Journal Entry #5

I watched Primetime (film about early 2000s reality show - To Catch A Predator) recently, and I had so many thoughts after watching, and even more after seeing reviews online. What interested me most was how uncomfortable the movie was willing to let its subject become without necessarily telling me how I was supposed to feel about it. The premise behind To Catch a Predator seems morally straightforward at first. They are "catching" adults who are attempting to meet minors, and I do not really have an ethical problem with exposing that behavior. What became more complicated for me was thinking about the fact that the show was also entertainment. The people producing it were making money because predators existed, and, even more uncomfortably, a more shocking or bizarre predator made for better television.

I do not think that automatically makes the show or the people behind it bad. If anything, that is what I liked about the movie. It allowed two things to be true at once. The show could serve a legitimate purpose while also profiting from the behavior it claimed to fight. Someone like Chris Hansen could believe in what he was doing while also understanding that he was performing for an audience. I think spending years working within those contradictions would naturally make someone complicated, and that was much more interesting to me than a movie that simply portrayed him as either a hero or a bad person.

What surprised me afterward was seeing people interpret that complexity as the movie attacking him. I wonder if part of that reaction comes from people already having a relationship with the version of Hansen they saw on television decades ago. I never watched the original show, so I did not have that attachment going into the movie. It also made me wonder if we are becoming worse at separating portrayal from endorsement or condemnation. So much of the media we consume now, especially short-form content, tells us almost immediately who is right, who is wrong, and how we should feel. Even the algorithm learns what we already agree with and continues giving it to us. Maybe that makes it harder to watch something that refuses to give us a straightforward answer. A character can be flawed without being a villain, just as a person can do something valuable while still benefiting from it in uncomfortable ways. 

I think there is something important about being able to hold both of those ideas at once. Sometimes the point of a movie is not to decide whether someone is good or bad, but to make us uncomfortable with how inadequate those categories can be. What I liked about Primetime was that I did not leave thinking Hansen was good or bad. I left thinking that the entire situation was complicated, and I think having to sit with that uncertainty was kind of the point.