“Primetime” explores the cruel desire to punish and purge the world

There was a time when television made a clear distinction – or at least claimed to do so – between truth and falsehood, fiction and reality, entertainment and news. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, the two began to merge and blur. Big Brother, Survivor, American Idol… Suddenly, the ‘real’ lives of ‘ordinary’ people became compelling, thanks to skillful editing and guidance from producers. And what if we add crime to the mix? And not just crime, but the worst conceivable form of crime in the Western world: paedophilia? This gave rise to To Catch a Predator, a programme broadcast between 2004 and 2007 in which a journalist sets a trap for a paedophile who has attempted to groom minors online. They invite the predator to a house; the decoy – an adult dressed as a minor – welcomes him, then finds an excuse to leave the room. Then the presenter, Chris Hansen, enters and reads aloud the most obscene and sexually explicit messages the predator had written in the chat rooms. Documentary director Lance Oppenheim has now made his first ‘narrative’ film based on this programme – his inspiration, he told us, being ‘Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma’. Hansen is played by Robert Pattinson, the former Batman and former sexy, sparkling vampire from the Twilight saga, who this summer demonstrated fine acting skills as the number one suitor, the insolent Antinous, in Nolan’s Odyssey. “I wanted to play Hansen like Gibson in Braveheart,” Pattinson tells us. “I thought you wanted to be a cross between Jerry Maguire and Dracula,” Oppenheim teases him.

The title, "Primetime", comes from the very best television slot – prime time – which Hansen eventually secures, going head-to-head with "Lost". In addition to exploring ambition, fame, and the cruelty of show business, the film functions as a sustained meta-game about television and the blurring of reality and fiction—a topic that, at the screening we attended with the director and cast on Sunset Boulevard, drew considerable interest from industry technicians (’How do you film cameras whilst they’re on?’, they asked, and other such technical questions). However, in light of the case of Nidal Malik Hasan—who was scheduled to face a live-streamed execution at the behest of the alcohol-fuelled crusader from the Department of War, a move subsequently halted by Trump (!)—what springs to mind when watching Primetime is, above all, the question of punishment. Hansen, at least in the film version, believes he is on a mission to rid the world of paedophiles. A fellow journalist, who is setting off on a reporting assignment whilst the Gulf War is raging, teases him by saying, ‘I’ll be watching you from Afghanistan’. But he doesn’t care; for him, catching the ‘paedos’ – those ‘monsters’ – is his reason for living; it is ‘ridding the world of an ancient evil’. To explain this, he says at one point: ‘There used to be a public pillory in every town; now there’s a television in every home.’ So the cathode-ray tube serves as a pre-trial punishment, as public exposure; television is the display of others’ shame.

There are groups—partly as a result of To Catch a Predator—who, by posting everything on YouTube, set traps for potential paedophiles and lure them into Walmarts, and sometimes even beat them up, whilst they are filmed and forced, live on air, to call their wife, for example, and confess, and to walk amongst the crowd whilst someone shouts through a megaphone, ‘This man was here to meet a thirteen-year-old!’. At the end of each episode of To Catch a Predator – which attracted 7 million viewers per episode in its heyday – we do not know what happens to the alleged predators. It was enough for the audience to see them caught, tricked, humiliated, frightened, and sometimes realising they had been on the verge of committing such a terrible crime. ‘Distrust all those in whom the instinct to punish is strong!’, Nietzsche warned. And meanwhile, there are those who are outraged by the Texas execution but not by the death penalty itself, as if it were better to be killed by the state with a syringe and in private.