We need to study the career of Robert Pattinson. What’s he doing? Just The Drama, The Odyssey, Primetime, and Dune: Part 3, this year. That’s two for them and two for him. This year. Robert Pattinson is on a generational acting running. This year. It’s not just about being prolific but what he does in each role. Despite hitting the superfecta of performances, each of them is unique, and perhaps the boldest of all is his role as Dateline’s Chris Hansen in Primetime.
“You see how this looks, right?” Pattinson asks as The Ghost of Chris Hansen, who is not dead but is spectrally absorbed by this heightened performance which understands the spiritual malady that has come with the unquenchable thirst for ratings. Hansen is always chasing after Hungry Ghosts. The hunt for ratings and pedophiles, the want for both being performative and fulfilling some hole of journalistic credibility Hansen does not care to fill by it the hard way, coincides with a bloodthirsty public who want to see folks humiliated on television, so they might feel better about themselves.
Who are the real predators, asked the documentary Predators, last year, but it’s the right subject and the wrong question. It’s not about who is or is not a predator. That documentary falls into the same trap as the show. We want to place labels so badly that we do not care if they fit. We have become reckless and our fixations have become dark as pitch. This To Catch a Predator show Hansen conducted did not meaningfully result in too many convictions or help with the problem of predators in the United States. It did result in hyper-violent copy-cat shows where vigilantism is the name of the game and the hosts play judge, jury, and executioner with their targets. There is no trial. And the kind of entrapment and targeted violence toward the intellectually disabled that they use would hardly stand up in court.
Primetime director Lance Oppenheim understands the situation well. So does Robert Pattinson, who gives an indelible performance, calmly sinking into Hansen’s conversational cadence, which has always been disarming, bringing his signature brand of clinical composure into deeply concerning meetings with folks who may have been the worst kind of people on earth. Primetime confronts this version of the truth. Oppenheim explores the nature of fame as it was gained on the back of pedophile hunting, often likening Hansen to a Dracula-like figure, in his framing composition and the general constitution of the story (see how both M’s appear jagged and pointed-down like vampiric teeth in Primetime’s logo). It’s not a subtle piece but subtlety would not work here.
Where the film achieves liftoff is not with Hansen at all, though, but with a composite sketch character called Decoy Dan played by Skyler Gisondo. Dan is a real earnest actor who thinks this will be his break to getting notable commercial work in the film industry. Alas, this highlights the tension at the heart of Primetime — Dan believes he’s giving a performance and the show he’s in believes it’s real. At one point, Dan drops his guileless naivety and adopts Hansen’s Midwestern affectation, confronting a suspect himself, as the lines between what is performative and real blur into a nightmarish crescendo that asks bigger philosophical questions. It’s not who the Predator is that’s the question but what the show is doing and whether its systems of entrapment represent reality at all.
Primetime coasts off of its two great central performances, ephemeral use of color palettes, and the wicked world of network television. Under the hood is the America we know. Afraid of itself and everyone else too. Fear drives everything. And the voice behind that fear has no emotion at all — perfectly, steadily monotone: why don’t you have a seat right there?