Baby Reindeer Is A Chilling Black Comedy
One That I Can Appreciate More Than (I Hope) Most of You Ever Do
If you’ve followed some of my writing this past year, you might know that for a little more than two years I was essentially stalked by a deranged person in my apartment complex. That person was elderly and suffering from psychosis that was aggravated by an increasing dementia. Not long after moving into my building he began to place calls to the police about loud music from my apartment and buzzing on my intercom impersonating the police.
This person’s fixation became more obsessive over the next several months. They would hammer on my door and accuse me of stealing from them. They would post increasingly threatening and virulently deranged letters in an unsteady hand that were frequently misspelled. Whenever this person encountered me, either in the lobby of our building where they spent an immense amount of their time, they would taunt me, scream obscenities and accuse me of theft of random items. At the height of their delusion, they would leave random pieces of garbage at the foot of my door, ring my doorbell anywhere from three to four times a day and post notes throughout the building urged the tenants — who this person claimed all loved him to get me out of the building because I was ‘a mentle case”. This climaxed in this person choking me in full view of my neighbors one summer night.
During this period I would learn from both my neighbors and the police who I became very well acquainted with about this person’s delusions and that they had not begun with me. This person had harassed tenants in the building and neighboring ones with similar delusions and attacks over the course of years. At one point a neighbor had been tormented so much that they had gotten into a fight with this person and they had been forced to move. I later learned one of the previous tenants in my apartment had been the victim of similar horrid behavior to the point that they had eventually vacated the building prior to my moving in — although whether that was the reason the apartment became available I never knew for sure. At a certain point it became clear that this person had been a menace to everybody in the building and himself, living in an apartment that was so filthy and unkempt that when they were finally committed to an institution last year no one wanted to even look inside.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I have a greater appreciation than most viewers probably would want to have for the situation that Richard Gadd lived through that is at the center of the recently dropped Netflix series Baby Reindeer. I’ll be honest I respect him for the bravery it took to take this horrific and warped relationship he had with ‘Martha Scott’ and somehow manage to turn into first a play and then a limited series on Netflix. I knew how bizarre and ludicrous the situation I was living through was — at a certain point I said that I was the lead character of every single Lifetime Movie of the Week that ever aired — and I tried to keep a sense of humor about it the more it went on. The idea of being able to write about it even after it came to an end was not easy for me to face; the idea of trying to turn into art is something I’m not sure I’m capable of, at least now. So there is a certain bravery about what Gadd is trying to do and the fact that he is willing to cast himself as the same role, even though he uses the name Donny in the series.
My reluctance to watch the series even as it became a phenomenon was more due to the fact it cut to close to the bone. However, now that it seems likely that the show will be among the contenders for Best Limited Series (Gold Derby has it ranked number 3 behind Fargo and Lessons in Chemistry) and that Gadd and Jessica Gunning are rising quickly in consideration for Emmys, it seemed now would be the time. The fact that it only airs seven episodes and that most of them are in the half hour range made it seem like something I could easily get done by the time the nominations are out and even to rank it among my picks this year. So today I saw the first two episodes. And it’s kind of scary how much of what the fictionalized Gadd went through that I can already relate too.
Yes he met ‘Martha’ at his job at a bar rather than his place of residence like I did but Martha eventually became one of those fixtures that was clearly obsessed with him, was clearly delusional (she claims to be an attorney for politicians even though she has no job) and she keeps coming to the bar clearly only to see him. Donny very quickly starts to receive dozens of emails a day from an email address that seems to be random letters and numbers and with messages that are filled with ridiculous misspellings of simple words. My Martha never send me a single email but that’s because they might not have had a computer or known how to use it.
Donny is in a dark place at the time he meets Martha: his career as a standup comic is going nowhere slowly, he hasn’t had a long-term relationship for a while and is currently living in the flat of his ex-girlfriends mother. He knows how dangerous playing with fire is, so when he tries to calm it down and says he just wants to be Martha’s friend he doesn’t realize the obvious. He gets a much clearer sense when they go out for coffee and she starts to become both loud and violent (something I knew my stalker was capable of). For reasons he will question years later, he follows her to her home and finds out she is living in squalor. She sends him another text and she hears his phone ping.
