Back when Saturday Night Live was funny (the late-1970s), the cast were known as the Not Ready for Prime Time players. A24 as a film production company wants to be the old SNL—hip, street smart, transgressive—but without any of the humor.
A24 has little humor because unlike the original SNL, it has a slightly malignant sense of life, no doubt one reason it has a big horror catalogue, and why its Syfy products, way back to 2014’s Ex Machina, feature robots killing or trapping their creators. There will be no Ghostbusters or Independence Day produced here. A24ites are Nietzscheans promoting a transvaluation of values, just a little too woke to start praising “the blond beast.” They’re more clever than you and can see the evils lurking in bourgeois virtue, western civilization, American institutions and the human race.
In Primetime A24 shows us how pedophiles have been victimized by predatory profiteering actors, reporters and producers, who couldn’t get authentic work in their fields and so took the low road of preying on the poor victims of heteronormative society who can’t get laid in our very non-egalitarian system of allowing some people to get more and better orgasms from hotter partners than other people do.
A “biopic” of Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson) and his NBC Dateline show that entrapped pedophiles by finding them online and then getting them to come to houses where they thought they’d be meeting 13-year-old girls or boys (played by youthful-looking twentysomething actors), A24 tried to get Hansen to blurb and endorse this movie. But they wouldn’t let him read the script or see any footage.
Hansen’s depicted as a loser who has no other way to eke out a career as a journalist, and his young actors are shown as similarly desperate. We see the Catch crew feed their pedophile victims into the star maker machinery and A24 depicts these “victims” as increasingly pathetic, with the Catch crew stooping lower and lower in their pursuit of fame. The first pedo is a slovenly brown man—Latin? Muslim?—who falls on his knees and pleads that he has a four-year-old daughter and was recently divorced. He just wants some touch! What will happen to his daughter when daddy is in prison?
The second “victim,” after discussing on the phone with his 13-year-old interlocutor whether his cock is hard and what he’d like to do with it, doesn’t want to get out of his car and come in. It’s pouring rain and he tries to get the 13-year-old boy to come out and get in his car. After stretching this scene out for some minutes the film gives a big reveal: the pedo is deformed, with oddly twisted legs, and uses two crutches to walk. How dare society deny this poor man whatever sex he can get! Especially given how affordability must be affecting rates for sex workers. Scott Wiener should get the San Francisco city council to do something about this.
Finally Hansen, who’s presented as insane and believing in some dark Moloch-like entity that lives off of child sacrifice, flies the crew to Texas in search of a “whale,” his Moby Dick. When it comes to dark demonic forces the movie depicts pedophile hackers erasing the internet footprints of their own activities and those of their brethren, and the Catch team seeing this happen change up their usual protocol and go to the pedophile’s home, with a locally-sourced SWAT team, where their “victim,” a well-respected prosecutor, refuses to come out and instead commits suicide, shooting himself in the head in his palatial home. So evil that these grubby TV climbers destroyed a man who’d had built up an enviable life and career.
In the end A24 shows us the actor who played the 13-year-old boy. He’s renting an apartment in a Phoenix suburb. A neighbor brings him his misdelivered mail. He’s finally received his membership card in the Screen Actors Guild. All the sacrifices of the Minor Attracted Persons who just wanted to bring love and joy to young people, sacrifices to greed (?), fame (?), capitalism (?) have finally earned the predator catchers riches they didn’t merit.
Back in reality, Chris Hansen’s podcast, Have a Seat (his introductory phrase when coming out from behind a door to confront a pedophile), has over 600,000 subscribers.