The trouble with Baby Reindeer
When does an unreliable narrator become a problem?
If you haven’t seen Baby Reindeer yet, chances are you will soon because someone will grab your collar and urge you to.
*** This article contains spoilers for Baby Reindeer on Netflix***
The dark, psychological drama (some also describe it as a comedy but you’ll see why I had trouble reading it as that) has proved a resounding word-of-mouth hit for Netflix, not just in the UK but all over the place.
In it, star and creator Richard Gadd recounts his real-life ordeal with a female stalker. In this lightly fictionalised re-telling, he plays a fledgling comedian called Donny, but we understand that Donny is Gadd and Martha (the phenomenally talented Jessica Gunning) represents the real woman who plagued him with emails, texts and social media messages for months as well as physically following him and sending abusive messages to his family.
Some of the messages we see during the show are, he says, real messages from the unnamed stalker. In some ways it’s a true crime drama told from the victim’s point of view.
Gadd is the titular “Baby Reindeer” - one of several nicknames the stalker gives him during their association. It’s interesting that he chose that as the title.
Gadd first wrote and performed an Edinburgh show about his experience in 2019 which itself went on to great acclaim and now Netflix is taking him to new heights as Baby Reindeer rockets to the top of the charts worldwide.
Like many, I had a very visceral reaction to it, having binged it over a couple of days last week. I thought it was relentless, gruelling, frustrating and insightful but most of all, boy - what a story teller. I tried to stop watching but felt almost compelled to keep going. The first-person narrative - Gadd’s voice narrates the action when his character isn’t directly speaking - is emphatic and insistent and pulls you along, leaving you little time to reflect on what he’s telling you.
He describes the first meeting with Martha, how he made her a cup of tea because he felt sorry for her, how this set in motion her campaign of abuse. But in his description of their interactions, it soon starts to bring up questions that Gadd doesn’t seem to want to answer. There’s no time. The story is galloping away and you need to keep up.
His relationship with the stalker is intimate. He’s afraid of her, but he cares about her, feels sorry for her, at one point taking her home from a freezing bus stop where she sits, catatonic. At every point that you or I would run in the opposite direction, Donny walks towards danger, having established early on her previous conviction for stalking and violently threatening one of her former colleagues.
Martha is a mass of contradictions. Her messages border on illiterate but she is, we later find out, not lying about being a qualified lawyer. I make a mental note of the first of many questions.
Why is an educated woman with serious mental health issues seemingly rendered illiterate by them? Because she’s articulate when she talks. Is that a thing?
In one episode, he flashes back to a meeting with a writer/producer he admires at the Edinburgh festival who later goes on to drug and sexually assault him. Donny, despite knowing what will happen if he returns and takes drugs with this man, goes back again and again, enacting some kind of self-loathing ritual, further deepening his own shame, proving and re-proving to himself that he deserves no better than to be raped.
This is presented as his first encounter with abuse and the reason for Donny’s later wilfully dangerous handling of the stalker. He’s addicted to the drama, more than one character says to him. He wants to relive the trauma of those sexual assaults somehow.
Why is Donny, the child of two very nice, understanding parents, so broken? Why does he think he deserves to be sexually assaulted by that producer? It is never explored.
The power dynamic - his rapist could potentially offer him the work and the fame he craves - insures his silence and partial complicity in his own abuse. Gadd points directly at this power dynamic which kept him coming back to an unsafe situation. In the end, his rapist does offer him a writing a gig on a show he would kill to work on.
So the next alleged detail is surprising.
On Twitter, a young actress posted a thread in which she alleges that she had an encounter with Richard Gadd during the making of Baby Reindeer. She says (and this is just one account, yet to be substantiated) that she has since heard from other women who have had difficult experiences with him.
This is her description and I haven’t been able to verify it, but she claims to have been down to the last two for Gadd’s love interest on the show, before another trans actress was cast in the role.
In short, she’s an unknown, about ten years junior to Gadd and was offered an audition by him personally after, she claims, he followed her social media. They met for a drink. During the same meeting, she says Gadd told her he was attracted to her and wanted to date her. If true, he was asking an unknown young actor to audition for his Netflix show, but also asking to engage in a romantic relationship with her. That would come under “problematic” in any circumstances but it’s particularly shocking considering the dynamic Gadd writes about and has experienced himself.
Can’t you date someone you work with? Not if you have power over their future career prospects, no. The power imbalance is too open to abuse.
Everyone loves Baby Reindeer and it’s certainly a career-making success for Gadd. But the closer you look, the more the emotional through-line doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I don’t think it would bother me if this wasn’t autobiographical - a true story. And of course, anything with a first-person narrator is going to be subjective: one person’s re-telling of events.
