Primetime: Identification with the Aggressor

There are few things more frightening than the possibility that the enemy is already inside. In 2007, Chris Hansen published a book with a remarkable title: To Catch a Predator: Protecting Your Kids from Online Enemies Already in Your Home. The operative word may not be predator. It may be enemy.

Lance Oppenheim's Primetime is ostensibly about pedophiles. More specifically, it is about To Catch a Predator, the enormously successful television phenomenon that promised Americans that the stranger their children were talking to online might be an enemy who had somehow already crossed the threshold. But Oppenheim sets his film in an America preoccupied with another version of precisely the same fear: that somewhere among us is a person who means us harm, that he may be impossible to recognize until it is too late, and that safety therefore depends upon finding him first.

It is difficult to imagine To Catch a Predator emerging from any historical moment quite as perfectly as the one that produced it. The program arrived only a few years after September 11, into an American culture increasingly organized around surveillance, vigilance, infiltration, and the possibility of enemies hiding in plain sight. Airports had become security checkpoints. The government was listening. Police departments were becoming increasingly militarized. Americans were learning to watch one another. And then Chris Hansen gave us something to watch.

There is a psychoanalytic defense known as identification with the aggressor. Faced with an overwhelming experience of vulnerability, the threatened person may identify with the power of the person who frightens him. The passive becomes active. The watched becomes the watcher. The person who fears being invaded discovers some relief in becoming capable of invasion himself. Put crudely: I will become dangerous enough that I no longer have to experience myself as endangered.

Primetime seems almost consumed by this transformation. Everyone is watching everyone else. Cameras are hidden behind walls. Conversations are recorded. Private sexual fantasies are copied, printed, read aloud, and broadcast into millions of homes. A suburban house becomes a surveillance apparatus. Police wait outside. The predator enters believing himself to be the one pursuing someone vulnerable, only to discover that he has been watched from the moment he arrived. The fantasy reverses. The hunter becomes the hunted, and America watches.

The fantasy reverses. The hunter becomes the hunted, and America watches.

The genius of To Catch a Predator was therefore not simply that it identified a frightening object. It offered the audience a new position in relation to it. We did not have to be the frightened parent wondering who might be speaking to our children through the computer. We could be behind the camera with Hansen. We knew what the predator did not. We watched him walk unknowingly into the trap. We watched his face when Hansen appeared. We watched the police waiting outside. For a few minutes, uncertainty disappeared. The dangerous person was no longer hidden among us. He was sitting in a chair. Perhaps that was part of the show's extraordinary psychological satisfaction. The threat had been located, and Primetime is interested in what happens next.

Identification with the aggressor does not eliminate aggression. It changes who is permitted to possess it. The disturbing achievement of the film is the gradual erosion of the psychological distinction between Hansen and the men he pursues. This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between exposing suspected sexual predators and attempting to sexually abuse children. Psychologically, however, Oppenheim repeatedly gives them a shared vocabulary. Both hunt. Both deceive. Both construct false identities. Both manipulate another person's expectations to lure him into a private space. Both watch without being seen. Both derive something from possessing knowledge the other person does not have. Eventually, even the camera seems unsure whom it is supposed to fear.

This may explain Primetime's obsessive close-ups. Faces fill the frame until there is almost nowhere else to look. Hansen watches the predators. The production watches Hansen. Dan watches both, gradually learning how to become what the adults around him require. We watch all of them. Surveillance ceases to be merely something occurring within the story and becomes the form through which the story is told. There is always another pair of eyes.

The film makes the post-9/11 connection unusually difficult to ignore. The police department possesses military equipment wildly disproportionate to the operation it is conducting. Hansen reduces moral ambiguity to the familiar binary of the period: you are either with us or you are with the pedophiles. The formulation is psychologically revealing. Once the world has been divided into the dangerous and those who oppose them, virtually anything done by the latter can be experienced as protection. Aggression has not disappeared. It has been purified, but purification requires splitting.

In Kleinian psychoanalysis, splitting allows incompatible aspects of experience to be kept apart. The loved object can remain good insofar as the hated object contains everything bad. The difficulty arises when the other person must be encountered as a whole: capable of goodness and destructiveness, vulnerability and aggression, sometimes simultaneously. Such recognition requires tolerating ambivalence, and ambivalence complicates the satisfying clarity of hatred.

