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“I will undress you, and you will undress me.” “You know what would be a huge turn-on for me?” “Have you masturbated today?” These are all words written by the men caught by Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, the mid-2000s reality TV hit that staged sting operations to nab adults who wanted to have sex with minors. In Lance Oppenheim’s film Primetime, however, they are spoken repeatedly by the show’s host, Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson). On camera, in spectacular “gotcha” moments, Hansen will read these lines back to the perpetrators once they’ve been caught red-handed. But behind the scenes, before the cameras start rolling, Hansen sits in his dressing room, repeating the lines to himself, trying to perfect his delivery, his pitch, his accent: “Lubricant… Loobricant… Lyuubricant…” And Pattinson, an underrated and out-there master of voices, makes our skin crawl a different way with each pronunciation. Because the words, the thoughts, seem to do even more damage once they’ve escaped the containment of private messages and grisly back-web chatrooms. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” Hansen insists at one point. One of the questions Primetime asks is if they might actually be spreading one as well.
I’ve admired Pattinson for years, but nothing quite prepared me for his turn as Hansen, mainly because the real Hansen on TV (or, well, the “real” Hansen) possessed such straight-edged, broadcast-standard accent and delivery. Pattinson plays him like a man whose voice and demeanor could change at will, an ambitious morass of contradictions. It’s a stunning demonstration of the actor’s range, and watching the film you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off. His queasily amiable delivery of “You see how this looks, right?” has already become an internet meme just from the film’s trailer. He can also adopt the stentorian tones of a prophet when he says things like “A man must be held accountable for the decisions that he makes” to the people he’s caught.
Off-camera, though, Hansen’s self-loathing and anxiety are off the charts. He wallows in guilt over his extra-marital affairs. He sweats profusely as he stares at himself in mirrors. He has an almost childlike, fawning obsession with fellow NBC anchor Stone Phillips, who gets to do serious reports from places like Iraq and represents a kind of camera-ready, lantern-jawed masculinity that Hansen must constantly work towards. Hansen can be cruelly mocking towards his oft-flustered but extremely professional producer Andie Bender (an astonishingly good Merritt Wever). He can be gleeful and nervous at once, as when he finds out from network boss Jeff Zucker (playing, amazingly, himself) that NBC is taking To Catch a Predator to primetime, to compete with ABC’s ratings bonanza Lost. Scripted shows are dying, and reality TV is the new goldmine. (Of course, as Primetime repeatedly shows us, To Catch a Predator was plenty scripted; it just treated its actors like crap, destroyed them psychologically, and barely paid them anything.)
Taking To Catch a Predator to primetime also means hooking bigger, wilder prey: “high-impact predators,” “the best of the best,” “whales.” They speak about the potential perps the way they might talk about celebrity guest stars. But the increased aggression is also a natural extension of the operation. Hansen and his team have already turned their production into a highly-militarized, well-oiled machine. “Visual confirmation!” “Perimeter breached!” they bark into their radios when a quarry arrives, grabbing cameras and gear like SEAL Team Six prepping for an extraction or an assassination. That’s not a coincidence. The screens in the backgrounds of Primetime repeatedly show us the fall of Iraq, the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden. Among other things, Oppenheim suggests that To Catch a Predator, among the most popular shows of the early Forever Wars Era, represented the confluence of militarization, surveillance, paranoia, celebrity, and entertainment, as well as the kind of frontier justice George W. Bush often dreamt aloud about — all parts of a legacy our society is still dealing with. (The perps on the show are called “bad guys,” the preferred parlance used to refer to pretty much anyone we killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time.) When the Predator team catches a rabbi, the man, defiant, yells at Hansen, “Who gave you permission to do this?” Yes, this perp is a monster, a wannabe-rapist, a criminal… but he also kind of has a point.
Pixelated and smudgy, Primetime (which just premiered in Venice and releases in theaters September 25) has been shot to look like something between an unearthed videotape and a bad nightmare. It has the wiry, close-up intensity of a thriller, but the filming style allows it to slip into abstraction — appropriate, since we all dream in TV anyway. Hansen sees monsters everywhere, including a demonic representation of that aforementioned “ancient evil” that seems to follow him around. Talking to a bystander, he tries to explain how he convinced a network exec who didn’t quite “get” the show in its early days. This, he says, was his pitch: “There’s a man, with a penis in his hands, standing on your porch. And he’s going to stick it in your daughter. Tonight, I’m gonna tell you how to keep that from happening.” Hansen delivers this not with gravity but with a gleam in his eye, proud of his big showbiz sell. Sure enough, the more popular the show, the bigger the epidemic of pedophilia seems to grow. Primetime dares to suggest that in a world where we’re eager to see monsters everywhere, we will eventually start to see ourselves.
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