Yesterday I saw one of the most visually and sonically stunning movies of the year by documentarian Lance Oppenheim, with outstanding performances from Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo. Between Primetime and his extremely impressive slate of films this year, including Dune: Part Three and The Odyssey, I wouldn’t be surprised if Pattinson ends up a double nominee in the upcoming awards season.
Primetime is a deeply disturbing, humorous, and critic of our culture in the age of surveillance. Lance Oppenheim blends surveillance footage from inside decoy homes with very intimate, claustrophobic character shots. The result plays out at a cramped, anxiety-inducing pace that feels like it is dragging the audience along the same way the rise and catastrophic fall of To Catch a Predator played out. The show left an indelible mark on American culture in just 20 broadcasted episodes.
What I found clever was how the film parallels the reality show with the post-9/11 and Saddam Hussein context and the world wide paranoia that followed these events. It’s the beginning of the surveillance state to counter-terrorism, and the persistent need for public shaming to safeguard the public, even if in the end it causes more damage and resolves nothing.
It also marks a turning point where everything in society starts becoming black or white, without nuance. Chris Hansen and the mystery predator he won’t stop pushing to catch, alongside the sheriff who wants to show the US how they deal with predators as a warning that he’ll do the same to anyone else, and never put these situations in perspective. They think pointing a camera at someone and shaming them is justice, when it clearly isn’t. Set against an era defined by network ratings and the dawn of reality television, the film constantly asks the audience, “Are you not entertained?”
Primetime reveals that beneath this mission against perversion, other perversions start to claw their way out. The production was far more concerned with the ratings than with protecting children, and society seems more interested in perpetuating a cycle of violence than restorative justice. The film lays bare the selfish nature of Dateline and big TV companies, and how they indulged an audience hungry for blood sport while showing unfeeling negligence that put young actors in unsafe environments and situations with abusers, leaving them completely unprepared for the trauma they were about to experience.
When safety takes a backseat to creating something for views, it becomes glaringly obvious that the goal of To Catch a Predator and similar shows was never really justice. It was exploitation formatted for ratings and that our perception of good vs evil can be distorted by a sense of righteousness.
Tackling the moral questions of how Dateline used evil people for profit was a deeply creative choice by Lance, and doing so by depicting Hansen as a narcissistic lunatic definitely shows his true opinion. I watched the film less as a biographical character study and more as a sensationalised snapshot of our society’s obsession with public humiliation, where the men that are being caught are more scared of being exposed than of being thrown in prison. The irony is that Hansen built his entire career on airing people on TV at their absolute worst moment, and is now the one being publicly dissected.
The messages these men send to people they believe are young girls and boys are absolutely abhorrent, yet they rehash them as if they were scripted lines rather than depictions of intended abuse. So the real question is if the people orchestrating the humiliation become numb to the depravity of the perpetrators, does it start to feel less about justice and more about profit, ego and spectacle?
Damien Vandercruyssen’s vivid colour grading directly enhanced the storytelling, and evoked the same emotional whiplash the real show forced on its audience. The line between real trauma and televised spectacle dissolves completely, exposing the sickness of America’s obsession with the surveillance state as a form of justice. Ultimately, Primetime forces us to admit that as long as we mistake voyeurism for accountability, we aren’t just passive viewers, we are active participants.
Although set in the early 2000s, the film’s themes are widely relevant today, where Meta glasses, content creators and turning constant surveillance into entertainment. We love watching people mess up, we love watching them suffer the consequences, and now we can walk around and just bide time until someone does.
