We don’t need another movie about the morally dubious people who make our television. It’s already understood that show business is also a dirty business. What else is new? Director Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime actually answers this rhetorical question, making his film a fascinating and upsetting experience. Who knew there were unknown depths still to discover in our wretched media landscape?
Primetime jumps in as Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson, with yet another tremendous performance) and his show, To Catch a Predator, are about to become hits. “We’re going to be bigger than Lost!” sets the mid-00s aspirational level. The film’s eyes into this TV world, however, belong to Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a starry-eyed hopeful actor. He’s hired by the team, which includes roles for a dynamite Merritt Wever and Matthew Maher, as a decoy. Dan’s job is to lure men into a house so that Pattinson’s Hansen can confront them with why they’re there: to have sex with minors. This is a grim spectacle, but audiences watched it—just as we are now—and this crew, each member bizarre or broken in their own way, feels they are doing something important. Or at least that’s what they tell themselves. Oppenheim zeroes in on that sentiment, with his lurid film portraying it as a slick infection that keeps spreading. Yes, the show uncovers the most reprehensible crimes (or intended crimes), but it never feels like a success either. And no one can quite capture the unnameable evil (or loneliness, or sadness) at the core of American life in our mediated age.
The Nietzsche quote about staring into the abyss applies in Primetime, but only just. It’s not because Oppenheim and writer Ajon Singh say something new about the idea. The film instead acknowledges something else more brazen. These people are not just letting the abyss stare back; they’re jumping in. That red REC at the top of the TV camera’s frame seems omnipresent at times, and fitting. What a wreck.
