In this portrayal of Chris Hansen’s TV rise, the hunt for online predators becomes an Ahab-like pursuit through the anxieties of post-9/11 America.
In this portrayal of Chris Hansen’s TV rise, the hunt for online predators becomes an Ahab-like pursuit through the anxieties of post-9/11 America.
W atching A24’s recent release, Primetime, is a bit like eating one of the Fruit Roll-Ups that Chris Hansen, as portrayed by Robert Pattinson, feverishly snacks on throughout the movie: sugary, artificial, with a voice in the back of your head whispering, “Something isn’t right here.” The story is a plastic-wrapped Moby-Dick pursuit set early in the millennium. Something is lurking below the water, and Hansen is determined to drag his “whale” into the light, no matter the cost.
The film is a dramatization of the Dateline NBC series, To Catch a Predator, inspired by Luke Dittrich’s 2007 article recounting one of the show’s sting operations that resulted in the suicide of Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Rockwall County, Texas.
It is easy to be swept away in the energy Pattinson brings to Hansen, all dramatic gestures (including what is sure to be a meme-worthy mouthwash spit) and rousing monologues. But beneath the frantic lighting, moral self-bolstering, and 2000s references, there is something primal. While it is debatable how well it is woven in, a recurring thread throughout the film is the retelling of Hansen’s time in India. Hansen did win an Emmy for his reporting on the exploitation of child labor in the South Asian silk trade, but Primetime creates a broader mythology out of this kernel.
In the film, Hansen tells Decoy Dan, the faux child actor who lures predators into Hansen’s traps, played by Skyler Gisondo, about his time in India, where he tracked down child predators causing chaos and violence in the local villages. The two are throwing around a baseball while a heavy storm brews, a pseudo-father-son scene with tension on the horizon. Hansen tells Dan that there is “a darkness that cannot be understood that exists outside of time and space, not a man but a monster . . . we’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil.” Hansen is a self-assigned vigilante, and he clearly believes in the reality of the evil he is hunting, even going so far as to peroxide his hands after being touched by one of the show’s targets and telling his producer, “If you had children, you would understand.” There is a religious zealotry to Hansen’s hunt, and while he is certainly portrayed as morally complicated (aren’t we all), the film never requires us to doubt the evil of what he is hunting.
Hansen is undeniably an Ahab figure, but the righteousness of his hunt is increasingly corrupted by his need for a whale. “It’s not about money for me,” he insists at one point. “We’re not leaving until the whale comes.” Comically, he then proceeds to lie down nearly comatose on the stakeout house’s bathroom floor (the film is riddled with these grotesquely funny scenes). Hansen has tasted success before — he is forever measuring his new project against his past Emmy win — and To Catch a Predator offers the possibility of something greater, especially with blackmail from an affair looming like a Sword of Damocles above him.
Primetime never needs its predators to be innocent for Hansen’s pursuit of them to become unsettling. Instead, it asks what happens when the pursuit of genuine evil also supplies a man with professional success, public adoration, moral authority, and purpose. Hansen does not merely want to catch predators. Increasingly, he needs there to be predators to catch.
The film’s saturation in the Global War on Terror is impossible to miss. There is something of the Wild West lurking throughout Primetime, a liminal America caught between the perceived security of the 1990s and the frightening new world taking shape after September 11. The internet is still strange enough to be menacing: AOL chat rooms are dark territory, populated by faceless strangers who might be anyone. Hansen and his crew ride into that territory promising to make the invisible visible.
The metaphor becomes nearly literal when the operation moves to Texas. News broadcasts in the background announce Saddam Hussein’s impending punishment. Local police swagger before the cameras, showcasing their guns and declaring that “no pervert will step foot” on their streets before heading out for barbecue. By the time they march through a hotel hallway toward their target, journalists and law enforcement have merged into something resembling an army.
The language is correspondingly martial. There is a bad guy. There is a monster. There is a community to protect. Eventually Hansen delivers an ultimatum to Decoy Dan as the young actor threatens to abandon ship: “You’re either with me, or you’re with him.”
The film doesn’t need to underline Bush-era drama. Its point is more interesting than a simple indictment of post-9/11 politics. Hansen inhabits a world hungry for moral legibility, one in which evil might be identified, located, surrounded, and dragged before a camera. The predator sting offers that fantasy on the manageable scale of the living room. As Hansen tells Dan, “There used to be a pillory in every civilized town. Now there’s a television in every home, and I’m on it, and so are you, Dan.” That line gets at the uglier proposition beneath Primetime. Hansen has not abolished the mob; he has given it a camera crew. America is full of anger and fear; he will give it a face and outlet.
Stylistically brilliant, sometimes to his own detriment, director Lance Oppenheim repeatedly shifts between cinematic photography, hidden cameras, broadcast footage, a colonoscopy camera, and the degraded technology typical of the period. At first, this proliferation of viewpoints seems to promise omniscience. The camera can go anywhere. It can catch what men do when they believe no one is watching. It can reveal the monster underneath the neighbor.
Then the cameras begin to fail.
During an encounter with a predator after Hansen’s affair, the surveillance footage loses its sound. The image becomes murky, almost underwater. As Hansen is confronted with the question: “Who do you think you are?” the room falls nearly black until Pattinson’s eyes are practically all that remain. The man whose authority depends upon making other people visible becomes illegible himself.
That reversal reaches its horrifying conclusion in Texas, with Hansen’s white whale.
Before the film reaches that moment, a scene cuts to Conradt offering a distinction Hansen’s worldview has little room to accommodate: the accused on trial is “not a monster, but a man.” Hansen, meanwhile, has already decided what television requires. “I need to put him on television,” he says. A Texas cop responds, “I need to put his head on a stick.”
And then, in an instant, Conradt dies. The whale is gone.
“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Hansen asks the night air after the gunshot stops ringing.
Hansen means: Who would have hunted these men? Who would have protected the children? But by this point, the film has made another reading unavoidable. What would have happened if Hansen — and the cameras, the producers, the ratings, the armed procession, the audience waiting at home — had not been there?
For all its blood and ugliness, Primetime is ultimately obsessed with performance. Decoy Dan is literally an actor, hired to become someone else so convincingly that another man will reveal himself. The predators perform innocence. Police perform frontier justice. Producers perform concern while obsessing over ratings. Hansen performs paternal protector. The line between what is real and what is artifice blurs.
Early in the film, a voiceover says, “I’m hoping if he really is a nice guy maybe it’ll rub off on me.” It is a funny little line that eventually begins to sound like a theory of acting: Perform something long enough, and perhaps you become it.
Primetime leaves behind the artificial sweetness of the world it recreates — Fruit Roll-Ups and Crazy Frog, Rent and AOL, baseball and barbecue — but by the end, something metallic has overwhelmed the viewer’s palate.
Hansen wanted his whale. Dan wanted to become an actor. Both got closer to their dreams, at a cost.
