In a dimly lit room filled with shades of red and blue, that give the room a shady character, we see Robert Pattinson, in the character of Chris Hansen, murmur something continuously to himself. It is the unmistakably odd, and somehow sticky catchphrase from To Catch a Predator – “You know how this looks right?”
And we, the audience, ask exactly this question as well. How does this look? How does it look when a man who is supposed to catch child predators, is obsessed with how he is perceived on Television, rehearsing over and over again, something that seems inane in comparison to what the show is supposed to be doing.
Not that a presenter should not rehearse or go over his lines, after all, a presenter is a professional with a job to do; it is just there is a palpable absurdity to a man obsessing over his enunciation and how he comes across on TV when the context of the show is so brutally grim. Oppenheimer gets this dissonance and never lets loose a chance to make this clear. The situation is inherently absurd.
Make-up people highlighting people’s blushes, the cameraperson zooming in on the tears of a predator, the producer of the show making sure everything is dramatic enough, Hansen looking at the camera and asking if the take was good enough – all while the life of man, albeit a potentially evil man, is breaking down in front of our eyes. And we are being let in on this, we are watching the creation of a show where everything except the final showdown is finely tuned.
Robert Pattinson as Chris HansenStraddling The Line Between Real and Unreal
It creates a weird dynamic, the show is real and unreal at the same time. To the predator being caught, their life is practically over. They will be seen as a sex offender forever, ousted from the annals of polite society permanently. Nothing can get more real than this, the pain of the humiliation will probably be the most undeniable sensation in their lives. While at the same time, there is a crew of people trying to make the whole situation look as sensational as possible.
The person who was being a decoy for the predator is playing a character, Chris Hansen is playing a character, the police (as mentioned in the 2007 Esquire article upon which the film is based) act overtly dramatic because of the presence of cameras. Ironically, literally everyone in the show follows a script, except for the predator. Outrageous morbid premise but as history has shown us, people lap up morbidity.
To Catch a Predator
Primetime, as directed by Lance Oppenheimer, is based on the outrageously popular NBC show To Catch a Predator which ran from 2004 to 2007. As the name would suggest, this was a hidden camera show that would lure would-be predators into a decoy house, after which Chris Hansen would appear out of nowhere asking for an explanation for the would-be predators text messages, and the final confrontation would be the law enforcement making a dramatic entry and arresting the would-be predator. That was the structure of the show.
Still from NBC’s To Catch a Predator (2004-2007) with the real Chirs Hansen (right)The film, however, is not interested in the show itself but the personalities that go into making a show like that. Primetime is primarily interested in obsession, power and how we are willing to go to any lengths to win. The film is centered around Chris Hansen, and while the Primetime character Chris Hansen is based on the real person, I think it would be safe to say that Robert Pattinson plays a highly exaggerated version of Hansen. A version that takes on mythical proportions. A version that is not incredibly sympathetic to his perspective but one that goes on a righteous crusade and warps into something else altogether.
Is It a Pro-Predator Film?
Since the film seems to portray him in a not-so-noble light, there is a lot of Internet discourse about the film that blasts the film for ‘subverting expectations and portraying the person exposing the paedos as the villain while portraying the paedos as victims’. It is not as simple.
People love thinking in terms of black and white, they want moral certainness, and nothing brings out our vitriol more than the subject of Predators. It is an extremely sensitive subject, with millions of victims worldwide. Whenever the subject comes up, many of us want to maul these predators, and rightly so. But that should not deter us from misinterpreting what the film is trying to say. In no way shape or form does the film sympathize with these potential predators, often portraying them as pathetic single guys who are often numbingly desperate. What the film focuses on is the often dubious process of luring these would-be predators.
Adults, both male and female, pretending to be minors and sending provocative messages to lonely men to lure them into the decoy house as fast as possible. While we can all agree that chatting up 13 year olds is unequivocally wrong and morally reprehensible, the methods of entrapment that the NBC show used, often going above and beyond to make sure that the potential predators would have sexual incentives to come to the decoy house, are morally dubious at best, and manipulative at worst.
Questioning Motivations
The movie is not interested in villainising the potential predators, as that would be convenient and extremely easy to do. Every single person already agrees that predation is reprehensible. It is instead interested in the more nuanced question of the ethics of entrapment; for the purposes of humiliation, which would then lead to ratings. The movie questions the true motives of the people behind the show. Was everyone making the show for the right reasons? Maybe not. That’s what Primetime tells us.
