In the Flesh: Baby Reindeer

It’s been a long time since something rattled me so badly I had to step back and shake it off, my skin crawling, nausea roiling my stomach. Baby Reindeer rattled me that badly. I set it aside for a day before returning to it, and when I did, it slugged me again just as hard. There’s something about the show’s combination of abject, squalid wretchedness and black comedy that squirmed right in under my skin and refused to leave. To see Richard Gadd portray himself as someone so cowardly, unselfaware, and avoidant is like watching a nurse express a festering wound. It’s like getting the juice that leaks out of hot garbage bags all over your clothes, or having it poured down your throat. To watch as he slowly unpicks the knot of his intense self-loathing to expose the dysfunction and desire beneath is so vulnerable as to be almost unbearable, not least because his slowly building understanding of his own complicity in his unhappiness, and in Martha’s (Jessica Gunning) years-long campaign of harassment and stalking against him, doesn’t stop his self-destructive behavior. 

It’s Gadd’s willingness to dig into the similarities between his thinly fictionalized self, Donny Dunn, and his stalker, Martha that makes the show’s abjection so fascinating. Recoiling from her obvious violent dysfunction would be too easy, and dishonest to the experience of repeated violation which is so clearly the heart and thesis of Gadd’s project. As a teenager, my first sexual experiences were of repeated violation by a trusted friend, and the nauseous ambivalence with which Donny regards his rape and assault, his inability to stop returning to their sources, felt like a noxious homecoming. When a person experiences a sexual awakening in close proximity to such an event, the two psychic phenomena can become emotionally entwined, the victim’s emotions about their attacker interpenetrating with the changes occurring within their own self-image. Donny’s intense anxiety that his grooming and repeated assault at the hands of TV writer Darrien O’Connor (Tom Goodman-Hill) led to his sexual awakening is a profound thing around which to build a story, thorny and difficult to the point of total inextricability.

Baby Reindeer can hew a little talky, especially in its last few episodes, and its overlong dissection of the various dysfunctions at its dramatic core do somewhat deflate things, but the material is so white-hot, so underexplored in fiction as a whole, that the power of it still comes through. Donny’s willing return to Darrien after becoming famous by telling, without naming names, the story of his rape at the man’s hands is one of the nastiest moments in recent televisual memory, a fragmentary shard of insight slicing through the gummy, flaking flesh of acculturation to codependent abuse. His affinity for Martha in the years leading up to her arrest and his continued fixation on puzzling out the why of her deranged stalking and sexual obsession provoke deep nausea, touching on experiences in my own life that badly needed airing out and reexamination. For all that it left me shivering and sick, I’m grateful to have seen it.