Predatory Sex and the Single Generation

In our current cultural conversation, especially post-Weinstein, Diddy and Jeffrey Epstein, the image of the pedophile, the groomer or the elderly creep is a universal villain. His is an insatiable appetite; he is a master manipulator, a wolf seeking an endless supply of lambs. In Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson) describes the bad guys they’re catching on network television as “a man on your porch with his penis out who wants to put it in your daughter.” People, understandably, want these creeps obliterated. Perhaps no one understood, and then exploited, this urge better than Hansen.  

“Primetime” depicts the rise and fall of Chris Hansen and his hit “Dateline”-branded show,“To Catch a Predator.” TCAP was designed as a simple and endlessly watchable documentary-style parable of justice: there are objective bad guys (predators) and there are objective good guys (TCAP’s team of local law enforcement, digital sleuths, decoys, cameramen, and Hansen himself). “Primetime” is based on the Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” which details the suicide of Texas prosecutor Bill Conradt after a botched, rushed, legally-dodgy TCAP ambush. The film doesn’t provide a particularly fresh angle on Hansen’s ratings-hungry, sensationalized idea of “justice” (especially if you’ve already seen David Osit’s thoughtful documentary “Predators”), but it’s not surprising that a cinematic renegotiation of “To Catch a Predator” has arrived: we’re thinking a lot about creepy old men these days. 

In the decades since TCAP, we’ve seen true monsters like Weinstein, Epstein, Sean Combs and R. Kelly exposed and prosecuted.  Access to free and varied sexual content online is at an all time high, and highly-specific sexual discourses are low-hanging fruit for culture mag thinkpieces and “ragebait” Tweets alike. In this cultural context a common narrative (and mild moral panic) has emerged: Gen-Z is, allegedly, totally sexless. But the stories being told about Gen-Z this year, particularly at the movies, are offering an alternate view. In particular, Elliot Tuttle’s “Blue Film” and Georgia Bernstein’s “Night Nurse” offer a vision of explicit, erotic, subversive Gen-Z sexuality formed specifically in a post-Chris Hansen and “To Catch a Predator” world. In both movies, our Gen-Z protagonists aren’t just unafraid of sex, they’re fraternizing with America’s number one cultural enemy. 

In “Night Nurse,” audiences meet Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) as she’s being pinned against the wall by Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), one of her septuagenarian charges at the old folks’ home where she works. He’s forcing her to scam another elderly man by pretending to be a young, distressed family member over the phone. In “Blue Film,” we encounter camboy Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) as he tells his thirsty viewers that tonight, he’s getting paid $50,000 to spend the night with a man. Unbenknownst to Aaron, the patron is his former middle school teacher, Hank Grant (Reed Birney). Hank has privately lusted after Aaron since Aaron was his 12-year-old student. 

Both of these films made shockwaves in the indie film scene, largely because of their focus on a lecherous older man in a relationship with a much younger adult. Many people from different generations and political backgrounds have (often conflicting or impossible) suggestions about how, exactly, Gen-Z should be navigating a post-MeToo, post-digital-nativity, sexually-recessed world. This includes frequent “takes” from Gen-Z itself, who declare on various social media platforms and Substacks what fetishes are or are not “okay,” how often and what kind of pornography you should be watching, and how much older your adult partner can be than you (an adult). Subjective (and generally speaking, private) sexual decisions that require context and are undoubtedly dependent on an individual’s experience are reduced to “rules” that can determine social and moral failings. 

But the protagonists of “Blue Film” and “Night Nurse” are not the frigid, virginal Gen-Z caricatures that have been depicted elsewhere. In “Night Nurse,” Eleni becomes so hungry for Douglas, so determined to become his favorite girl amongst the nurses, that she pushes at the boundaries of his scams until even he is hesitant. Her desire is so huge that she outdoes him in his perversion. When Eleni kidnaps a girl to concoct a hostage situation — making their scam a reality — Douglas is, in effect, under Eleni’s thumb. The pleasure Douglas allowed her to feel in small doses gave way to Eleni needing a bigger, realer hit, and in a sense, she’s protected: by way of being a young woman in a room with a lecherous old man, her story will be more compelling than his. 

In “Blue Film,” Aaron almost always has the upper hand; an aloofness borne from the combination of being a practiced sex worker, the object of Hank’s affection, and no longer a child in danger. He is stronger, younger, and though he sometimes partakes in and enjoys subversive sexual practices, he does so consensually and in appropriate conditions. He is everything Hank isn’t. Aaron feels empowered to grill Hank, and in this space, where his true self is known, Hank perversely feels liberated enough to speak freely. It’s both uncomfortable and fascinating, and a total refutation of the claims that Gen-Z youth are flinching away from the very idea of sex (“Blue Film” director Elliot Tuttle is 26). “Blue Film” and “Night Nurse” are striking artistic pursuits because they use the lecher to raise questions about desire, curiosity, repulsion and — uncomfortable as it may be — empathy. In short, they are works of art diametrically opposed to “To Catch a Predator,” whose modus operandi centered on retributive vigilante’s glee.

There is a subversion of anticipated power dynamics in “Blue Film,” “Night Nurse,” and “Primetime.” In “Blue Film,” Aaron is given carte-blanche (and a cash gift) to access the inner workings of Hank (in addition to sex), and is cherished by him in the process. And Eleni is hungry, horny and so enthralled with the thrill of Douglas’ illicit games that she grows upset when he refuses to “go all the way” — when he’s unable to penetrate her or unwilling to literally hold someone hostage. 

In the world of “Primetime,” Hansen becomes the predator. Instead of meeting the imaginary teenager they thought they were talking to online, the creepy older man instead comes face to face with Hansen, who, in “Primetime,” often stalks toward his unsuspecting mark like a hungry animal. He is rich with power ranging from his evidential printed chat logs to the camera crew and law enforcement set to appear at his call. 

