"Instead of an alien hunter with gnarly teeth, this offers a profoundly troubling meditation on our collective thirst for revenge or at least the kind of bizarre performance art version of revenge as served up by reality TV show To Catch a Predator, a US series that ran from 2004 to 2007 and which featured weekly footage of paedophiles and would-be paedophiles being duped, shamed and arrested."
"Every episode was roughly the same: a man is observed arriving at a suburban house, expecting to have sex there with a teenaged girl or boy who is in fact a hired actor who has lured the target over. Then journalist Chris Hansen would step out from behind a doorway to confront the target with transcripts of interactions he had been having with the decoy."
Predators is a documentary that scrutinizes the punitive spectacle of televised sting operations such as To Catch a Predator. The film follows director David Osit as he confronts his own past fascination with the show and the cultural appetite for public humiliation. The documentary reconstructs the sting format: decoys lure suspected offenders, a host confronts them with transcripts, and law enforcement arrests them seconds later. The film questions whether such theatrical shaming prevents harm or perpetuates vigilante entertainment, and it highlights tragic consequences including a suspect's suicide. The film critiques the ethics of performative revenge and the moral responsibilities of media producers.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]