So why are bells clanging so loudly for me?
Gadd is being hailed as brave, courageous, vulnerable, and even generous for sharing in this way. Comparisons have been drawn with Michaela Coel’s thunderous I May Destroy You. Some say more needs to be said about sexual violence towards men and this show could change that. He is, many agree, “a good thing” for bringing this to light at such apparent cost to himself.
Of course, such is the public support he’s receiving, there has been little cost, in reality. Only admiration, love and an almost global standing ovation. It must be every artist’s dream to have their work - particularly when it’s so personal - received in this way.
Why am I finding his display of humility and compassion so hard to swallow?
We come to my biggest problem with Baby Reindeer.
The message Gadd repeats often, in the show and in interviews, is that his stalker is as much of a victim as he is. It wasn’t her fault that she was deluded and mentally unwell. If anything, he has compassion for her, not hatred. His largesse is impressive.
We end Baby Reindeer with the clear message that it was his compassion that got Gadd/Donny into trouble (coupled with a probable but unexplored need for drama) and all he really did was offer a drink to the wrong person.
But he has made a TV show out of it and, presumably, hasn’t been in contact with the real stalker to see if she minds her mental illness (for which he has deep compassion) being plastered all over billboards from here to Times Square.
If he believes her to be a victim, why has he coded her as a caricature of the kind of scary, mad woman you wouldn’t want following you on a towpath at night? Why has he written, produced and starred in a TV show about her, making public her messages and her most depraved, humiliating actions?
It’s one thing exposing yourself, but another to do that to a woman you claim to have compassion for.
Jessica Gunning plays Martha with incredible range and nuance. No one could have done a better job. But the character she plays is a real person. You can argue that Gadd gets to tell this story because he was on the receiving end of her behaviour. But I keep coming back to the same question.
What about her?
We all process trauma in different ways and maybe the stage show and now the TV show are, as he claims, a kind of catharsis for him. But what about her?
Is she sitting at home watching herself portrayed in this way and feeling good about it? Is it providing healing and catharsis for her? I’m trying and failing to imagine a world where that’s the case.
You could say that he puts all the ambiguity on screen. Several characters express disbelief that he lets the stalking go on for six months before reporting it. That he sabotages his own attempts to bring the ordeal to an end more than once and in fact makes things much worse. That something in him craves the chaos and turmoil and, crucially, attention that she provides.
Something in Gadd obviously craves the attention a hit Netflix show is providing him. He is complicated, a victim of serious abuse but also someone who has chosen to process his trauma in public.
He seems to be asking difficult questions of himself, but we’re still left knowing nothing about the root of his compulsion to sabotage himself by the end. We only know what he tells us. And what he tells us is that he is misguided but ultimately, a big softie. A baby reindeer who just tried to do the right thing.
Look, all storytellers manipulate us to an extent. But here we are being asked to witness Gadd’s real life, or a version of it. He writes the script, all the other characters speak with his voice too. He is in total control of this story.
So many more questions.
Why does his ex-girlfriend’s mum agree to effectively look after him when he’s a grown adult at drama school who could presumably get a flat share?
So many of the situations he finds himself in underline the fact that he is a sad-eyed, passive object to whom terrible things happen. But even as a study of complex trauma and its legacy, he seems incurious or deliberately obstructive when it comes to the origins of this mind-set.
He is both a victim of stalking and a person in total control of this story and, crucially, our reactions to him.
In interviews he is humble, dips his eyes when the phenomenal viewing figures are mentioned, is grateful to everyone for taking Baby Reindeer to their hearts, is surprised by the reaction to such a “niche” story. But the character of Donny, who we are told is Gadd, is desperate for fame and recognition and attention. Making a big budget series with Netflix is a huge deal, only a few get to do it and something he’s been building up to for his whole career.
I can’t marry the two versions of Gadd on offer, is I suppose the thing I’m trying to say: the one I can see and the one he’s telling me to see.
What did you think?
I was chatting to my husband about my concerns about this show. He asked whether I would feel the same if the genders were reversed. After a little thought I realised that, if the genders were reversed, the victim of the stalking (so a woman comic actress) would likely NEVER pitch such a programme because of the skewed power dynamic. In other words, she would be mortally terrified of her stalker and would do everything in her power to not provoke him to reoffend. The fact that Gadd doesn't appear to be worried about this says a lot, no?
I’ve watched it, I thought the performances were excellent and I thought martha was played with a lot of sympathy. Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but how can we tell our own stories without involving other people?