Primetime Turns Chris Hansen Into a Horror Show

Primetime has an interesting look that’s the key to its worldview, which is that our society is so bad that no one can escape its infecting qualities. There’s a smeary effect around the edge of the lens in many shots, which are generally in shallow focus, making everything appear greasy and defiled and half-hidden. This is in addition to a lurid color scheme dominated by nasty shades of red, green, and blue that are often clashing with each other, so that characters’ faces emerge out of surroundings that seem disgustingly tainted. Robert Pattinson, playing Chris Hansen — the real-life former host of the hit NBC Dateline series To Catch a Predator that ran from 2004 to 2007 — appears in certain close-ups with his face suffused in an unwholesome tint of hellfire red. Appropriately enough, much of the film was shot with an actual colonoscopy camera.

Hansen is portrayed as a self-deluding creep who ultimately gets less sympathy than the entrapped pedophiles. At some level, it seems, Hansen knows how rotten he is. In an early scene, when he’s in the first-class section on an airplane with a seatmate who’s a big fan of the show, he quickly warms to all the praise. He starts to confide in the sadistic old man, who ultimately wants to know: Doesn’t Hansen want to personally beat up the sexual predators he puts on camera? “Don’t you want to make them bleed?” he asks in a hideous close-up.

And Hansen brags, with a horrible shit-eating grin, that actually, “I think what we do might be even worse.”

Primetime is the first narrative feature film directed by Lance Oppenheim, who’s best known for the HBO documentary series Ren Faire. Oppenheim had an incredible twofer triumph at film festival premieres earlier this month, as Primetime garnered enormous attention at the Venice International Film Festival while the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which Oppenheim codirected with Nathan Fielder, created a sensation at the Telluride Film Festival. Both films portray a person being studied in endless close-ups who represents a bottomless pit of social corruption, and both films were shot with approximately the same crew, including David Bolen, who’s long been Oppenheim’s chosen director of photography. You Can See Everything doesn’t open in theaters until October 16, but its signature shot is already iconic and widely memed. It’s a long-held close-up of the appallingly blank, infantile face of blue-eyed blonde businesswoman Elizabeth Holmes. Those baby-blues are wide open and unblinking in the film’s preview as she says over and over that she’s “being real” and telling the truth about her health technology company Theranos, through which Holmes was then committing fraud on a vast scale. She’s now serving an eleven-year prison sentence.

Corruption in Close-Up

Primetime also spends a lot of time contemplating faces in close-up. There’s Pattinson’s face representing Hansen as all sharp vulpine lines, slit-eyed, hungry, and almost feral when he thinks he’s unobserved. There’s the smushier, harder-to-read face of his show’s producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), who occasionally ponders her own limitless indifference to morality or the well-being of others right before sliding back into producer mode, cracking the whip or smoothly shifting over into soft, specious persuasion in order to keep the show running as a ratings winner.

And then there’s Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), the aspiring actor and naive new recruit who’s at the center of the show’s sting operations. His youthful, freckle-faced appearance and golly-gee manner are considered perfect for a twenty-three-year-old actor who needs to play an eager thirteen-year-old boy inviting pedophiles over to his house for sex while his parents are away. Dan Plum really wants a professional credit that’ll get him a Screen Actors’ Guild card. What he’ll actually get is something far more unsettling.

But he stays on To Catch a Predator — even after giving that first ad-libbed “performance” that gets a little too real as he registers shock and fear at the sudden display of whipped-cream-slathered genitals by a young male predator in a hurry. He stays on the show partly because of hero-worship, as he’s lured in by the phony mentoring offered by Chris Hansen. Hansen cynically nicknames him “Decoy Dan” and persuades him that his awesome acting skills are doing the Lord’s work, saving innocent children.

Meanwhile, Hansen’s marriage is unraveling. He’s giving his wife Mary Joan Hansen (Anna Faris) extravagant promises to reform even as he’s doubling down on his career and cheating on her with another woman. A National Enquirer photographer snaps a compromising photo of Hansen and the girlfriend even as she’s becoming an ex-girlfriend, and the blackmailing threats kick in as soon as To Catch a Predator gets abruptly moved into prime time by a network executive who smells an opportunity. This sudden white-hot chance to achieve mainstream success, which is immediately imperiled, pushes Hansen, producer Andie Bender, and Dan Plum over the edge into very dark terrain.

Robert Pattinson is not just the star of Primetime, he’s also a producer on the movie and was the one to bring the Ajon Singh script, based on the 2009 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” to Oppenheim. Though his performance is divisive, it’s so startling and so dominates the film, that he’s considered a leading contender for essentially every award nomination this season.

