[COLUMN] The Digital Nightmare of Primetime | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Primetime, in particular for the true story that inspired the recent film. If you’re looking for a quick review: the film is great. Deeply unsettling, bleakly comic and wryly observed, it’s a really fascinating glimpse at a particular moment in American culture, with a powerhouse set of central performances from Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo. It is a digital nightmare of a movie, dripping with sweat and cast in hellish hues. It is, as Adam Nayman quipped, “Dark Knightcrawler.” Just be aware that this piece contains a discussion of the film’s ending. With that out of the way: showtime.

The specter of the War on Terror haunts Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, a film about the disastrous run of the NBC reality television series To Catch a Predator, which spun out of the current affairs show Dateline and culminated in a morbid spectacle involving the suicide of a Texas Assistant District Attorney.

The pitch of To Catch a Predator is remarkably straightforward. Television show host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) works with Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), who founded the internet vigilante group Perverted Justice, to trawl online chatrooms to find potential pedophiles. Those men are then lured to a rented house that has been outfitted with cameras, where an actor who can pass as a child, such as Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers), lures them inside before Hansen confronts them.

The show existed in a strange liminal space. One of the reasons that the series didn’t have to request the consent of the men featured to show their faces on screen was because it was technically considered a news show. However, it was packaged as entertainment. The show was designed to draw eyeballs and to hold attention, with stories edited salaciously and wry voiceover commentary. It was all presented as public spectacle, produced with the freedom afforded new but none of the diligence or care.

This tension simmers through To Catch a Predator. NBC president Jeff Zucker (playing himself) openly admits to Hansen, “I don’t like your show.” However, in a post-Seinfeld and post-Friends world, he concedes, “America loves it.” So he moves it to the hypercompetitive Wednesday night timeslot, where it will play against Lost on ABC. This becomes a recurring fixation for Hansen throughout the film. “We’re going to be bigger than Lost,” he vows to his producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever).

So To Catch a Predator becomes entertainment. It has to compete with the expensive Hawaiian location shooting, the epic plane crashes and the mysterious polar bears of Lost. It’s hard to hold to any journalistic standards under those expectations. Del notes the hypocrisy of Perverted Justice purporting to shame predators while selling novelty lingerie on its merchandise site, refusing to go on while the site sells a thong reading “contents aged at least 18.” (That item really existed.)

This is, after all, a business. The subject of money comes up repeatedly. Zucker makes the big announcement that To Catch a Predator is moving to the primetime slot at the upfronts for advertisers. He moves so quickly in part because of anxiety that rival executive Patty Patterson (Jessica Hecht) over at ABC is trying to reverse engineer her own take on the formula, effectively trying to beat a competitor to market.

The show’s newest recruit, Dan Plumm (Skyler Gisondo), is enticed by the promise of $5,000 per shoot. After Dan has a rough first day, Bender convinces Hansen to have a drink with him by promising that he can expense it. As they wait at an airport between shoots, Bender keeps Dan placated by reaching into her purse and giving him money to buy gum for the flight. Bender complains about how much money the shoot is burning by the minute.

This base reality is at odds with the mythology the show builds around itself. In the opening scenes, To Catch a Predator is treated almost like warfare. The first predator caught (Tony Revolori) is a veteran who served in Iraq. The team reports that he has “breached the perimeter” as he approaches the house. Going to greet him, Del throws on a camouflage baseball cap. When the predator leaves, he is tackled by local law enforcement, including one member camouflaged in the foliage.

When Hansen leads the team to Murphy, Texas, forgoing the regular “bottom feeders” that the show catches in pursuit of a “whale”, he teams up with Sheriff Cortland Gunn (Bokeem Woodbine). Gunn is a veteran of Desert Storm. His police department is heavily militarized. They drive around in armored personnel carriers and test their assault rifles by shooting at targets wearing printed out photos of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Hansen leans into this sensibility. When the team arrives in Murphy, Texas, he starts wearing body armor and never takes it off, looking like a reporter embedded in Iraq. Editors at NBC opine that Hansen “thinks he’s Mike Wallace”, referencing the 60 Minutes host whose coverage of Vietnam changed public opinion. When he leaves for the shoot in Fort Myers, Florida, Hansen talks to his wife Mary (Anna Faris) as if he’s in active service. “You’re gonna be so proud of me,” he promises her.

Primetime repeatedly reminds viewers that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are unfolding in parallel with Hansen’s crusade. Throughout the film, televisions constantly show footage of key events such as the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue or Hussein’s trial. Hansen is heavily implied to suffer from an inferiority complex relative to Dateline host Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), who is a “real” journalist doing important work. “I’ll be watching from Afghanistan,” Phillips promises Hansen.

Throughout Primetime, Hansen develops quite a chip on his shoulder. “Predator has never gotten the respect that it deserves,” he asserts. While various members of the public and law enforcement flatter Hansen, his pride and his ego are hurt by the fact that his peers and contemporaries do not recognize the importance of what he does. If nothing else, director Lance Oppenheim treats To Catch a Predator seriously, treating it as a window into its cultural moment.

Primetime is not especially subtle in parallelling Hansen’s zealotry with the broader social and political context of the Bush era. When Von Erck suggests that their “whale” is wired into the Texas political scene, Hansen cannot help but ask, “Are we talking about the President?” When Dan demonstrates reluctance to press ahead on a sting operation, Hansen warns him “you’re either with me or you’re with them”, engaging in the same sort of moral absolutism that Bush employed.

Hansen imbues their vigilante reality television show with a moral certainty. He tells Dan the story of his trip to India in the late 1990s, investigating the disappearance of children. He recalls a tale told to him by a young girl of a monster hiding in the wilderness. Evil, it seems, is lurking in a dark cave in the Far East, and it has found its way to American shores. When Dan wonders what they are doing, Hansen assures him, “We are ridding the world of an ancient evil.”

