‘I don’t want to be a bad person.’
This cry from a young man’s wounded heart sits at the core of Primetime, an intriguing dark dramedy about predation, ambition, and exploitation. Part of what interested me was the depiction of the economics and changing face of entertainment in the early 2000s.
The ‘00s were a weird, transitional time in pop culture, as the old standards of censorship were crumbling, but we hadn’t yet started talking about ethics in how entertainment is produced. The lines that can and should exist between it and, say, crime and punishment. As well as how much we’re obliged to protect participants.
Child sex abuse is a subject you can’t really talk about with a lot of people because their anger and hysteria get in the way. Some of it is performative, I think. (‘If I don’t act 110% angry all the time while discussing this, graphically describing how I’d torture sex offenders to death, people’ll think I SUPPORT it!’)
Any discussion of child abuse should be centred on lessening it, and you don’t do that with performative rage and vigilante sadism, ultimately. By indulging those instincts, you miss the nuance, the reasons why many people offend beyond just “they’re bad”. And by doing that, by letting the varying types of criminals go unexplored, to slip through the cracks, society allows children to be abused.
A better approach would be to recognise paedophilia as a psychosexual sickness and let those who wish to be helped BEFORE they offend seek help. So in the end, you have to ask yourself: what means more to you? Preventing child abuse before it happens, or getting your rocks off with vigilante torture fantasies?
Given the hysteria, this was a brave film for Lance Oppenheim to make. The real Chris Hansen is already making filthy insinuations about him. Hansen inevitably came out against his depiction here, even though the film is probably a lot kinder about his intentions and preoccupations than he deserves.
It presents him as a complicated man who felt like he was doing the right thing. As opposed to a grifting vulture who happened to hit upon a pursuit that wrote him a blank check to be the worst version of himself.
Robert Pattinson is excellent in this role, even if it is a slight softening. Hansen, as a media figure, represents the rejection of nuance. He’s very much ‘these people are good, those people are bad, and whatever you think of me, those people are my justification’. He wouldn’t have been satisfied with anything more or less than a hagiography.
Primetime is all nuance, and Pattinson’s wolfish sleaze in this role is fascinating: he preys on Decoy Dan’s (Skyler Gisondo) need for a warm paternal hand to guide him, keeping the younger man in this morally questionable entrapment circus. One thing this film revealed to me was how To Catch a Predator itself engaged in a form of endangerment.
In one scene, Dan is exposed to a criminal who pulls out his own genitals and waves a can of whipped cream about, barely three feet away. Isn’t this a form of sexual assault, not of the character Dan’s playing, but of Dan himself? And didn’t TCAP just facilitate it?
Rating: 4/5
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