Although the recent documentary Predators may be a slightly more complex and detailed analysis of the To Catch a Predator phenomenon, Primetime is just as effective of a film experience, if not slightly more so. This is partly because it takes a bit of a different line of attack towards the series’ ethical issues. Director Lance Oppenheim’s narrative film debut (he made his name in docs) centers on the tone and tenor American entertainment took during Chris Hansen’s rise and fall as a television personality.
Having lived through the early 2000s but not being old enough at the time to remember everything about them, I can see in hindsight a certain air-headedness about the way many of the huge stories of the time were subsumed into the general “entertainment” bubble. Coffins from the post-9/11 wars never being shown on television, the nonstop bashing of Britney Spears, and Chris Hansen’s apparent mania vis-a-vis child predators seem to me to all fall into the same category of warped priorities in mainstream culture at the time. Obviously no one wants predators to get away with preying on minors, but the line in the sand that has to be drawn in our desire for justice is to not make unqualified people — and in this case, essentially game show hosts — the arbiter of how that justice is meted out.
When Hansen steps into his stings, are we thereby abandoning the concept of qualified law enforcement and turning everyone into a sheriff? I would argue yes, based on the general anxiety and many copycats the show created. It’s a sort of panic which is not good for society in the long run. Primetime seems to agree with that sentiment, and all of that is on the face of the brilliant Robert Pattinson as Hansen. Without doing a ton of research, it’s tough to know exactly what is exaggerated here and what isn’t. However, in the same way that To Catch fomented a certain kind of mania, the general vibe of Primetime reflects the mania of the show’s crew back at them. Pattinson depicts this mania in a half-grimacing smile, which he uses to portray himself as a hero (he literally says that an actor’s role in the sting is akin to a “superhero”), but always belies a personal desperation. Perhaps those notes are already hit on the head too much for some throughout the movie when it comes to Oppenheim’s direction, but Pattinson is nearly always at the forefront of them, especially as Hansen rages against Lost, which he desperately wants to beat in the ratings.
In a narrative film, I think it’s tricky to thematically place your subject within the specific era they dominated without seeming didactic. With Hansen and To Catch, though, most people can acknowledge now the ways in which the show and its host went too far. The film culminates with the infamous Bill Conradt episode, and here it really echoes into Shakespearean tragedy territory. As the film explores in Hansen’s backstory, there was something originally noble in what Hansen was trying to do. It’s why many still see him as a hero. That nobility was ultimately subsumed by a desire for ratings over justice and personality over prudence. The neon haze of the film’s visual language ironically emphasizes just how seriously the crew of this show took themselves, when they really should have had a seat, at least for a minute. | George Napper