This is, after all, the luxury of a show about hunting and catching child abusers. Pedophiles are, quite reasonably, viewed as complete monsters. They are the worst people in the world. They prey upon and exploit the innocent, taking advantage of the most vulnerable people in society, engaging in behavior that is abhorrent to any normal human being. They are, as Dan notes during the one segment where he takes the lead, “bad guys.”

So there is catharsis in turning their suffering and humiliation into public spectacle. It is not just about punishing them. It is also about validating everybody else and reinforcing the myths of larger society. “There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,” Hansen ruminates to Dan at one point. “Now there’s a television in every home. And I’m on it.” By creating this freak show, this public spectacle, the bonds of the society around it are strengthened.

Primetime is very firmly anchored in the 2000s, but it is haunted by the present in a number of ways. In particular, the film taps into the current conspiratorial preoccupation with pedophilia as a political tether. Despite demonstrable evidence of actual systemic child abuse among the extremely rich and powerful, allegations of child sex abuse have become a fixture of contemporary politics through movements like Pizzagate and QAnon, used to justify all manner of extreme action.

This has always been the way. The ancient “blood libel” conspiracy theory propagated antisemitism by falsely insisting that Jewish communities were engaged in ritual child sacrifice. These sorts of framings, along with “stranger danger”, help to propagate the myth that children are most at risk from sinister unknown forces. The reality is often much more mundane and upsetting. Most child abusers are known to their victims, but it is easier to imagine the threat as an alien outsider.

By neatly identifying and delineating the bad guys, everybody else gets to position themselves neatly as good by way of contrast. It’s like staging on a War on Terror, and defining the forces aligned in opposition as standing for “freedom.” Who in their right mind could oppose such a concept? Hansen’s crusade allows him to position Dan – and implicitly himself – as a “superhero”, another cultural reference to the era. Those simplistic stories of good and evil speaking to the moment.

Primetime suggests that Hansen is a flawed person. He is flawed in small and petty ways, in the ways that an ordinary person might be. Throughout the film, he is haunted by a threat that the tabloid newspaper The National Enquirer is going to expose his affair with a woman in Fort Myers named Krysten (Caroline Hebert). The film suggests that, on top of pressure to compete with Lost, Hansen is driven to chase the “whale” in Texas by a desire to get ahead of his own potential scandal.

After all, the luxury of chasing pedophiles is that their obvious monstrosity serves to excuse and erase almost any other indiscretion. When Bender finds out about the affair, she asks the loaded question, “How old is she?” Hansen understands the implication. “She’s 30, Andie,” he bluntly informs his producer. “Bravo,” Andie offers sarcastically. The benefit of neatly delineating the world into “good” and “evil” is that it allows one to set the boundary of “evil” at quite an extreme.

This all ends in disaster. Desperate to land the “whale”, Hansen breaks the format of the show to chase Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt (Alex Winter). When Conradt declines to come to their location, Hansen and Bender convince Gunn to stage a large-scale tactical operation outside Conradt’s house. This large-scale military operation is far outside the show’s remit. “We don’t do that” Del reminds Hansen. “They come to us.”

The stand-off ends with Conradt taking his own life. This really happened. It was a spectacular disaster, resulting in 23 cases being thrown out of court as tainted. Standing the wreckage of everything, Hansen repeats his own catchphrase to himself. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Given the film’s repeated invocation of the War on Terror, it’s hard not to read this catastrophic expedition as its own metaphor for America’s misjudged foreign interventions.

The reality is that the world cannot be forced into such clear delineations of good and evil, and the idea that it can is just a fantasy. Hansen is repeatedly seen rehearsing and practicing his line deliveries, trying to strike the right intonation. He practices his catchphrases. He tries to land the perfect take in the vocal booth. After giving his inspiring speech to Dan at the motel dining area in Fort Myers, he dashes into his room for a quick costume change before running off to meet Krysten.

Primetime is fascinated with the idea of the image and the reflection. The film was shot on a variety of formats using a wide range of cameras (including a colonoscopy camera) and it has that ethereal turn of the millennium digital haze to it, recalling films like David Lynch’s Inland Empire or Michael Mann’s Collateral. The audience is always aware that they are watching a constructed narrative, both in the show that Hansen is making and in the film that Oppenheim is constructing.

Characters are often seen reflected in windows or mirrors. They are shot through glass doors. Rain glistens like drops of crystal. The image often ghosts as the characters move, an echo trapped within itself. Appropriately enough, given its subject matter, Primetime has a vaguely nightmarish quality to it. Nothing is real. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I watching? Is this a documentary? Is this a scripted movie? Is it something new, something different?’,” recalls Oppenheim of To Catch a Predator. “I couldn’t tell if it was like a prank show or a horror movie or a news program.”

This is another way in which Primetime connects to the present day. Hansen has inspired a generation of even more reckless online copycats engaged in their own vigilante justice. However, the film evokes another specter of NBC’s reality television line-up from the mid-2000s. The current President of the United States burnished his celebrity as host of The Apprentice on NBC, a show that portrayed him as a savvy businessman and dealmaker – and which saved his reputation and his finances. Donald Trump became a billionaire in part by playing one on television.

The problem with creating these sorts of fairytales and fantasies is that eventually people begin to confuse them with reality. After their drink together at the motel bar, Dan notices that Hansen wears a bracelet on his wrist. “Is that an acting totem?” Dan asks. Despite the fact the film introduced him rehearsing his line deliveries, Hansen seems almost offended by the question. “Nothing I do is acting,” he assures Dan. One almost gets the sense that he believes it.