Primetime

— Neil Postman

Lance Oppenheim, making his fiction debut after significant experience in documentary filmmaking, reconstructs that world through a form contaminated by the television of the 2000s: surveillance devices, nervous images, reality-TV aesthetics, fragmented editing, and a continuous overlap between what happens in front of the camera and what is constructed for it.

Behind Hansen's story emerges the portrait of a television that no longer merely tells reality, but transforms it into spectacle, eventually transforming even those who tell it into spectacle themselves.

There is something perfectly coherent about Primetime arriving today to tell a television story from 2006. And there is something paradoxical about it as well: the film deals with the transformation of information into spectacle, something we have been witnessing for decades.

Lance Oppenheim, making his fiction debut after Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld and Ren Faire, reconstructs the world of To Catch a Predator, the program hosted by Chris Hansen that turned the capture of men accused of seeking sexual relationships with minors into a television event. Justice became spectacle, indignation became audience, humiliation became visual merchandise.

And this is precisely where Primetime finds its most interesting point.

Oppenheim does not simply tell us about television: he brings it into cinema. The camera adopts the grammar of reality TV, employs surveillance devices, fragmented images and a certain instability of the gaze, constructing a fiction that seems continually contaminated by documentary. Form thus becomes a reflection on its own subject: a fiction reconstructing a television that transformed reality into spectacle.

The operation is formally intelligent, but not particularly effective as cinema.

Because Primetime, despite the quality of its idea, is rather boring. The distance that should produce unease sometimes produces nothing but inertia. The formal device is recognizable, but it does not always succeed in turning itself into an experience.

And above all, the film tells us something we know all too well: the capitalism of the gaze.

For decades we have known that television spectacularizes pain, exposes intimacy, turns people into characters and private life into content. We have witnessed the progressive erasure of the boundary between information and entertainment, between news and voyeurism, between indignation and consumption.

The audience itself has become part of the apparatus. It is not enough to say that television offers people what they want: television often constructs the audience's taste, educating it to desire precisely what it is being offered. First it produces the need, then it sells the product that satisfies it. We no longer consume objects alone, but existences. We consume other people's shame, pain, downfall and intimacy.

In this sense, Chris Hansen is an exemplary figure. Pattinson does not merely play a journalist, but a man who progressively becomes his own television image. The journalist becomes a character, the character becomes a brand, the brand becomes a product.

And yet Primetime does not really enter unexplored territory. Television has been showing us this shit for decades: exposed private lives, packaged suffering, humiliations transformed into entertainment. Today the mechanism has simply become infinitely more pervasive through social media and digital platforms.

The difference is that Hansen needed a crew and a television network. Today all it takes is a smartphone.

And this is where the film, perhaps inadvertently, becomes more interesting for what it leaves outside the frame: we no longer live merely in an age in which spectacle invades reality. We live in an age in which reality is constructed from the outset so that it can become spectacle.

From this point of view, a reference to Ulrich Seidl seems inevitable.

The Austrian director, although often working within fiction, manages to achieve a far more radical documentary effect. In his films, reality does not simply appear to be imitated through a documentary grammar: it seems to emerge from the very construction of the fiction itself. His characters, their bodies, environments, habits, obsessions and loneliness acquire an almost unbearable concreteness. Staging does not diminish reality: it makes it more evident.

Oppenheim moves in the opposite direction. He brings documentary into fiction, but the result sometimes appears less alive precisely because it is too conscious of its own apparatus. Where Seidl manages to make us forget the cinematic machine while constructing every image with painstaking precision, Oppenheim constantly reminds us of it.

And perhaps this is the essential difference: Seidl uses fiction to reach a documentary truth; Oppenheim uses documentary to construct a fiction that resembles reality.

Primetime therefore remains an interesting film above all for its formal conception and for the subject it stages, but it is not the revelation about the world of entertainment that its premise might have promised.

Its intuition is stronger than its result.

Because what is truly disturbing is no longer that television has transformed reality into spectacle, but that we have stopped being surprised by it.

— Guy Debord