A Few Words on Baby Reindeer (And Not Really)
I watch mosquitoes bounce off the glass walls outside the kitchen of my house. They’re determined and undeterred, they go in circles clockwise, counter-clockwise, for minutes on end. Transfixed, I shake myself aware and come back inside, careful not to let them in.
I was supposed to write on a couple recent movies and films (a distinction worthy all the cultural snobbery I so often like to excuse), and specifically one so tonally bizarre you can’t look away from it, even though you’d actually rather not sit in what it would be like to have your mother hook up with a famous boyband member.
This isn’t that piece.
Instead, I give you the following – still culturally relevant, as Baby Reindeer is on everyone’s mouths and screens, opening conversations on identity, trauma, abuse, stalking, turning tragedies into art, or at least capitalizing on them as a commercial product… the list goes on. You probably didn’t need my few cents on the matter, and certainly did not ask for it, yet here I am delivering what would probably be one of the biggest self-reports to come out of these articles I write here.
“Don’t watch it”, my mother says to me during my short hometown getaway. For the first time in my life, I’m experiencing a kind of block that feels impenetrable, although from the outside I am absolutely killing it. To the naked eye, I am successfully balancing 40 hour work weeks, being a full time student who also takes on additional courses (damn you, unjust lotteries of GLASS that leave you no chance getting enough credits in a semester and have you condemned to catching up later on!), maintaining a somewhat rich social life (more or less), and keeping myself alive. In reality, I can’t get a single word on a page. Whether that be my thesis – deadline of which is drastically approaching – a radio article, or even a journal entry. A word that doesn’t make up the ramblings of a mad person, that is. So home I go, the stay extended a little past what it probably should be, hoping that the warmth of the hearth would deliver a cure. Or at least provide comfort in the meantime.
“I think it’s dangerous. For young people like you.”
At that point, I start defending the show based on what I’ve heard circling around. I tend to do that a lot, excusing and justifying things to the outside of me, always assuming best intentions at play. I see the fault in it, but in those moments I desperately want to believe all that which I come up with to be true. It’s somehow easier to take their side, but I can’t yet know why. This often frustrates my mom, and this case isn’t any different. “We’ll talk when you watch it”, she finally tells me after some huffing and puffing on both our parts. I guess her want to have a conversation runs deeper than her initial better judgement.
After I make my return and start settling back in, I finally get an opening in my calendar to quietly sit down and work on whatever it is I have to work on. In all honesty however, it’s not just the writing that I’m having trouble with. It’s all of it. I seem to have lost touch with myself somewhere along the way, confidence – shaken, moods – swinging, actions – erratic. Therefore I do what I do best. I mean, at this point, if I could escape into something so far I would come out on the other side turned all inside out, I probably would. And so I sit back, and press ‘play’.
While binging, I cannot help but think of anything that I’d heard or read about the show and contrast it with what my mom has said. Of having so little self-respect that you let yourself be mistreated time and time again, of finding success only through what looks like self-exploitation, of compromising your personal safety for a chance at it, and the dangers of finding praise exactly because of it. And as I continue watching, I realize her points are not fully right but not exactly wrong, since they don’t come from a place of hate or shame, rather genuine concern – and the show does play with the ambiguous integrity of its characters, blending notions of victimhood and perpetration, in my opinion doing so quite intentionally. But it hits me then, that difference in reception. What is it about the show and the viewing experience of my Gen X mother and my Gen Z self that led to this difference?
I think it comes down to two things.
One, there is a dissonance within the anatomy of this mini series. ‘This is a true story’, the intertitle informs us after the opening sequence. Quite a bold statement that is – not ‘inspired by’, not ‘based on’, we are led to believe that whatever is about to unfold actually happened. But our better judgement tells us that can’t really be right. A typical viewer is still aware that embellishments were probably made to drive narrative and pace, and the Richard Gadd within the series is not even called Richard Gadd. We know he’s utilizing the character of Donny to tell us his own story, but the accuracy of that retelling is not for us to be properly assessed. Nor should it really be, unless your concerns align with my mom’s. Because if this narration was 100% reliable, it really being a true story, I too would consider the makings and meaning behind the show questionable. Because then, it partly becomes the story of how if you want to have a chance at commercial success, you should let yourself be collateral damage for it, giving in to the dirty rules of the dirty game of dirty creative industries in order to progress, and then somehow weaponizing your own trauma and pain to tug on the empathy of others, making a whole load of money on it. Because, if we are to believe the events of the show exactly as they are presented, how are we to know that this isn’t how a successful, £1million career was made?
The show tackles a theme of returning to the sources of your trauma and as much as it makes sense, the more it happens, the more intentional the coming back becomes. You may be confused the first time, if you haven’t before you certainly should become sympathetic by the second time, but it is the very last time we see it happen that makes me question how much you can absolve the character of what becomes their personal bad decision making. And of course, we know the show is not actually a true story, as confirmed by Gadd in interviews, maintaining that what he gets at is “100% emotional truth” which is all fair. But it now makes me wonder why it is that the work makes it so ambiguous to discern. Obviously, it’s working in favour of promotion and publicity – just see how many articles pop up once typed ‘How much of Baby Reindeer is true?’. But to my mind, it’s not only working against the integrity of the character and therefore Gadd the real guy, but also makes an even worse case for sensationalizing your own traumatic experiences for entertainment to ultimately capitalize on. It left my mom, and after this consideration – me, with a lingering bad taste in our mouths. It’s his story, it’s his right, you might say. But.. should it be?
It is in the second thing that we get back to my common practice of justification. And to that emotional truth, and the emotional honesty that the show can’t be denied. You see, I believe my mom to still be lucky enough not to grow up in an environment where basically all that surrounds you means to make you hate yourself to make money on you, or at least lucky enough to have a possibility not to completely internalize it. I can’t say the same for myself. Therefore, watching Baby Reindeer left me with a distaste primarily for my own self-hatred. I hated recognizing parts of myself in the extreme case of Donny’s character, and with the show’s ambiguous ending, it only made me want to do everything in my power to avoid the cycle of dangerous, heightened diffidence. I kept telling myself I can’t let it get to that point, that I would never compromise myself for any quick fix: monetary, physical, ego-driven, you name it. Not for a promise of something I’ve been conditioned to want by the climate I was born into, where status is king and we’re all being kept in a prison of stratification that benefits the very few. That I will never put myself in harm’s way in hopes of avoiding being harmed in the future, at the cost of passively doing harm onto others. Because curing self-loathing with solutions presented by its source (again; money, “good” looks, status, fame or just a lot of attention, etc.) to me is like the glass wall to the mosquito – no matter how determined you are, you won’t make it out to the other side, only grow increasingly confused by your own reflection. The only way to go is up and over.
If you think it’s hypocritical of me to write this then, well… I myself am no expert on the line between a work cathartic and one self-exploiting. Still, I can assure you, I will make 0.0 moneys from it, I am not being that descriptive about my struggles, and I am not hiding beneath a veil of auto-fiction. And finally, I will not encourage you to, nor discourage you from watching Baby Reindeer. After all, it did make me put words on a page.