Hansen seems increasingly incapable of this complication. The men he pursues become something resembling part-objects, stripped of the contradictions that might make them recognizable as whole people. Their individuality matters little because each occupies the same position in his internal world. One predator can replace another. Each is another incarnation of the same persecutory object, another monster waiting to be exposed. But Hansen's inability to recognize the predator as a whole person may be less an exception to his ordinary way of relating than its most grotesque expression.

Oppenheim portrays a man for whom other people seem to exist primarily in relation to his own importance. His colleagues sustain his authority. His adversaries provide opportunities to demonstrate it. Even his children are recruited into the performance: he wakes them to watch him on television, as though their admiration were more urgent than their sleep. Their experience of him matters more than their experience of themselves. Other people appear to possess significance insofar as they can confirm the significance of Chris Hansen.

There is something profoundly narcissistic about this arrangement. In pathological narcissistic functioning, other people may be experienced less as separate subjects with their own inner lives than as objects whose principal function is to regulate self-esteem. Admiration sustains grandiosity. Criticism threatens it. Relationships become organized around the preservation of an idealized self-image, and the other person's separateness becomes an inconvenience, sometimes even an injury.

Perhaps most strikingly, Hansen himself seems to have become similarly reduced. He does not appear to experience himself simply as a man who happens to be Chris Hansen, but as Chris Hansen, a recognizable personality whose continued existence depends upon the recognition of others. The public image becomes an idealized self, grander and more coherent than the ordinary person who must sustain it. He is both the performer and the audience for his own performance, forever watching himself being watched. The irony is that the man who cannot encounter others as whole people may have lost the capacity to encounter himself as one.

This gives his relationship to the predator a particular psychological necessity. Hansen does not simply despise the monster. He needs him. Each new confrontation offers another opportunity to experience himself as righteous, powerful, and indispensable. To recognize too much humanity in the person sitting across from him would introduce an unwelcome complication, not only into the pursuit of the enemy, but into the identity of the man pursuing him. The predator must remain monstrous because Hansen's own goodness has come to depend upon it. Without the monster, who is Chris Hansen?

By the end of Primetime, Oppenheim makes Hansen's internal world visible. Looking through a window at the District Attorney, Hansen sees not the man but a monster. It is an extraordinary image because it reveals something that has been happening throughout the film. The enemy is no longer simply someone Hansen discovers through investigation. It is something he has become organized to perceive. The individual disappears behind the category. The human being becomes the persecutory object. Hansen has constructed a world in which monsters are everywhere, and his own identity depends upon their continued existence. Perhaps this is where Primetime becomes about considerably more than Chris Hansen.

A frightened culture does not necessarily become gentler because it knows what it is like to be frightened. Sometimes it becomes fascinated with strength. It builds bigger weapons. It watches more closely. It permits invasions that would previously have seemed intolerable. It becomes suspicious of privacy because privacy is where the enemy might be hiding. Most importantly, it learns to experience its own aggression not as aggression at all, but as the necessary work of keeping innocent people safe. And perhaps the most troubling consequence is not that the protector comes to resemble the aggressor. It is that he becomes increasingly unable to recognize the resemblance. His violence is protection. His intrusion is vigilance. His pleasure in another person's humiliation is justice. The distinction between good and evil remains perfectly intact, even as the behavior of those assigned to each side becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Hansen's book promised to protect Americans from enemies already in their homes. Primetime suggests that the danger of such a promise may lie not only in the enemies we discover, but in what we become while searching for them. The predator is inside the house. So we fill the house with cameras.

The predator is inside the house. So we fill the house with cameras.

Common questions

What is Primetime (2026) about?

Lance Oppenheim's 2026 A24 film, written by Ajon Singh, stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, host of To Catch a Predator, in 2006, as he sets out to make television history and an operation goes fatally wrong. Skyler Gisondo and Merritt Wever co-star.

What is identification with the aggressor?

A psychoanalytic defense, described by Sandor Ferenczi and later Anna Freud, in which a person overwhelmed by a threat takes on the power or qualities of the one who threatens him: the passive becomes active, and the watched becomes the watcher.

Does Primetime (2026) have a TVI score?

Not yet. The film is not currently in the TV Intelligentsia catalog, so this essay carries no score. TVI does not publish a number before a rater has watched and scored the work under the current standard.

Is this essay a review with a score?

No. It is a psychology essay about the film, an interpretation of the work rather than a scored review.

Who is Alex Gigler?

Alex Gigler writes The Inner Life, TV Intelligentsia's psychology and film column, and holds a doctorate in clinical psychology (PsyD). His essays read films through psychoanalytic and developmental ideas. They are interpretations of the work, not clinical assessments of any person, and they do not set or change a title's TVI score.