Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s A24 fiction about the rise of Chris Hansen’s Dateline NBC stings, treats a public exposure of men soliciting children as a study in the hunter’s vanity. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen as a ratings-drunk showman rehearsing chat-log filth in the mirror, more eager to own the hour opposite Lost than to name the crime for what it is. The picture is “inspired by true events,” which in this case means the 2007 Esquire account of a Texas prosecutor who killed himself as police closed in, timelines rearranged, and a later personal scandal folded forward so the journalist can be made to look like the most interesting sinner in the room. Hollywood’s house organs then congratulate the inversion: the man who walked into a house with printed evidence of intent becomes the antihero; the men who drove there to meet a child become scenery in a media-ethics seminar.

That is not moral complexity. It is a substitution of categories. To Catch a Predator was vulgar television, and no serious person needs to pretend otherwise; vulgarity that documents a man arranging sex with a minor is still a record of the arrangement. Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh spend their ingenuity on Hansen’s posture, the producer’s fatigue, the decoy’s tears, and the network’s appetite. Child victims barely exist as persons. The film’s energy goes to deflating the reporter who made the crime visible. When an industry that cannot keep its own houses clean funds a prestige object whose dramatic payoff is the humiliation of the man who said “have a seat,” the argument is not that journalism can be theatrical. The argument is that the theater now prefers the accused to the accuser, provided the accuser is square enough to look ridiculous under neon.

The fact of the funding and the Venice-to-multiplex release is the diagnosis. A culture that still knows, in its statutes if not in its festivals, that adults do not get to negotiate childhood will not spend its prestige capital turning the sting into a horror portrait of the sting’s host. Fire, in the old civic sense, is not a metaphor for riot. It is the refusal to keep paying for stories that relocate shame from the act to the exposure of the act. Until that refusal arrives, Primetime will stand as a finished artifact of a guild that can aestheticize almost anything except the plain duty to protect the young and to speak plainly about those who hunt them.

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