Few things are capable of riling almost everyone up collectively, and those that do typically pivot toward unambiguous moral spectacle. In the hyper-mediated 21st century, everything is spectacular, such that the usual grotesqueries of war and conflict don’t necessarily register unanimously as objects of sympathy. Malice and mean spirit, however, are universal currencies, and the schadenfreude they induce spares no one in the collective exchange of emotions and identities. Would a committed pedophile savor the exploitative shock value of To Catch a Predator? They usually do, if we are to believe the testimonies of recent offenders similarly lured. So it is that the decidedly heinous crime of child sexual abuse commands near-absolute censure by society; this state of affairs, in turn, portends further perversions, not from the sinners themselves, but from those who cast the stones.
Public opinion has no doubt shifted around the fantasies of reality TV vigilantism, and much has been criticized in the case of To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC series which ran from 2004 to 2008 and raised the curtain on the stranger danger epidemic befouling America. But the show’s veritable pleasures have persisted, in no small part due to an admixture of moral superiority and plain old catharsis. As Chris Hansen, its suave and suited host, entered the room where the prospective child-lover awaited, foolishly anticipating a good time ahead, his presence and signature platitudes would leeringly invert the dynamic, spotlighting the alleged pedophile now as a sorry victim of their pathetic and innate depravity. In the same way, much of David Osit’s third documentary feature, Predators, overturns the established conventions of propriety in examining the fame and fallout wrought by Hansen’s exceedingly addictive crusade. But the film differs in two key ways: it recognizes its possible complicity in the moral discourse, and attempts to remedy it by way of compassion.
Osit adopts a pointed if humbly inquisitive approach to the sordid material at hand, opening Predators with split-screen footage of one of Hansen’s busts before cutting to a more measured discussion about the matter. Through Mark de Rond, a Dutch ethnographer and recurring talking head in the film, the director nimbly articulates his own unease with the show’s smug, got ’em air, walking the thin line between addressing the systemic failings of media sensationalism and appearing to endorse a fatal attraction to minors. The show, de Rond argues, purported to delve into the diseased minds to understand why they had this attraction, although it did everything else but clarify this mystery. Alongside social scientific observation, Predators also taps on the experience of several personnel involved in luring the unsuspecting men to televised national humiliation. Interviewing three of the show’s decoy kids — who, back then, were themselves barely legal — to gather a sense of its legacy, Osit arrives at a less than glamorous conclusion. The pressure of performance, compounded by the traumatic realization of having tarnished justice (several cases were rendered inadmissible by the court on account of entrapment), has taken an irreversible toll on his subjects’ well-being.
Predators does not, however, retreat into revisionist diatribe, conscious as it is of the unshakable dialectic inherent to the politics of recognition. It strikes a riveting and unsettling chord, sustaining this apprehension through its historical overview, first through the heydays of NBC, and then in the copycat vigilantism fronted by amateurs and influencers alike. A number of its accounts tell the other side of the story too: one of these vigilantes was herself sexually abused, and frames her actions as a kind of victim empowerment, while none other than Hansen sits down with Osit for a candid interview to defend his worldview on account of his many grateful beneficiaries. Having graduated from classic television and gone digital (with the streaming series Takedown), the proudly unrepentant presenter sidesteps the most direct of Osit’s questions, embellishing the film’s third act with lurid, caustic irony. That it manages to weigh in potently, and not judgmentally, speaks to Predators’ remarkable sensitivity as a work of hybrid proportions. Equal parts exposé and inquiry, the documentary alights upon an inconvenient truth — that our desire for righteous certainty predates our inability to dispense justice clearly.
DIRECTOR: David Osit; CAST: Bryce, Chris Hansen, Dani Jayden; DISTRIBUTOR: MTV Documentary Films; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
Comments are closed.