“You see how this looks, right?”
There’s a guy at my boring fluorescent-lighting office who looks a bit like Chris Hansen. He has that slightly puffy face, that combed hairstyle, that look that evokes a certain simplicity – which is not to say he is stupid. Indeed, Greg, which is not his real name, may well be the most intelligent man in the office, and hides it so well that no one would ever know. That is the entire mystery of Greg. Greg is just a guy, but he’s also pretty high up and could make decisions that make or break my life at any moment. I’m not sure exactly what he does all day, but his salary is 2 times greater than mine, so it must be important. He started last month, he looks slightly confused, endearingly so. I like Greg, I think. He’s one of the nice guys, he seems happy to help.
Robert Pattinson, in the Primetime trailer, looks nothing like Chris Hansen. For one , Robert Pattinson is sexy. He’s playful and flamboyant. He’s straight but gay – that’s his secret with the ladies. He has exaggerated mannerisms, he really wants you to get these BEGGARS out of here. Everyone loves R Patts, for good reason. He was brilliant in Good Time and The Lighthouse, the shining light of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. And so the YouTube comments take a hyperbolic turn. Pattinson is on a “generational run” (sic.) , say five thousand. “Oh my god the voice”, say three thousand more.
Those three thousand have never watched To Catch a Predator, and it shows. The real Chris Hansen is not flamboyant, he has no mannerisms, he’s not some game show host. He’s sombre, he’s not here to play. He’s on a mission. Justice will be delivered, steadily, following a meticulously planned humiliation ritual. It always goes like this. The predator has an awkward conversation with the decoy (a 25 year old woman), before she eventually leaves through a dark corridor. Out of the very same corridor comes Chris Hansen, giving the eerie impression that the decoy had suddenly decided to show its true form by transforming into the TV host. “Why don’t you take a seat right there?” he says, paternally, to the shocked pedophile. This is my favourite part of the show, because in these moments it almost feels like Chris has some sort of pity for them, and they always obey. Then he grills them, and that’s where we really get to appreciate Chris’s detective work. When the respected middle school teacher turned sex offender denies the allegations, Hansen always pulls out the transcripts, quoting him sending lewd messages to what he thought was a 13 year old girl. “You see how this looks, right?”. Eventually, Hansen reveals who he is, the camera crew enters the room and he lets him leave… only for him to be immediately arrested by the police as soon as he makes it past the front door. Pattinson plays him like the Joker, when really Hansen is Batman, both detective and vigilante. Chris Hansen is the modern superhero, his super power is TV. He wears a metaphorical mask on camera, only revealing who he is in the very last moments. Chris Hansen is America.
Riding back from work in his Grey Volkswagen Passat, Greg absent-mindedly turns on the radio. He likes the news. It’s one of his main hobbies. Every Saturday morning, while walking the dog, an old black labrador called Kerozene, Greg buys the local newspaper, and gently appreciates it on his return home on his sofa, like an old man tasting wine, Kerozene sitting at his feet. So Greg loves the news, generally, especially the locally sourced kind. Today’s news though puts quite a downer on him. A little girl, 12 years old, raped and murdered after being groomed online. She was found in a ditch not far from where he lives, her body mutilated, her face battered so violently that it took her poor parents more than a minute to recognise her. Greg turns it off. He tries not to imagine his own daughter, 9, in that ditch, but the images keep flashing in his head as darkness sets on the highway. He drives home in silent anger, the only real anger of a man about to take action.
Why is To Catch A Predator great TV? To give a simple nerd answer, because it taps into our libidinal desires for vigilante justice in a fractured society. “Who can I trust in this dark, fucked up world”, thinks Greg as he sits home in the dark and turns on his 12″ Samsung Smart TV? “Let me show you something”, replies the TV, and, without asking, our Greg from Surrey is watching a certain show set in suburban Connecticut.
