predator” is much more than mere TV. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he says.
Does Hansen believe any of this? It’s hard to say. As portrayed in “Primetime,” it’s impossible to tell when Hansen isn’t performing, or if he ever stops. Is he really chasing demons or just chasing ratings? He is a fascinating figure, but the more the film focuses on Hansen, the more it confuses the face of the problem for the problem itself—and risks allowing its real quarry to slip away.
Oppenheim’s previous films were all documentaries (in fact, he has one coming out next month: the much-talked about Elizabeth Holmes docudrama “You Can See Everything,” co-directed with Nathan Fielder). But “Primetime” is no documentary, blending the facts with invented drama and phantasmagorical imagery in a more expressionistic telling of the story. That stylization is often effective but hardly necessary: “To Catch a Predator” is already stranger than fiction.
On “To Catch a Predator,” Hansen’s team would find sexual predators online by posing as teenagers, and lure them to houses where Hansen and a camera crew would be waiting. Hansen confronted the men with transcripts of their illicit chats and interrogated them about their intentions, before allowing them to leave the house—where they would find law enforcement waiting. It was a sensation, and despite Hansen’s claims (in the film and in real life) that they were performing service journalism, the real draw of “To Catch a Predator” was the perverse spectacle of men exposed, humiliated and punished.
We meet the team behind the show and witness their internal tensions. Competent but underappreciated producer Andie (Merritt Wever) considers an offer to move to ABC, while techie vigilante Xavier (Matthew Maher), who finds most of the show’s targets, maneuvers to take her job. Del (Phoebe Bridgers, acquitting herself well in her first major film role) is a “decoy,” an actor who plays teens in interactions with the show’s targets; she also begins to doubt that the show is actually helping anyone.
And there’s the newest member, fresh-faced actor Dan (Skyler Gisondo), who unwittingly takes a job as a decoy. Soon he’s affecting a high-pitched voice and offering trays of cookies to real predators, which is, to say the least, more than he bargained for. Although he’s unnerved, he’s also starstruck by Hansen. The older man insists that “Nothing I do is acting,” and tells Dan that they are “superheroes.” But it’s clear to us that Dan is being used, his youthful face and genuine discomfort part of the exploitative spectacle that is “To Catch a Predator.”
Hansen is the film’s center of gravity, and Pattinson’s intense, nervy performance is certainly compelling. But you won’t get any groundbreaking insights into Hansen’s psychology: he’s egotistical, his personal life is a mess and he has a messiah complex. Are you surprised? We’ve seen this particular character portrait before. It is frustrating, then, that the film spends so much time on Hansen’s personal foibles, especially because it muddles the film’s attempt to indict the viewer.
Television—like every screen—is a two-way mirror. It affords audiences the voyeuristic thrill of witnessing depraved behavior and its consequences, while never having to reflect on the dark urges that inspire us to seek such spectacles in the first place. By focusing so much on Hansen the film risks doing the same, giving us an easy target for our disgust so we can ignore the finger pointing back at us.
One of “Primetime’s” smartest, and most unnerving, narrative moves is to make the “To Catch a Predator” segments skin-crawlingly uncomfortable. Oppenheim forces us to recognize the humanity even in these men who plan to do horrible things. Many of them are played by recognizable former child actors, including Tony Revolori, Jonathan Lipnicki and Alex Winter—a nod, perhaps, to the exploitative nature of show business. There’s no catharsis in watching them whimper and apologize as Hansen towers over them. It’s an ugly spectacle, and we are forced to consider why Americans were drawn to it in the first place.
It was impossible for me to watch “Primetime” without thinking of the Catholic Church’s own history with sexual abuse. Clearly our faith community is not immune to this sort of sin, and we’re not immune to the desire for vengeance and punishment that made “To Catch a Predator” a hit. Whenever new allegations break, some Catholics are quick to point the finger at their preferred nemeses: secular culture, queer people, priestly celibacy, Vatican II and so on. It’s easier to blame and shame someone else than to look at ourselves, our community and ask hard questions about how we might be culpable in creating a culture where such horrific crimes are possible. We love to see sinners punished—as long as it’s other sinners.
“There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,” Hansen says. “Now there’s a television in every home. And I’m on it.” “Primetime” takes place during the particularly bloodlusty culture of the immediate post-9/11 years, when indiscriminate vengeance was considered a virtue. But it’s a desire as old as civilization itself and it thrives on public spectacles of humiliation. Hansen thinks he’s hunting a demon, but he ends up feeding it.
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