Occasionally I will be mid conversation with a friend my own age, core millennials born around 1990, and one of us will recall – with something not entirely distinct from fondness – the strange era in the early 2000s when we all at once had private unfettered access to gore. Not in horror films or spooky stories but actual recorded content of real-life death, torture and destruction. This was a variable situation from house to house, naturally. Some of us had strictly limited access to the internet, and some of us went from having none to wading through its deafening, incoherent bombardment largely unsupervised in a matter of months. This was determined often by happenstance, rather than by will or neglect on the part of parents. For a long time many had no further conception of the internet than as a kind of convoluted fax machine.
Somewhere in the gap between MS Paint and MySpace, there were those of us who sought out or happened upon graphic footage which has bobbed just below the surface of consciousness ever since, charged with undeniable and potent meaning. There were crime scene photographs and autopsy slabs, Isis beheading videos, car crash footage. There was 4chan and the places even worse than 4chan, where people gathered to swap pictures of babies deformed in the aftermath of nuclear accidents and Polaroid photographs of serial killer victims in the last moments of life, vivid in their total awareness of what was about to befall them. Though I had always been a horror fan, I learned eventually not to seek out the real life stuff, less because it caused me a moral quandary and more because it rooted inside me, in a way things designed for entertainment did not. It wasn’t a simple process to stop myself, though, because though I knew instinctively it was shameful to gawk at violence and death, there was also some other fool part of my brain trying to convince me it was actually correct in some way to witness the worst of what humanity had to offer.
I thought about that odd era when I watched the new documentary Predators, released in the UK on 14 November. Predators is a revelatory and brilliant film about the NBC television series To Catch A Predator presented by Chris Hansen. The premise of that show saw Hansen confront paedophiles who had been exchanging flirtatious or sexual messages with a decoy posing as a child. They then went to the proposed meeting place, where they were greeted by adult actors who looked young for their age and were posing as adolescents. One of the moments that made me most squeamish – among many – was when one of these actors mentioned that her father had put her forward for the role of a sexualised tween.
The men’s reactions – and it was almost entirely men – vary from disbelief to instant hysterical dissolution to pathetically misguided bargaining. They are often told they are free to leave at any time, but when they do so, a team of police officers descends. One man asks the officer questioning him if she is a counsellor sent to help him. It ran from 2004 to 2007, ending after one of its subjects, an assistant district attorney in Fort Worth, shot himself as police tried to serve him a search warrant. The cameras continued to roll, officers smirking obsequiously to production staff, demonstrating the truly surreal subservience law enforcement can show to the entertainment industry.
The show aired during the exact years my friends and I were learning to parse real life horror online, and indeed clips from it were among the mishmash of the simultaneously compelling and repellent content I was absorbing. What made the show so successful was also what made it so savage, particularly when looked upon now, from the documentary’s sensitive and subtle vantage point. The viewer is watching someone’s life destroyed, and is prompted to to revel in watching the person realise that this is what is taking place. Whatever complexities surround that individual’s actions and motivations and history, these facts are undeniable: paedophiles are bad, and this paedophile is being punished. If the medieval morality play aimed to teach its audience how to behave, the contemporary equivalent simply beats its audience over the head with the knowledge that they are already right, and the person onscreen is wrong. Things that are undeniable are comforting. Human grotesquery which we can gawk at virtuously is appealing. We may be excused even from the squalor of our prurience.
In the years since To Catch A Predator stopped airing on terrestrial television, its premise has spurred a vast cottage industry of predator confrontation shows, which mostly appear on YouTube channels and are then shared endlessly on X, perfect short-form content for our degraded cultural landscape which seems to lose dimensions and depth and meaning every day. There are questions raised in the documentary about the ethics of ensnaring these men on camera, some of whom are mentally impaired and some of whom are only 18 and arranging to meet another teenager a few years their junior. Even without debating individual wrongdoing, using such encounters as entertainment is clearly morally insidious. It brings to mind the death penalty, and why I am against it even when it is used against someone totally beyond redemption: my opposition has as much to do with inherent spiritual violence committed by and inflicted on the executor and witnesses, as to do with believing in the right of the executed to live.
[Further reading: How to fix the internet: break the oligarchy]
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