I’ve been thinking about guilt lately. It is anxiety’s cousin, eating away at you, tainting your past and your present, but worse because anxiety is often about the theoretical. If you feel guilty, you feel responsible for something. There are a lot of ways to deal with guilt, and today seeing a therapist is recommended most often. In 2004, you did not have to work through your unpleasant emotions. You could just blame them on someone else. For many, that someone was Saddam Hussein.
The recent movie “Primetime” explores a metafictional account of the life of Chris Hansen and his work on the 2004-2007 television show “To Catch a Predator.” Robert Pattinson plays Hansen as a man who sees catching predators as a holy quest to rid the world of an “ancient evil.” The debate over what in the movie is real is interesting. No matter how much of it was movie magic, it is true that Hansen took his work seriously; to him, it was more than a TV show.
(Spoilers ahead.)
The show and the movie end the same way: A group of small-time Texas cops help Hansen land a big target. When the predator doesn’t take the bait, they send a tactical team to his house, with Hansen leading the charge. But he never gets his man. Hansen stands outside the suburban house, feet planted in wet grass, staring up at a face in a dark window. The predator meets his gaze and shoots himself in the head. This happened, even if the chess pieces were in slightly different positions. As the credits roll, with the predator unable to harm anyone anymore, the demon who haunts Hansen appears. The ancient evil.
The moral sorting of what is good and evil – how much good can be done with evil results before it’s all evil, how much good compensates for evil – has been done. When interviewed about the man who died, Hansen said he had no regrets. His hands were clean. Maybe this is fine, maybe it’s not, but what is interesting is that Hansen seems to absolve himself morally of a death, which is no small thing. Why? Is it just because the dead man was a pedophile?
I think there is another layer. In the film, Hansen is a cheater and neglects his children. (It’s worth noting that we have real-life evidence of Hansen cheating on his wife only after “Predator” was canceled). Wearing a crisp suit and bringing a paycheck home for his family, the movie positions him as the institution of the household. He explains to his wife that the sacrifices she’s making (in having a broken home) are worth it, because he’ll be on TV, on “primetime,” ridding the world of an ancient evil. If he can do that, adultery is a small sin.
Consider, again, that this was during the years in which the post-9/11 world was finding its feet. The United States had charged headlong into a war in Iraq that was, by all admissions, based on lies: We found no weapons of mass destruction; there was no sudden flourishing of peace in the region; chaos still ruled the country. The war of liberation became one of conquest. Who then, could Americans blame? “Primetime” shows us our answer in the form of a lingering shot on a TV on the wall in a dim NBC studio: The brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, who in 2006, during the time “Predator” aired, we had hanged.
With the predator’s statue toppled and George W. Bush bragging about his “mission accomplished,” America laundered its sins and institutional rot with a convenient pariah who was unquestionably evil. The logic is unimpeachable. Hussein was a dictator who deserved to die. To think otherwise was un-American. In the years to come, we would have to forget the million dead Iraqis whose souls will haunt this country forever. And with Hussein dead, we still find ourselves wandering the Middle East, haunting an ancient evil that eludes us.
Hansen’s spiritual quest continues much like Captain Ahab (e.g., he calls the predator who commits suicide “the whale”). The question “Primetime” asks is not if it was “worth it” to catch predators, but if Hansen thought that his good deeds (of ambiguous utility) could cancel the bad. Forgetting the trauma inflicted on his “decoys;” forgetting the predators who went free because of his mishandling of evidence; forgetting that the team’s heavy-handed approach often led to dropped charges; and forgetting any moral failings of the man doing the catching. Forget it all – an ancient evil is afoot. And the ritual for purging it comes from our American mythology: assault rifles, swarming men with guns, helicopters and armored trucks; and hypermilitarism (at home and abroad) chasing the hyperreal (television).
There will always be someone lower than us. We will always have someone to humiliate. While we want badly to do good, we, much like Hansen and much like the predators, are haunted by an evil more ancient still: That of our own selfishness, our cravings and our way of hurting others.