Interestingly enough, “Primetime” has its own youth-in-sexual-limbo. Unlike Eleni and Aaron, newly hired decoy actor Dan (Skyler Gisondo) — a desperate 20-something actor — is very distinctly not Gen-Z. “Primetime” takes pains to keep us grounded in 2006: Tamagotchis hang from a predator’s car mirror, a character orders the Jared Fogel special at Subway. Like Eleni and Aaron, Dan is gaining something from his time spent with predatory old men: $5,000 a shoot, he brags to a fellow broke actor. But where Eleni and Aaron are permitted to peer curiously into the void of sexual taboo, and to make boundaried, autonomous decisions based on what they discover, Dan’s work insists on a lack of spiritual exploration. After his first exposure (quite literally: a man shows his penis to Dan within minutes of his first shoot) to the work he’ll be doing, Dan cries as a producer hands him two Advil and a glass of water. And while he tries his best to embrace the sting operation as an acting challenge, his inability to distance himself from the work that Hansen and his program are doing wears on him spiritually. What he’s being asked to do is calculating, graphic and without boundaries. He is at Hansen’s and TCAP’s beck-and-call, void of autonomy and encouraged to void himself of empathy. Where Aaron and Eleni use their interactions with their respective dirty old men to explore something much deeper, related to their desires, pleasure and autonomy, Dan, trapped in TCAP’s world, is barraged with the cold and the impersonal. He and everyone around him make money off of the public’s desire to find a socially acceptable way to stare directly at something verboten and repulsive.

Hansen and his team may have claimed their allegiance was to justice, but it’s impossible to deny that justice took a backseat to ratings. As Hansen puts it in one scene of “Primetime,” instead of the pillory in the middle of each town square, there is now a television in each home. This suggests that Hansen thinks both the pillory and the television are adequate means for justice — if you are content with justice mainly, or perhaps solely, consisting of public humiliation. Why they were actually performing these pseudo-sting operations — and more crucially, how they were doing it, whether it was ethical or even legal — was less relevant. 

The trick of “To Catch a Predator” was that for years it was impossible to criticize: how could one attack a show which held in its gunsights the one of the vilest, most reprehensible acts? But feeding a cultural obsession with no-holds-barred vigilante punishment should not come at the cost of due process and a baseline understanding of humanity. 

In David Osit’s interview with Vulture about the mixed response to his documentary “Predators” and its criticism of the exploitative design of “To Catch a Predator,” Osit said, “You might find yourself, watching “Predators,” feeling empathy for people who’ve done bad things. But no one’s ever convinced me that empathy in itself is bad.” To consider empathy (not to be confused with acceptance or forgiveness) for someone who attempts sexual abuse is a moral quagmire. There have been many attempts to grapple with how to tell these stories. Most often they are tales of vengeance (“Hard Candy,” “Mystic River”), dramas about the spiritual repercussions of the abuse on the child (“Mysterious Skin,” “Bad Education,” “Fallen Angel”), or thought experiments on the limits of catching these predators (“The Artifice Girl”). 

These all have their place, but the pseudo-trilogy of “Primetime,” “Blue Film,” and “Night Nurse” hint at a nuanced tide shift, even if it’s a small one. These films absolutely do not sanction the grotesque act of sexual abuse or exploitation. Hank loses his job, spends time in prison and blows all his money on this one night with Aaron. When the film ends, he has nothing. Eleni’s one-upping of Douglas’ hijinks gets him arrested. These films encourage a process of reflection and internal and external investigation that are private and personal. Our “Blue Film” and “Night Nurse” protagonists may make some money from their encounters, but it is positioned as entirely secondary to the discoveries they make about themselves. They end their films as figures in solitude — Aaron singing softly in the shower, Eleni sitting in the back of an ambulance — but without a call to the audience for retribution. Digital engagement and discourse have adopted the exploitative patterns that televised content like “To Catch a Predator” shaped. In 2026, the solitude of off-putting individual behavior feels revolutionary. 

While the plot trappings of “Blue Film” and “Night Nurse” are off-putting, the actual argument they make about their Gen-Z characters — specifically that these characters are adults capable of taking risks, who deserve to pursue pleasure and inner clarity, even if that takes them down some seamy roads — is an antidote to digital surveillance and rapidly regressing social and sexual norms. Algorithms are rewarded for shrinking all topics to bite-sized, prescriptive, one-dimensional, cortisol-or-dopamine-delivering clicks, even if it comes at the cost of ignoring any consideration of form, content, and intention. One-off discourse-bait Tweets and short form videos can discuss (and even depict) sex acts, but these are miniscule packages. They often cannot encompass even the necessary nuance for one opinion about a facet of sexuality, let alone encompass the full, lived, subjective spectrum of human desire and sexuality. 

“Primetime” also ends with its avatar of youth in solitude. Dan, shaken by a sting gone extremely awry, opens mail in his lonely apartment. He’s surprised to see he’s received a SAG-AFTRA card for his work on “To Catch a Predator.” Perhaps there are technically rewards for giving oneself over to the system that feeds off of public humiliation and mass sensationalization. But while Aaron, Eleni and Dan all leave the screens on notes of ambivalence, Dan is the only one that seems totally distanced from both his material goals and himself. Dan has not technically done anything truly immoral — he’s more of a pawn in a larger, colder game. It does seem, though, that material gain in the world of the one-dimensionally, ratings-oriented sensational and an ability to maintain a sense of sensuality (in its literal, most basic form: a sense of physical self, of spiritual pleasure) are mutually exclusive practices.