“I will undress you, and you will undress me.”
As Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” begins, Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) lurks in his dressing room, repeating the phrase to himself. The words are those of an unsuspecting predator who is about to become the target of Hansen’s latest sting operation. The disturbing, highly effective and shamelessly unsubtle opening sets the tone for the film to follow. “Primetime” envisions Hansen, of the hit NBC reality series “To Catch a Predator,” as a kind of predator himself — an unscrupulous attention junkie who will go to dangerous lengths to pursue higher ratings in the name of his warped idea of justice.
From 2004 to 2007, millions of Americans tuned in to “To Catch a Predator” to watch Chris Hansen’s latest televised sting operation. People posing as teenaged boys and girls lured real adult men through anonymous chat rooms to rented suburban homes, where an adult decoy would invite them in. Suddenly, Hansen would step out and confront the men with evidence of their inappropriate messages, at which point they might deny wrongdoing, beg for mercy or simply break down in tears — all of which was caught on hidden cameras for the audience’s viewing pleasure.
In “Primetime,” Oppenheim interrogates the ramifications of the show’s meteoric rise and its eventual downfall. How did a show featuring real suspected child predators capture the public’s interest so thoroughly, particularly amid concerns about its content and legality? What kind of person would work on a show like this, and how might that work affect their personal lives?
A documentary filmmaker, Oppenheim makes his narrative feature debut with “Primetime.” While one might expect a documentarian to approach real-life subject matter with an objective, straightforward eye, Oppenheim instead embraces a highly stylized visual language. The film is awash in oversaturated colors and heavy film grain, with deep reds and blues, neon lighting and frequently unnatural illumination giving mundane suburban spaces a feverish, voyeuristic quality. Its grainy images and surveillance-like camera angles evoke the aesthetic of “To Catch a Predator,” but Oppenheim pushes the look far beyond the relatively naturalistic visual language of the original show.
The contrast is deliberate. “To Catch a Predator” presented itself as journalism, using hidden cameras and an ostensibly objective style to give its sensational subject matter an air of legitimacy. “Primetime” strips away that pretense, using its hyper-stylized lighting and colors to make the world of the show feel increasingly lurid and unreal. Oppenheim is less interested in simply retelling Chris Hansen’s story than in recreating the psychological and media ecosystem that made “To Catch a Predator” a phenomenon.
The film does not focus on a particular plot so much as a series of incidents, culminating in the sting operation that would precipitate the show’s real-life cancellation. Struggling actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) joins the team as a decoy performer in 2006 just as the show’s success earns it NBC’s prime-time slot. Dan does not realize he will be encountering real predators and is traumatized on his first day of shooting when a target exposes himself. The crew looks on, bemused, sure that the incident will make for great TV.
Hansen takes Dan under his wing, and their relationship becomes a focal point of the film. Hansen shares his philosophy that they are engaged in a moral crusade against an ancient evil, with the show serving as a modern-day “pillory” for society’s worst offenders. It’s impossible to know whether Pattinson’s Hansen is putting on a facade, really believes what he is saying or perhaps some combination of both.
Pattinson’s performance is the key to the film’s bizarro appeal. He plays the outsized version of Hansen that we’ve come to know through memes and parodies in shows like “South Park” and “The Boondocks.” He relishes the delivery of catchphrases and one-liners directed at predators like “You see how this looks, right?” or “Why don’t you have a seat right there?” In the film’s funniest moment, he calls the service number on a defective vending machine and introduces himself: “This is Chris Hansen, with Dateline NBC.” Though constantly rehearsing his lines and practicing his entrances, his Hansen insists, “Nothing I do is acting.” He is so obsessed with his mission that the man and the persona have blended into one — fitting, given that the real Hansen has remained in the spotlight with revivals like “Hansen vs. Predator” and “Takedown with Chris Hansen.”
In order to remain competitive on the air, Hansen becomes obsessed with catching a “whale” — a high-profile predator who can bring in record viewership. The mission brings the team to Murphy, Texas, where they suspect a government official of attempting to meet a teenage decoy. What begins as another routine sting soon spirals into the operation that ultimately brings the show crashing down.
“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Pattinson’s Hansen asks twice over the course of the film. The first time, it plays like the catchphrase of the superhero he has made himself out to be, a capable crimefighter in the business of foiling evildoers. By the second, the question carries a different, more ominous weight. “To Catch a Predator” reflected an American appetite for spectacle, humiliation and moral certainty, turning real people’s worst moments into prime-time entertainment. The problem, as Oppenheim presents it, is not necessarily the investigations themselves, but the decision to turn them into a lucrative spectacle. The more uncomfortable question is what happens when the pursuit of justice becomes inseparable from the pursuit of ratings.
“Primetime” never offers an easy answer. Instead, it turns the question back on the audience, asking what our fascination with Hansen says about ourselves. It’s a dark, strange and frequently hilarious film that derives some of its own guilty sensationalist pleasure from the spectacle it examines. That tension is what makes Oppenheim’s film so compelling: Even as it asks us to question our desire to watch other people’s humiliation, it knows exactly how to keep us engaged.
