You know it, and we grieved it: Primetime never made it to Malaysia’s big screens. The Film Censorship Board banned it in October and has yet to tell us why. Now that it has landed on digital, I’ve seen what we were being protected from. It turns out to be a film about people who decide, on everyone else’s behalf, what is right and what is wrong. Awkward.
Lance Oppenheim’s film dramatizes To Catch a Predator, the 2000s hit fronted by the always composed Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), who set out to cleanse the United States of paedophiles. The method was simple, if you can call it that. Hire specialists to pose as teenagers in chatrooms, send in decoy actors to reel grown men in, then greet them with the surprise guest of honour, Hansen himself. The police wait outside. Hansen is the good guy, the paedophiles are the bad guys, and justice is served on primetime.
Oppenheim wants to know what happens when the exposé turns exploitative in the name of entertainment. He answers through the people behind the show. We follow the producer, the decoy actors and the rest of the crew, and watch each of them unravel as the show gets bigger and the stakes get higher. Everyone around Hansen calls the show “God’s work”, and the film keeps him in a constant moral push and pull over whether he believes it. Pattinson plays him so cartoonishly that it turns ridiculous and, somehow, incredibly effective.
It’s a film that paints Hansen as a man who hoots like a gorilla the moment his show is put on par with Lost and stays unhinged without hiding what it is really about. The build-up to the show’s undoing is deeply satisfying, as the crew baits a district attorney by means that are far from ethical, only for the sting to end in his demise, which is exactly why the abrupt cut to black does it a disservice. It’s not a Hallmark movie, so no one expects a tidy epilogue. Still, it feels like the film flinching at its own moment.
And as it cuts to black, you find yourself spiralling. Was Hansen ever in it for the greater good? Busting paedophiles is always worth encouraging, but what happens when a moral crusade slowly twists into a disguise for self-righteousness and power? Primetime leaves you asking who gets to play God, and whether we invent the role ourselves to feel above something.
Which brings me, inevitably, to home. Someone at the “top” decided this film wasn’t good for us, and didn’t think we were owed a reason. So I’m left to guess, and my guess is cleansing: the subject is dirty, therefore the film is, therefore we are kept clean. If that’s the logic, the board has not watched closely. Primetime never once endorses the act. Its target is the crusader, the man so sure of his own righteousness that he stops asking what it costs. A censor who bans that film without explanation has cast himself in it.
And here is the part I can’t get past. Only Selangor and Kedah have set 18 as the minimum marriage age for Muslims. Everywhere else, a girl can be married at 16, and younger still if a Syariah judge signs off. That is legal. A film about the men who hunt children online is not.
So even if Primetime never got to grace our screens, it is definitely prime time for all of us to ask who is telling us what is right and what is wrong. And to whoever made the call: what are you cleansing, and who put you in charge?