We see therefore that the show is not pro-predator, it is anti-dubious motivation. Moreover an exploratory film whose conclusion would be that predation is not good, would be an utterly pointless and inane film.
The film follows Chris Hansen and his quest to be the highest rated Television show on the network, taking on extremely popular shows like Lost and Friends. This is a mission for Hansen, a messianic divinely ordained journey.
In a revealing scene, Hansen is on an airplane and meets an elderly fan sitting beside him. The elderly man asks him whether he does not want to strangle these predators with his bare hands, and Hansen replies with a chilling – “I think what we do might be worse”. This reveals that Hansen is not simply doing this for the ratings, although that is the primary factor. He is shown to derive a kind of morbid pleasure from the humiliation of these predators, a sense of divine justice. This strong or rather warped sense of justice is explored in the latter parts of the film.
Chris Hansen Transforms
Throughout the film we see two strands of Hansen – one is the rating hungry ruthless competitor that wants to crush all the other shows to secure the primetime slot, that we see during the first half of the film. The other emerges in the second half of the film in the form of this messianic figure that wants to purge the earth of evil itself.
The film focuses on this descent to an almost biblical madness, the visual language of the film follows suit. Everything becomes over dramatised in the second half, the colours are more intense, the music coalesces, and the stakes are raised to the highest possible order. There is constant thunder and lighting, the setting is apocalyptic as Hansen is hell bent on getting his Whale, a potential predator from the government that would change the perception of the show as something that lures in small-time predators to one that catches big fishes.
We see that the film then essentially follows Hansen’s descent into madness; his transformation from a ratings guy who believes in the cause of the show to someone who becomes wholly absorbed in the moral cause of the show, to the point of sabotaging the show itself. He becomes possessed with the idea of moral purity, frantically ranting about the need to rid the earth of ‘an ancient evil’
An Ancient Evil
In the most interesting and the weirdest sequence of the film; Hansen lectures his one of his crew members, Decoy Dan, the 21 year old actor pretending to be a 13 year old boy, that while investigating a case of missing children in the south of India he encounters stories of a nameless and faceless ‘ancient evil’ that lurks in the darkness of caves. He then reiterates to Decoy Dan, that their mission is to cleanse the earth of this ancient evil. An ancient evil that takes the lives of children.
We see that Hansen sees the world in terms of a clear good and evil. He reaches a place of extreme moral certainness, his world does not have any room for moral greyness. There is a biblical nameless ancient evil out there, outside of himself, and that needs to be completely exterminated. There is a purity to his belief which makes him all the more frenetic. It is this complete surrender to this primal warlike instinct, to wage a war against an enemy, that almost drives him to the point of paralysis.
Doubts, Hesitation, Compensation
In the middle of the film we see Hansen struggling with self doubt after his extra marital affair is discovered and he is blackmailed over his photos dining with another woman. This causes him to go into a spiral of doubt, there is a moment in the film where he catches a Rabbi trying to prey on a young boy, and instead of surrendering to the situation the Rabbi questions Hansen and his motives. The Rabbi accuses him – Do you think you are a good person?
Hansen is visibly shaken and for a moment, is engulfed by a kind of shame. He is no longer sure. He is a man that himself indulges in evil, should he be judging others? The visual language is strong, Pattinson’s face warps into a 2001-like kaleidoscopic sequence ending in the complete blackening of his face: an almost perfect visual representation of what it feels like to feel shame.
Ironically, it is these self doubts that reaffirm and strengthen his belief in the righteousness of his cause. To avoid confronting his own moral failings, Hansen magnifies and externalises the evil of harming children into a nameless ancient evil entity. Doing so dilutes his own moral failing, what he does in the form of infidelity is now miniscule compared to the biblical evil that is harming children.
His obsession at his righteousness is a way then to compensate for his hesitancy, his doubts, his own personal failings.
A Self-Assured A24 Styled Debut
Primetime is an extremely confident and fresh debut, a film that employs an array of visual languages to convey the time and place and the zeitgeist of mid-2000s America. Digital video, grainy footage and DV era television footage, everything is used to give us that Y2K sensation. Although it is hard to describe what it is, the film has a typical A24 visual language: a language that is whimsical and yet intense.
It asks us some difficult questions, not afraid to delve into dark alleys, questioning the nature of reality TV itself, and the ethics of entrapping people. The ideas apart, it is the compelling psychological portrait of a man that descends into madness of purity that drives the film and makes it work. Primetime is a brave, triumphant debut for a director we should all be looking out for.
