It took just 20 episodes for the Dateline NBC program “To Catch a Predator” to leave a mark on the culture. A sting-operation-meets-hidden-camera-prank, the show had a riveting hook: Men engaging in erotic online conversations with people they thought were minors got invited over to the children’s houses, welcomed inside by a young-looking actor and then surprised — and publicly grilled — by news anchor Chris Hansen, who had already won two Emmys for a piece on sexual trafficking in Cambodia.
“So what are you up to tonight?” Hansen might ask the would-be offenders, his demeanor crisp and casual. Some of the men tried to play cool until Hansen took out their chat transcripts; others sobbed and asked for therapeutic help. Regardless, the segments always ended the same way: the men in handcuffs, the audience riled up with moral righteousness and suspicion of their own neighbors. My roommate never missed an episode and would howl at the show’s tragicomic rimshot, a perpetrator’s few seconds of naive relief between when Hansen said they were free to go and police officers tackled them outside.
David Osit’s absorbing documentary “Predators” turns that investigative lens on the show itself. Tonally, this steady and powerful film is everything the original program wasn’t: hesitant, sorrowful and compassionate for every human being onscreen. Strikingly un-accusatory, perhaps because the television phenomenon itself had already passed judgment, Osit’s reexamination never makes the case that these men are innocent, although it’s also aware that the longer we watch behind-the-scenes reels of them, the more empathy we’ll have, albeit confounding and conflicted.
Even a former Kentucky district attorney, who brags that he “got a lot of attaboys” for partnering with NBC, softens his tough talk while watching outtakes of a soft-spoken and seemingly very confused arrestee. Maybe, the lawyer muses, at least that guy could have benefited from psychological counseling to become a “productive member of society.”
Osit wants to explore what “To Catch a Predator” claimed to do, what it actually did and why people liked to watch (including himself). Some of this he talks out with an ethnographer named Mark de Rond who suggests that it’s empowering to draw a line between good and evil. Yet, you get the sense that Osit’s comfortable if, by the end of his film, you’re even less sure of where that line is.
His impressive fact-finding mission includes interviews with three of the performer-decoys — two girls and a boy — who were barely adults themselves when they were hired for this high-wire, high-pressure improv gig. “I had to look at it as: This is an acting job,” says one. Another watches a tape of her college-freshman-aged self setting up a guy who could have been a classmate and sighs, “Years later, I’m still emotionally exhausted.”
A childhood sexual abuse survivor himself, Osit also has another question: Why would anyone want to hurt a kid? Hansen’s spontaneous inquisitions never turned up an answer. When Hansen sits down with this documentary for his own interrogation, Osit (who co-edited the film with Nicolás Nørgaard Staffolani and did the cinematography) dutifully notes everything a normal TV interview tends to offer — makeup, preparation, a ride to take the subject home — as if to contrast the star’s treatment with the footage that made him household-famous, or perhaps to show us how much work happens offscreen that never makes into a show’s most ratings-worthy snippets.
Fair or not, it’s a bit icky that Hansen is here framed as the sole force behind the program. “To Catch a Predator” had producers, too, and they’ve dodged their turn to brave the camera’s scrutiny. Their absence makes Hansen’s willingness to sit down for a cross-examination feel especially admirable. He continues to insist that the show helped victims. It’s only when Hansen starts speaking for victims that Osit reveals his own traumatic history, an exchange that might come off as a gotcha, but I think is more complicated than that.
“To Catch a Predator” ran for three years from 2004 to 2007 and a breakneck montage reminds us that at the peak of the show’s popularity, Hansen’s work was acknowledged by Oprah, “The Simpsons” and Washington, D.C., back when Congress agreed that confronting such grim facts was in the country’s common good. (Meanwhile in Florida, a certain pedophiliac billionaire was negotiating a plea deal.)
That same era has recently been under indictment for the delight in which it leered at underage celebrities. A website counted down the days until Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen turned 18. Paparazzi laid on the sidewalk at “Harry Potter” star Emma Watson’s birthday party, jostling for the first publishable upskirt shots of her panties. Lindsay Lohan marked her own transition to adulthood with a Rolling Stone cover that trumpeted: “Hot, Ready and Legal!” Shrewdly, Osit alludes to this cultural moment with a clip of an MSNBC news broadcast transitioning from a serious segment on Hansen to making light of the mental health of Britney Spears, whose is-she-or-isn’t-she virginity status was a topic of mass discussion for years.
The fulcrum of the documentary is the show’s most notorious episode, the one that may have ultimately gotten it canceled (although that’s unclear) and the one that its decoy, a cherub-cheeked male blond, says he “wouldn’t film again for $10 million.” The offender was a Texas assistant district attorney who ultimately shied away from coming over to meet the child. Breaking format, the TV crew drove to the man’s home with the sheriff and a tactical squad. As officers broke in through the back door, the man shot himself in the head.
“Predators” has some of the raw footage of that day, although Osit doesn’t use any of the material that was captured by body cameras that belonged not to the police but the producers, raising the question of who was working for whom. We stay outside on the lawn with Hansen as Osit’s own cut of the segment unspools at a patient pace. He gives us plenty of time to think about what we’re really watching: not must-see television, but the preamble to a funeral. I found myself furious at the lieutenant who smiles as she tells Hansen of the man’s suicide. Then I realized she too might have just felt self-conscious to be on TV. Over and over again, this documentary makes the point that the screen flattens people’s full humanity.
What has a steady diet of crime-based reality television done to our national psyche? Did these spicy, snack-sized transgressions skew our sense of what’s happening beyond our front door, just as cops who grew up watching “Cops” might worry that they’re slacking if their shifts are too dull for TV? Do we really want to incentivize vigilantes like YouTube copycat Skeet Hansen, seen in the documentary machinating and uploading his own stakeouts, pitiful farces of justice with the catchphrase “You’ve just been Skeeted”?
Osit wants us to leave the theater chewing over these quandaries, and he’s even willing to let us wonder whether his own movie is a net-positive on the world. As he sighs, “We make TV, we point cameras at something and the trauma continues.”
‘Predators’
Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Playing: Opens Thursday, Sept. 25 at Laemmle Royal and Alamo Drafthouse DTLA