Baby Reindeer is the TV show of the year and moved me greatly. In case you’re unaware, it’s a Netflix show created by comedian Richard Gadd which is based on his real-life experiences of being stalked by a woman, a stranger to whom he gave a free cup of tea in the pub where he worked. She dubbed him her “baby reindeer” and it turned into a story of, as Gadd puts it: “41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, four fake Facebook accounts, 106 pages of letters, and one cup of tea.” The series starts off dark enough and very funny, with Gadd appalled by the woman, but also empathetic towards her and weirdly flattered by the attention. But what transpires in a later episode elevates it into something much more profound.
Looked at purely as a TV show that delves unflinchingly into survivors and stalking, this is an accomplished work. Yet the show has hit true phenomenon status over the past week or so and I was clearly far from the only viewer to have laughed and cried hard, and spent days haunted by it. It’s striking universal chords about the self-destruction that can be tied up in bad relationships.
You know this person is bad for you, but it’s also fascinating to see just how the drama will turn out
One of the key elements is its depiction of how self-hatred makes people extremely vulnerable to attention, whether that’s loving or abusive, friendly or sexual. Not all of us have been through such traumatic experiences as Gadd, but a great many will have got together with someone for all the wrong reasons, and stayed with them despite their best interests. It’s because they love and idolise you — or whatever version of you they have invented in their heads. But when you do things that don’t fit that fantasy version, they hate you for it. You know this person is bad for you, that they fail to understand you at all, but it’s also fascinating to see how the drama will turn out. There’s an emotional intensity to it that in some cases can be addictive. It’s no accident that controlling partners can veer quickly from love and affection to threats and abuse. “No one loves you like I do — and you better feel the same.” It plays upon your ego even as it destroys your self-worth.
This kind of psychology runs through not just a lot of relationships, but how we live our lives today. What is social media, if not an abusive relationship? Where love and hate are waiting every time we open the apps, both desperate for the approval of “followers” and afraid of them, caught up in fantasy versions of others, and ourselves.
This extends to our perceptions of politics too, where we enter into fantasy worlds of cosplaying politicians who are seemingly incapable of doing the right thing. My worry is in our low-esteem state of a country, we have become addicted to the drama, and give more attention than we should to the most extreme people out there, out of grim fascination: “How bad can things get?”
One commentator said this week that Baby Reindeer was irresponsible because it didn’t anticipate that audiences would try to find out who the real stalker was, suggesting that Gadd should have “fudged it”. A baffling take given the strength of the show is its searing honesty. Indeed, while the show offers no straightforward redemption arc, what it does do is illustrate how low-esteem dysfunction can be tackled by grasping the truth and meeting difficulty head on. Love and fulfilment can be found on the other side. Dealing with reality, not fudging it, is surely the answer to many of the problems we’re facing.
Whatever happened to pale and interesting?
Just to add to the Back to Black pile-on, let me say that the buff body Jack O’Connell displays as Amy Winehouse’s beau Blake Fielder-Civil is most annoying. Fielder-Civil is not a hero to anyone, but the film passed up an opportunity to present a male body on film that finally wasn’t Jolly Green Giant level. As someone who has cultivated a junkie body without using junk, I love to see any kind of pale, Byronesque physique. Doing exercise used to be the lamest thing ever When I Were A Lad. I remember seeing Kurt Cobain photographed in between Flea and Joe Perry at some festival, looking tiny and pale and so very cool next to their cheesy, LA-tanned musculature. Surely any sign of wasting muscles is a sign that time has been spent reading Shelley and Burroughs, not wasted on working out. Not in my case, my skinniness is due to pure laziness, but come on, let’s see some “literary” bodies out there. Get your weakness out, lads.
