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In David Osit’s recent film, “Predators,” the filmmaker incorporates a brief excerpt from a mid-aughts installment of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” where the then-uncontroversial host—his free-speech feud with the Trump White House still far off—is introducing the newsman Chris Hansen to the viewing audience. “Our next guest is the head of the funniest comedy on the air. It’s titled ‘To Catch a Predator,’ ” Kimmel quips with a smile, as the studio audience’s guffaws fill the air. “If you haven’t watched it, it’s kind of like ‘Punk’d’ for child molesters.”
Kimmel’s depiction of Hansen’s program may have been facetious, but it also wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “To Catch a Predator,” which aired between 2004 and 2007 as a segment of the news-magazine series “Dateline NBC,” was essentially a concealed-camera prank show. In contrast to Ashton Kutcher’s MTV effort, however, its subjects weren’t well-known figures falling victim to practical jokes but, rather, ordinary citizens lured into a decoy house under the assumption that they were about to engage in sexual activity with a minor, portrayed by an adult yet youthful-looking actor whom they had been communicating with online. Upon arriving at the house, these individuals were confronted by Hansen and his camera team and subsequently apprehended by local law enforcement. (The host’s oft-repeated departure line—“you’re free to leave”—was contradicted by the swift police apprehension of the offenders as they attempted to exit the building.)
None of this may seem especially amusing, but what struck me as I viewed “Predators”—a reflective and unsettling film that employs a blend of archival snippets, unedited footage, and on-camera interviews to analyze the history and influence of “Catch”—was the manner in which humor consistently surfaced, in and around the program. It’s evident in Oprah’s enthusiastic exchange with Hansen when she invites him onto her show; it’s present in the boisterous reaction of a true-crime convention audience as its participants observe footage of Hansen interrogating a predator; it’s even noticeable in the thinly veiled amusement of a police lieutenant as she informs Hansen that one predator, whom the camera team was about to apprehend, had fatally shot himself once he encountered law enforcement.
The desire for retribution undoubtedly contributes to these joyful reactions: as one woman who has participated as a decoy in pedophile-sting operations informs Osit bluntly, “It is damn funny when a despicable person gets what they deserve.” However, the filmmaker’s emphasis on laughter also serves as a representation of a broader critical point that he’s attempting to convey. To watch “Predators” is to comprehend that “Catch” functioned primarily as entertainment, which largely undermined its other professed goals—to deliver justice, to explore the depths of sexual deviancy, to offer comfort to abuse survivors—while also diminishing the inherent humanity of the show’s subjects, transforming the actions of troubled individuals into a quasi-pornographic spectacle intended for an audience’s voyeuristic satisfaction.
“Catch” was a carefully edited program that depended on familiar patterns to gratify its viewers, and one of the ways in which Osit’s film begins to disrupt that established familiarity is through the inclusion of extended segments of unedited footage captured during various shoots but excluded from the final cut. In these excerpts, we witness the predators, once confronted by Hansen or, later, by law enforcement officials, weeping, expressing remorse, requesting absolution and counseling and assistance—all of which the show, whose principal objective is to transform depravity and its punishment into a spectacle, is both unable and unwilling to offer them. (“I could tell you’re a therapist,” one of the men says to Hansen, hopefully, to which the host replies, somewhat incredulously, “You think I’m a therapist?”) Observing these men fall apart is an unsettling experience, and Osit, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, isn’t trying to assert that they are somehow innocent or without fault. (“I don’t think it’s excusable,” he says, regarding the men’s predatory behavior.) Nevertheless, as the ethnographer Mark de Rond remarks about the footage, “To portray these men as human beings, the show essentially collapses. And perhaps that’s why it wasn’t included on TV.”
Transforming humans into objects of obsession to be scrutinized rather than understood wasn’t merely a characteristic of “Catch” but of mainstream culture more broadly at the time of the show’s broadcast. At one juncture in the documentary, Osit incorporates an archived MSNBC clip from the conservative news program “Scarborough Country,” which, immediately following an interview with Hansen about “Catch,” transitions to promoting an upcoming segment concerning Britney Spears’s mental-health struggles. “Oops, she left it again!” a voice-over booms alongside videos of the singer, smiling and waving on the red carpet. “Britney’s second stay at rehab is complete. So, can anyone or anything persuade her to obtain the assistance she so desperately requires?” Spears’s sexualization as an underage performer could scarcely be separated from the subsequent difficulties for which she was publicly criticized, and, as I viewed the clip, it was challenging not to consider the ways in which “Catch,” too, conveniently evaded discussing how the predators that the show exposed didn’t operate entirely in isolation; the culture itself was predatory.
It’s worth noting, as well, that “Catch” didn’t emerge in a metaphorical void. In the early to mid-aughts, reality television was a relatively nascent genre still establishing its identity, and the period was filled with shows whose blatant vulgarity pushed the medium’s boundaries as far as they could possibly extend. Programs such as 2004’s “The Swan,” in which a group of women underwent extensive cosmetic surgery to become conventionally attractive over the course of a season, or 2005’s “Who’s Your Daddy,” in which eight men competed for a prize of a hundred thousand dollars by each attempting to persuade an adopted woman that he was her biological father, were representative of that era’s reality-TV common language. Similar to these shows, “Catch” was defined by a desire not only to document people’s suffering but to revel in and profit from it.
Furthermore, Osit’s film emphasizes that even though Hansen’s program was cancelled, in 2007, “Catch” was merely the initial entry in a lengthy series of exploitative entertainment focused on predators. In recent years, YouTube has been flooded with videos of men administering harsh vigilante justice to predators that they succeed in attracting to public locations via online communication, and at least one creator of such content, known as Skeet Hansen, views “Catch” and its host as direct forerunners. (“Why shouldn’t I be allowed to earn money from catching these individuals like the original show, and producing this content for people’s amusement?” he inquires.) Osit shadows Skeet as he lures a predator to a motel room with the assistance of a decoy. Sporting a poorly fitting blazer over his T-shirt, and sounding somewhat like Chris Pratt’s goofy Andy Dwyer impersonating F.B.I. agent Burt Macklin on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” Skeet informs the man that he’s part of the “Predatorial Investigation Unit.” (Explaining to Osit that you need to indicate police presence in a video if you don’t want YouTube to remove it, Skeet states that it’s sufficient to merely film someone wearing a counterfeit badge in order to satisfy the platform’s criteria.) All of this pretense for the sake of clicks would be comical were it not for the utterly disheartening image of a pervert sitting in a cheap motel room, concealing his face, sobbing, and suggesting he might take his own life. At one point, even Skeet appears uneasy. “We’re gonna pull some strings and see if we can, you know, find you someone that you can talk to,” he assures the man, without any basis. For those familiar with the genre, it’s already evident that there is no support forthcoming. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