Pattinson’s Talent and Star Power

Personally, I love the way Pattinson is going for more extreme and stylized effects reminiscent of old-time Hollywood actors.

My podcasting partner noted that Pattinson’s waspish performance of villainy in The Odyssey, as the most malevolent of the suitors bedeviling Penelope, shows him moving into “Roddy McDowall mode.” McDowall, a brilliantly gifted child star in the golden age of the studio system, became a character actor as an adult and created a memorable rogues’ gallery of amusingly twisted and sinister figures, all colorfully portrayed right to the edge of camp and occasionally well over it.

Today, giving such a performance is a high-risk move to make in any modern “prestige” film offering, all due to an infatuation with method acting that began back in the 1950s. It was in this era that “going method” first convinced critics and audiences that there’s no other way to give a good performance than in this one style, generally termed the most “realistic.” There are, of course, many acting styles — Delsarte, Brechtian, Expressionistic, etc. — but the critical knives are out for anything but the Americanized, Konstantin Stanislavsky–influenced “method” performances that took over most acting schools generations ago.

The most famous example of a divisive non-method performance is probably Jack Nicholson’s harrowing, ultrastylized tour de force in The Shining (1980), which director Stanley Kubrick intended as an opposing force to Shelley Duvall’s wrung-out naturalism. As Nicholson put it, actors shouldn’t have just “one set of theories.” For him, it all depended on the film in question. “You can go for years saying, ‘I’m gonna get this thing real because they really haven’t seen it real’ [. . . . ] and then you come up against someone like Stanley [Kubrick] who says, ‘Yeah, it’s real, but it’s not interesting.’”

Say what you will, Pattinson is definitely interesting here, going for effects that wouldn’t be out of place in an old-school gothic horror film. But he’s entirely in key with the sensational punch Oppenheim is going for: redefining the possibilities of the biopic genre with this “fever dream” that captures “an emotional truth.” As Oppenheim puts it, “When you spend a lot of time doing reportage on an extremely dark subject, it must rub off on you. Rob [Pattinson] and I watched [Chris Hansen] on Theo Von’s podcast, and Theo asked how he deals with all the darkness. He said, ‘I just bury it deep down inside.’ That was a really telling answer.”

While Primetime is playing in theaters, the real-life Chris Hansen is making the rounds to express his criticisms of the film, which he claims is “a hit piece” that’s “98% . . .  pure fiction.” On the Fox News show Jesse Watters Primetime, Hansen presented footage of himself actually attending the film in a Times Square theater in New York City. On his way in, he notes that Lance Oppenheim contacted him late in production and told him the film was “a love letter to Chris Hansen,” giving Hansen the perfect setup for his punch line, “If that was a love letter, I’d hate to get a poison pen letter.” After seeing the film, Hansen — ever the showman — interviewed other audience members emerging from the theater who express support for Hansen as well as Hansen’s own view of his show To Catch a Predator’s legacy: “All we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children.”

Of course, Oppenheim is positively gleeful about Hansen’s response to Primetime:

His reaction to the film right now is exactly what the film is about. I was a fan of Chris Hansen, and I still am. That’s why I wanted to make this film. Yes, he’s a journalist. Yes, he’s an entertainer. But he’s also an artist. He made this hall of mirrors, with adult actors pretending to be children and sets that look like something out of Blue Velvet. . . . To me, he’s a hero, a complicated hero. . . . He’s a human with flaws setting out to do something noble, and the effects of capitalism and commercialism make for a confusing experience for him.

Somewhat incredibly, Oppenheim insists that he has no intention of villainizing Hansen, even as he explores the sadistic thrills built into “performative justice,” updated for the mass media and the always-online age. There are other kinds of predation involved here, dating back to the days of “the whipping post, the pillory, the town whipper that would show up and publicly lash a criminal and thousands of people in the town square would turn up to watch. Chris Hansen is the new version of that guy.”

If the film has a message, it’s not a complicated one — the point is that certain terrible things shouldn’t be staged, marketed, and exhibited for public entertainment, because that process has a dark and degrading effect on everyone involved. We don’t have public hangings anymore for a reason. Yet it’s remarkable how, in interviews with Hansen expressing his utter inability to comprehend what Oppenheim thinks he’s doing in Primetime — even after quoting Oppenheim’s own explanations — he’s got that same wide-eyed, unblinking, uncomprehending expression of blank-faced innocence as Elizabeth Holmes.

With Primetime and — very soon — the much anticipated Holmes documentary, Oppenheim is undeniably an artist for our times.