I watched Primetime recently, and I don’t really know what I expected going into it. I knew it was about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator. I knew Robert Pattinson was playing Hansen. I knew the basic idea of what the movie was about. What I didn’t expect was to leave the theater thinking, “Why do people do this?” Not just the obvious question, “Why would someone do something so horrible?” but the bigger question of why people become the way they are in the first place.
I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that. Honestly, I don’t even know if there is an answer that would make me feel better. When you hear about someone doing something horrible, it’s easy to just put them into a category in your head. They’re bad people. They did something terrible. That’s it.
But at some point, I started wondering what actually gets someone to that point.
Why does someone have those thoughts in the first place? Why do they act on them? Is there something that happens along the way that could have changed things?
And then I realized I was trying to understand something I don’t think I’m ever going to understand. Maybe that’s part of why true crime is so popular. We want answers. We want to know why someone did something, what they were thinking, and how they got there. But Primetime also made me think about the other side of it.
To Catch a Predator was supposed to expose people who were trying to meet minors. But it was also a television show. People watched it. People talked about it. Chris Hansen became famous from it.
At what point does exposing something horrible turn into entertainment? I don’t really have an answer for that either. I watched Primetime, so clearly I’m part of the audience too. And that’s probably what made me uncomfortable. I’m watching something because I want to know what happens. I want to understand the story. I want to see someone get caught.
But why?
Is it because I care about what happened? Because I’m curious? Because watching someone get exposed is satisfying?
Probably a little bit of everything.
The movie got me thinking about this way more than I expected, and somehow that led me back to something I’ve already been thinking about: How little we actually know about the people around us.
Every person has a completely different mind. Different experiences, different families, different things they’ve been through, and different ways of looking at the world. You can talk to someone for hours and still have no idea what they’re thinking about when they go home. That’s a weird thing to think about, especially when you realize that someone can grow up in a completely different environment from you and come out of it seeing the world in a way you might never understand.
I think that’s what Primetime made me think about the most. Not necessarily the people in the movie, but people in general. How much of the way we think comes from how we were raised? How much comes from the people around us? How much comes from things that happen to us?
I don’t know.
Maybe that’s what I liked about Primetime. I didn’t leave with an answer; I left with a lot more questions.
