A24’s latest, Covid-esque media-studies creep-out
In the unfunny psychological satire Primetime, the NBC reality show To Catch a Predator (2004–2007) provides the basis for director Lance Oppenheim to further confuse our relationship to media. Oppenheim, working from a script by Ajon Singh, reenacts the show’s creation, singling out its host Chris Hansen as the villain-victim of its sting-operation format.
Primetime itself is a sting-operation. Both Oppenheim and Singh, who are in their early 30s, apparently view contemporary media through a sarcastic lens. They’re cynical adolescents using 67-year-old Hansen (played by dilettante British actor Robert Pattinson) to demonstrate how TV’s old-school tabloid journalism misled the public — supposedly a consequence of cultural collapse that infects every human interaction. It’s Covid-esque.
Oppenheim and Singh take a neo-neo-noir approach to television, vigilantism, and moral relativism. Blandly handsome Hansen embodies the TV-genic clone quality favored by TV executives — an image that idealizes Warhol’s 1967 quote “In the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Hansen and his NBC team exploit the universal desire to be famous, even infamous, that extends to everyone from television presenters to politicians, even criminals. But Primetime snatches back that ambition by ridiculing it.
That condemnation is tied to a sense of superiority that’s implicit in the film’s grimy, unctuous look — lurid colors that make the pretense of docu-drama realism akin to horror films. Oppenheim evokes the ideological obscenities of the mockumentarian Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), but he’s evidently a fan of David Fincher’s bile-and-urine motif (as in Fight Club) that turns the world slick yet skeevy.
In a Variety profile, Singh confessed, “I want Hollywood to feel dangerous again. You make something that’s a risk. All of a sudden, people believe in it, and it becomes a viable product. Then, they can go out and make more projects that feel scary or dangerous and can be huge successes. I believe that. I think audiences really crave it.”
That’s an aberrant reaction to growing up with the reality-TV phenomenon, thinking that trash is acceptable, and then converting it to “cinema” content. But Singh’s goal also explains the acrid character-assassination of Hansen that flips the film’s subject from sexual crime to media crime.
Pattinson’s performance is an extension of his breakthrough role as the dubious heartthrob vampire in the Twilight franchise. He loots Hansen’s public image, exaggerating tics of TV-newsreader vanity and self-pity emphasized by Pattinson’s bug-eyed praying-mantis look; it’s as bizarre as Tom Cruise’s good-old-boy in Digger. As co-producer of Primetime (along with horror specialist Ari Aster), Pattinson invests his own smarts about media-industry arrogance. This explains the plot twists entangling Hansen, his producer Andie (Merrit Wever), their hired decoy (Skylar Gisondo), the suicidal district attorney Bill Conradt (Alex Winter), and comic minor roles, such as predators played by Tony Revolori from the Wes Anderson universe and Jonathan Lipnicki, who was the cute kid in Jerry Maguire. And a special guest appearance by actual To Catch a Predator producer Jeff Zucker, who portrays himself like Tom Cruise’s oafish producer in Tropic Thunder, lends the film a hall-of-mirrors pseudo-profundity.
What a grotesque twist that Primetime villainizes Hansen as the enemy of the popular audience. Oppenheim essentially defends today’s mainstream propaganda media when he elicits sympathy for pedophiles. But he lacks the profundity of Peter Lorre starring as the murderer of children in Fritz Lang’s German expressionist classic M. Primetime’s goodwill toward pedophiles is a liberal betrayal similar to the media bias in favor of illegal alien criminals and seditionist protesters.
To take Primetime more seriously than perhaps it deserves, the storyline channels human sexual energy (of adulterous Hansen as well as the pervs) into something that obstructs progressive political achievement, even distracting from other, more controversial sex scandals. That is, Oppenheim and Singh intend to obscure conventional morality and media legitimacy. This film is not an analysis of how media functions, fails, or misleads. It’s just another A24 indie-monstrosity, a creep-out designed for a future media-studies curriculum.
