“Primetime” Reminds Its Viewers That Two Things Can be True at Once

The latest film to divide the internet is Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” an unflinching portrait of the behind-the-scenes drama that took place during the making of “To Catch a Predator”. 

The film primarily follows two characters: Chris Hansen, the host of the Dateline NBC program who’s played with great intensity by Robert Pattinson, and 23-year-old Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), who is cast as one of the underage “Decoys” who lure pedophiles into the team’s staged houses. 

The film does not set out to be a recap of its source material which aired from 2004 to 2007, and shocked and titillated audiences of Americans who were still reeling from 9/11 and the ensuing United States invasion of Afghanistan. Glimpses of the ongoing foreign war are periodically displayed on television screens in the film, establishing a consistently unsettling backdrop for “Primetime’s” already troubled protagonist. 

The viewer is hounded, time and again, by Oppenheim’s vision of Hansen’s “To Catch a Predator” as a mere spectacle. It is a counterfeit version of the altruistic upholder of justice that it claimed to be, and which many viewers believed it was. 

This idea – that the man committed to ambushing and arresting pedophiles for a television audience might not have been doing it out of the goodness of his heart – has been troubling to those who believe Hansen is a good person – or at least, not a bad one. But as Pattinson's Hansen tells Plum, “Your definition of bad and my definition of bad are vastly different.” 

The film portrays Hansen and the show’s producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Weaver) as chiefly concerned with television ratings. Their punishment and humiliation of child predators is treated as a form of reality entertainment, and they deliberately emphasize that aspect to bolster popularity. 

Some viewers have arrived at the conclusion that the film, in its psychological breakdown and implied disapproval of Hansen’s motives, effectively situates itself in opposition to Hansen’s actions, including catching pedophiles. The belief that the movie needs to promote one side or the other leads to the surmise that if “Primetime” isn’t endorsing Hansen, then it must be defending the child predators that he was dedicated to bringing down. 

During the apprehension of several pedophiles, we see flashes of familiar human emotions: regret, shame, embarrassment. One of the men is a paraplegic. Another cries out that he has a daughter at home. A third, in the film’s climax, commits suicide upon realizing his home is surrounded by police officers waiting to arrest him. 

These moments remind us that these are real people who were caught and arrested on camera for millions to watch from home. It is also clear in many of these scenes that Hansen relishes cornering these individuals. At no point, though, is “Primetime’s” purpose to garner the viewer’s sympathy for the pedophiles. To believe that is to miss the message entirely. 

Instead, the audience is encouraged to sit with the discomfort; while Hansen stopped child predators from interacting with children, he did so in a way that morphed justice into a commodity and public exhibition.  

In the second half of “Primetime,” Hansen tells Plum, “There used to be whipping posts in the center of every town. Now there’s a television in every home.” In this scene, the viewer is made complicit. After all, “To Catch a Predator” found success because it had an audience who enjoyed watching the humiliation and punishment of others.

One of the film’s weirder twists is when Hansen tells Plum about a trip he took to India where children had gone missing from several villages. The culprit was what he described as “the darkness” – some underlying evil force that cannot be understood or expelled from the world. The darkness becomes personified as a shadowy, demonic figure that lingers in the background of the latter half of the film. But before its physical appearance, the darkness shows itself in other ways during the first half. Hansen’s neglect of his wife (Anna Faris) and sons and his scandalous affair with another woman symbolize “the darkness” hanging over Hansen’s life. Its existence leads Hansen to assert that subduing pedophiles is his selfless way of fighting against it. 

The irony is that Hansen takes pleasure in his work. But he wasn’t the only one. The millions who watched To Catch A Predator enjoyed this idea of retributive justice; in principle, they brought the same attitude to 9/11 and the Afghanistan War. 

This sets a vastly different tone for the film. “The darkness” may not be some inexplicable evil that exists completely outside of humanity. Just as Hansen believes it exists within the pedophiles, the film reveals its effects on Hansen himself. “Primetime” makes the claim that “the darkness” might reside in each of us, too, as the part of ourselves that loves it when we see bad people get what we think they deserve.