Bryan Miller
David Osit’s new documentary, Predators, is about perversion, but perhaps not the kind you’d expect. It’s about the perversion of justice, and the way the camera—and especially the narrative shaping of television—perverts reality.
The documentary’s primary subject is To Catch A Predator, the wildly popular pseudo-spinoff of NBC’s news magazine show Dateline. T-CAP, as one super fan casually refers to it, ran from 2004-2007. The salacious premise makes for undeniably dramatic television: TV journalist Chris Hansen and his team of producers solicit child predators online through chat rooms and via the use of a “decoy,” a young-looking 18- or 19-year-old who pretends to be underaged, a child. When the men come to the house intending to commit statutory rape, Hansen and his camera crew pop out from another room and confront them, staging interviews that are either cringe-inducing or cathartic—or both—for the viewer, shortly before waiting police officers arrest the subject on film.
To Catch A Predator was a pop-culture phenomenon, with tropes and frequently used phrases from the show—“Nice house” or “Do you know why I’m here?”—becoming punchlines in the pre-social-media-meme era. The show was so ubiquitous that, in clips from the later episodes of the show, several of the subjects recognize Hansen immediately, and one even nervously jokes to the decoy that he hopes this isn’t a To Catch A Predator situation.
Even during its original run, the show was clearly treading through moral murk. That was a large part of its appeal. Even while it dealt with the threat of one of the most horrific crimes imaginable, it provided a permission structure for glib laughter about both the situation and its targets. It coyly posited itself as activist journalism even as it strove, through the creation of a formula as eerily similar to that of a weekly sitcom, to be entertainment. But To Catch A Predator’s backstop, its safety net, was always simple: What, are you trying to defend pedophiles?
Osit’s documentary absolutely does no such thing, but it asks difficult questions about the ethics of turning this so-called activism into prime-time TV, and about the motives of pretty much everyone involved.
Osit examines more than just the show itself, but its lasting legacy, including the copycat programming available in a variety of forms on YouTube. The second section of Predators follows the exploits of “Skeet Hansen,” a YouTuber whose popular online show seeks to recreate To Catch A Predator almost exactly, with Skeet perhaps not even aware of how deeply he’s internalized the tropes. Unlike Hansen, he works far more indirectly with police, and at one point explains to the camera how he fudges certain videos to look like the police were involved at all. His far more ham-handed, amateurish technique at first throws into sharp relief the differences between his and Chris Hansen’s more professional approach, although ultimately it begs the uneasy question: How different are they, really?
Osit is tragically qualified to address the topic. He shares with the audience that he himself is a survivor of sexual assault, and that he was also a regular viewer of To Catch A Predator when it aired. He’s not making his own documentary to score points for scolding and shaming; he gives ample time to an interview with Skeet’s decoy, nicknamed T-Coy, who explains that she is also a survivor of sexual violence and that Chris Hansen’s original show provided her significant catharsis. She says she feels like she’s on the side of justice by participating in its YouTube equivalent.
Those questions about justice aren’t so easily answered. Osit astutely points out that the footage from the show, including the initial confrontation with Hansen, is shared with the police, and that Hansen solicits confessions from the subjects while carefully eliding his status as potentially either a therapist or a legal authority (a line “Skeet Hansen” blurs beyond all recognition). In other words, these potential criminals are compelled to confess without ever being read their Miranda rights, or even being aware that they are in a strange liminal space before their immediately impending arrest.
Always burbling beneath the surface is the obvious retort: So what? These guys deserve it. Osit doesn’t render a verdict on this debate. He does chronicle a pair of prominent cases, one in which a subject of To Catch A Predator commits suicide while the cameras roll just outside—an episode that actually made it to air, by the way—and another installment of Hansen’s own online legacy show, Takedown, in which a high schooler who hasn’t yet started his senior year is busted for soliciting sex with a freshman. Among the critics of Hansen’s techniques are multiple law enforcement officials who bristle at the notion of unqualified TV newscasters using law enforcement as a tool in their own productions.
When Osit at last interviews Chris Hansen himself, the filmmaker is both uncompromising but non-confrontational. Though he wryly apes the visual format of one of Hansen’s own interviews, complete with footage of the TV host leaving the interview, this isn’t a gotcha interview. But after all the compelling and conflicting evidence presented throughout the previous hour and half, Osit boils his uneasiness down to one simple question—I won’t spoil it here—that gets to the heart of what is critically missing from To Catch A Predator. It’s not so much a damning moment, but a tragic one, indicative of the uneasy space between uncomfortable truths that Predators exists in.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival features over 200 films from around the world, plus an array of parties, panels, visiting filmmakers, and special guests.
