Film’s ability to act as a cruel and unrelenting audio/visual autopsy of the human psyche is used to its fullest extent in Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” a lurid and hyper-intrusive dramatization of Chris Hansen’s meteoric rise and cultural plummet as “To Catch A Predator” began transmitting into millions of American homes. That Hansen’s medium for “catching” these sexually violent online offenders was television is textual in the movie; its story as much about the perversion of good intent through the limelight of monoculture as it is about the man himself. Television at its most invasive, its most primal, is about instant gratification, the baser instincts of our lizard brains that like our entertainment to be loud, righteous, and immediate. Ambiguity is for the cinema, whereas TV is the static-tinged netherworld of grey blobs that shimmer and blip into an approximation of living flesh while presenting nothing of the sort; a perpetual game of three-card monte where the lady is never found and diet pills are hocked to a rapt and receptive audience. In the white-blue hum of a screen that would shock you if you dared touch its cold glass surface, past the barely perceptible screech of the cathode ray tube, lies both madness masquerading as truth. It’s the sort of unreality that could make a person lose themselves, even if, once in the faraway never was, they had high-minded ambitions of using this radioactive tool of mass persuasion for good. The falseness of the screen makes a farce of everything it shows, sending even those of honest intent pinwheeling along the bell curve of commercialized savagery that beckons toward the bug-zap light of fame. Chris Hansen wanted to be seen; that is of little doubt, nor is it hard to believe that at one point he truly hoped to rid the world of those who might harm the innocent. As “Primetime” shows, the best-laid plans of mice and ad-men go oft astray, unleashing a devastation that reaches through the screen and into the heart of those manipulated toward some greater good. Hey, it could be worse. At least it’s on camera.
“Primetime” throws audiences into the life and work of Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), whose series of stories for Dateline NBC, “To Catch A Predator,” has taken over the airwaves. Hansen, an ambitious reporter and newsman, is suddenly a celebrity, and NBC hopes to capitalize on the runaway success. People at home love to see the comeuppance of men who prey on children online; it’s cathartic, akin to lashing the guilty in a public square, as Hansen describes. Television is changing, and Hansen, along with his eager producer Andie (Merritt Wever), has the bull by the horns. But the audience and network are ravenous. They need more. More predators. More prey. Enter fresh meat in the form of Dan (Skyler Gisondo), an eager-eyed young actor who hopes to parlay some time pretending to be a 13-year-old boy into a career of substance. Hired on for his devotion to his craft and his susceptibility to fall into the treacly solipsism of Hansen, Dan becomes a surrogate son and mascot for this merry band of predator hunters, including another decoy (Phoebe Bridgers) and a man whose sole job is to lure offenders out by himself, pretending to be a child on the internet (Matthew Maher). As the team grinds for more outlandish subject matter, more deviant behavior, predators of pronounced societal standing, Hansen is looking for his white whale, a catch that will solidify his place in television history and catapult him to an ever-escalating stratosphere of stardom. He’s willing to do what it takes, and sacrifice whoever it takes, to get where he believes he was always meant to be. Woe to those he is forced to steamroll along the way.
“Primetime” opens with Chris Hansen tucked in his makeshift dressing room, repeating the comments that this week’s predator was texting to their decoy; heinous, pathetic, monstrous things. Chris whispers them to himself like an actor running lines until they seem to have no deeper meaning beyond the syllables themselves, the recitation taking on the form of a spiritual mantra. It’s telling that the score playing during this sequence is titled “Incantation”. Chris is summoning a persona of his own creation, the face of American punitive justice; the stone visage of righteousness bringing a hammer down upon the men whose lives are soon upended by their own perversion. Pattinson is chameleon-like, wearing Hansen’s skin as a translucent layer barely concealing a man grown tired of waiting for what is his due; a manifestation of ambition and hunger that is insatiable. “I’m never acting,” scowls Hansen when accused of putting on a performance in his role on the show, and perhaps that’s true. In many ways, “Primetime” is about embracing that stickier, uglier side of ourselves; excavating who we are even if we do not particularly like what we find underneath. Hansen, as played by Pattinson, is not a person; he’s a persona, an idea, an image on a lunchbox in the American psyche. At one point in the film, he tries to convince Dan that his role on the show is not to be bait but a superhero; an embodiment of goodness placed in the path of devastating evil. It’s obvious that Hansen is telling on himself; there’s only room in the spotlight for one hero, the one who a nation eagerly checked in on week after week to see what spineless, quivering individual would be offered freshly baked cookies and a chance to explain themselves next, to prostrate themselves before the masses in an effort to make everyone feel better about the comparative insignificance of their own sins. Even Hansen himself, when telling the story of his Emmy-winning investigation into a child killer in India, can’t help but paint the story in mythic terms. He was not stalking a man, but a monstrosity with a wide-mouthed grin that could swallow children whole; a lurking, creeping thing that could be found slunk in the dark of a cave, hungry and waiting. This is a fairy tale creature soon to be struck down by the handsome knight; a story to scare the children into coming straight home and being wary of traipsing down the dark alleys of the internet. “To Catch A Predator” was fiction wearing the mask of real life, of honest consequences and ramifications for the evil that men do. Keeping that mask from slipping is seemingly what drove Hansen to push well beyond the bounds of his perceptual distortion field, destroying the lives of both the innocent and the guilty in the process while ultimately doing nary a thing to save anyone at all.
There’s a documentary that came out recently called “Predators” that asks sticky questions about what good was ultimately wrought from “To Catch A Predator”. While several hundred arrests were made, many never reached convictions, and many others were thrown out for conflicts of interest or entrapment claims; that isn’t even to mention the on-camera death, which makes for the climax of “Primetime.” Hansen is interviewed for the documentary and is quietly assured that the work they did was good, despite the harm, despite the catastrophic insistence of television people to act as the guiding hand of law enforcement. He seems ambivalent about the lives ruined by his ambition, and frankly annoyed that he has not received the recognition he feels he deserves. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here” is a common refrain that Pattinson repeats over and over again throughout the film; a phrase meant as a haunting thought experiment of the horrors perpetuated by repugnant men seeking children on the internet. But the question still stands: what would have happened if Chris Hansen was not there? Would more men have been convicted? Would fewer children have ultimately been harmed? Would a nation have had less poison slop to fill their bellies with, convincing them that anyone outside the sanctity of their homes could be a child-munching vampire? Ironic that the vast majority of child predators live in the homes of the very children they prey upon; it’s almost as if these lambs are being led to slaughter under the pretense of salvation. “Primetime” has no sure answers, poses no clear judgment on the events of “Predator” beyond sending a reconnaissance mission into the psyche of those who created it. We cannot affect what we see on screen; we can only watch and, maybe, learn that predators aren’t always so easy to spot as the TV would have us believe.
“Primetime” is a feast for the eyes and ears; a distinctly uncomfortable, funny, and tragic descent into televisualized psychosis. It’s tempting to get lost in the artifice of it all, of the parasocial relationships we build within the reality we perceive on screen. We’re living in a world created by it, existing under a fascism founded on its false promises and voyeuristic seductions. It’ll kill us all one day, if it hasn’t already, this mass media we’ve grown addicted to, and it’ll surely be broadcast on screens around the world so we can witness our own destruction in real, agonizing time. It will be horrific. But my God, think of the ratings.
Tune in.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Primetime” is playing at The Broad Theater, Prytanai Theaters at Canal Place, and Prytania Uptown.