At his next gig he is bombing again when Martha is the only one laughing. As he reacts to her and the two of them interact, it’s clear this is the first time he’s gotten laughter for his act in a very long time. Against his better judgment he encourages her and only then does he bother to go on social media and learn the horrible truth. Martha spent years obsessed with another man, made his family the target of a social shaming, pushed his elderly mother into the street and was eventually arrested and put in prison. At the end of the first episode he repeats over and over: “I have a convicted stalker stalking me.” But the last image is of him friending her on Facebook.
He immediately regrets the decision but once he does it he seems unable to take it back. He keeps trying to justify in his own mind, even as she begins to comment on every single picture on Facebook, even as she continues to stalk him at the bar, even after he tells her the age difference is too much because she wants kids. That sends her into hyperdrive as she tells him every detail not only of her gynecological history but starts coming up with names for children.
What’s clear about Donny in the first two episodes is that there’s something cowardly about him, something unwilling to face who he is or what he is. In the second episode we learn that he put of a false identity on a dating app and ended up finding a woman named Teri who he is clearly attracted to. But he is terrified to reveal the deception and more ashamed to not to what to deal with the fact that she is trans. He knows the situation between Martha and Teri is combustible but he refuses to deal with it directly with either of the ‘women in his life’ . Even when he tells Teri the truth she demands to know why he won’t call the police, which is the obvious solution. (The series begins with him at the station but it has been going on for six months by that point.) Teri puts her finger on it when she realizes that despite all of the horrible parts of what’s going on there seems to be some part of it that enjoys being the subject of unconditional love, even if its clearly coming from a position of insanity. I can understand the logic of it to, having been on one side of more than a few toxic one-sided relationships myself over the years, but even I know the difference.
Donny clearly has a part of him that’s a mix of cowardice and shame, someone who keeps running from confrontation. This makes him the worst kind of person for Martha to be obsessed with you can tell Donny’s scared to death of Martha but won’t do anything because some part of him doesn’t want to hurt her feelings.
Gadd’s work is superb mainly as the storyteller, brilliantly showing all of the angles of shame, disgrace and fear in the first few episodes. But its Jessica Gunning’s work as Martha that carries the first two episodes of Baby Reindeer. There’s something clearly off-kilter with her the moment we meet her, but it’s not as obvious as, say, with Evan Peters as Dahmer or Darren Criss’ work in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Gunning’s Martha takes it to the other end of the danger spectrum: someone you’d dismiss as a threat not only because of her size and gender but because she seems so utterly clueless and unfiltered that it’s hard to take her seriously, even as the texts she sends Donny become more and more unhinged and foul-mouthed. Perhaps given how things ended with my stalker or given my empathetic nature, I felt sympathy for her even as she becomes crazier and crazier: you know she’s unwell and capable of saying ridiculously inane things and you know she’s capable of doing dangerous things, but the two don’t seem to coalesce. In an already crowded field for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series, Gunning looks like she will be a formidable contender for the Emmy later this summer.
It shocked but didn’t surprise me that in the aftermath of Baby Reindeer becoming a viral hit both the neighborhood and the woman who Martha is supposedly based on have been stalked on social media. That sadly is a part of our culture to. The actual Martha has also given interviews with the media claiming the version of her onscreen is a vast exaggeration of her and what happened, which doesn’t shock me either. We live in a world where everyone is considered good or bad and in Peak TV, the female characters always getting more shaming then the male ones. That this should happen in what is essentially a fictionalized story of a real event doesn’t shock me either.
Perhaps because I have the benefit not only of having survived a version of what Gadd went through and came out the other side that I can feel sympathy for both Donny and Martha in Baby Reindeer in a way that many other people won’t be able to. It is horrible to be the subject of someone’s insanity; it’s just as horrible to be insane yourself. Gadd is very brave, not only to have come through this horribly traumatic experience but to find a way to make something that is brilliant TV as well. It will be years before I’m able to write about what happened to me beyond the vaguest of terms and I certainly couldn’t imagine even writing a book about it, much less sharing it with millions of people.
Just as the incredible Beef tapped into an experience that I thought all people could sympathize with, not just the Korean-Americans that filled its cast, I suspect Baby Reindeer is filling a similar one. I doubt any of us have gone through the kind of things that Donny and Martha have, but we’ve all had to deal with our own fears and own flaws when it comes to who we love. Some of us have been less extreme versions of both characters at the center of Baby Reindeer, and like them we have the greatest amount of trouble admitting it to anybody — least of all ourselves.
My score: 4.75 stars.