A few hours earlier, my friend Joe and I are sitting outside a cafe in Athens, near the archaeological museum. It’s not a romantic Greek cafe – more like the Athenian Subway, where you take a little bite because you’re starving and broke and can’t find anything closer. I’m trying to be authentic by getting a spinach pita. It ain’t good. A man walks past us. “Doesn’t he look like Jeffrey Epstein?” says Joe. I laugh. He kind of does, vaguely. He walks past us again. Joe stares at him. I do too. Greek Jeffrey Epstein seems like a chill guy. Something about being in the sun really does wonders to an old man, whether that’s in Athens or on a Caribbean island. Joe takes his iPhone 17 Pro (the one with the 16 megapixel camera) out. “Careful”, I say. He doesn’t listen and takes a picture of the man from behind, then posts it on his Instagram story to some techno music.
The Primetime trailer, the Primetime trailer. I promised I’d write this about the Primetime trailer. Ah yes, another thing: it doesn’t get the aesthetic of what it’s trying to portray at all. Why the fake film grain (the movie was shot on digital and the grain added in post – trust me, I can tell) and oversaturation? To Catch A Predator is the antipode of that. It’s hyper-realistic. It’s inherently digital. In fact, it would not be possible if it wasn’t digital, without hidden cameras all around the apartment and if the crew held noisy film cameras. The realism of the image, imposed on something staged, is what makes it what it is and what really pushes the boundaries of reality TV. The house is fake, the child is fake, all is filmed, but the police are real. The predator is real. His punishment is real too. Chris Hansen never calls what he makes reality TV, even though it is. He calls it a news report. “I’m Chris Hansen, for Dayline NBC, and this is a report on men who chase young girls”. The lines are blurred. Is it about fame? Is it about vengeance? Or is it about documenting? Can it be all three at once?
“The Gulf War did not take place,” says Baudrillard. By this he means that the first war in Iraq was not a war by means of a conventional army, but a media event. War, he writes, is not any more the “continuation of politics by other means”, but the continuation of image by other means. In short, the Gulf War was good TV. Hyperreality has since spread its tentacles and conquered all aspects of life. It’s no surprise that the president of the US is a reality TV Star who appeared in WWE. It’s no coincidence that his media anointed foil, Zohran Mamdani, comes from a family of film professionals. The wars in Iran, Venezuela, the rift between the US and the EU, all the news. All of it is TV. On some level, Chris Hansen understood that, and he created an empire. Chris Hansen made the modern world. Do you like it?
Greg feels a bit reassured after watching Chris rip into the pizza guy, but then he watches the veteran episode, and it makes him angry. For the first time in a while, he finds himself deep in thought. Sure Chris Hansen is a good guy, he thinks, but there’s only one of him and thousands of them. The police can’t catch them all. But what if we all became Chris Hansens? We all have cameras, at least as good as the ones he used, on our phones. We all have a means of communication with the entire world. If only people put in a little effort into watching and reporting each other…
His train of thought is interrupted by the next video, which like To Catch a Predator also mysteriously pops up onto his TV through the Youtube app. Its title: “Jeffrey Epstein spotted in Athens???”, with Joe’s pic on the thumbnail. Through a weird game of digital Chinese whispers, (someone screenshotted Joe’s story then sent it to his group chat where one drooling degenerate posted it on 4chan), it was somehow taken seriously, alongside more or less laughable rumours and witness testimony, to form the bulk of the video’s argument. Greg is sleepy and furious, he falls asleep and dreams of flying to Greece and killing the god forsaken Jeff, of posting his severed head on his Facebook, to show all pedophiles what will happen if they dare hurt our kids. He even makes the news. Everyone from Pierce Morgan to Aaron Bastani is lobbying for his release. Greg used to love the news. In his dreams, the news loves him.
Aristophanes Parpadopoulos, the man posted on my friend’s story, died yesterday in a dodgy street in Omonoia, Athens, stabbed and thrown in a garbage can. In other news, Primetime is coming out in the UK soon and I’m really excited. Despite all I’ve said, I’ve got a feeling it’s going to rock. My flatmate recently told me, around all the AI scare, that we’re entering trippy reality, Blade Runner 2049, the times when things that used to not make sense are suddenly part of our day to day. It’s kind of cool and it’s kind of scary, and now more than ever it’s important to have movies that examine how we got here. I hope Primetime is one of them.
Primetime will screen at the London Film Festival. General release 30th October in the UK.
