Baby Reindeer (2024) is a Netflix series, apparently originating in the U.K., starring, written, and directed by a Scottish comedian, Richard Gadd. Ostensibly based on real events, the show depicts a woman relentlessly stalking its protagonist, Gadd, more or less playing himself as an unsuccessful stand-up comedian and bartender. The show is weirdly self-serving and disastrously deviates from its central plot to justify the hero's self-destructive behavior. When the series focuses on the protagonist's misadventures with his dumpy, overweight stalker, it is compelling and effective -- the protagonist is trapped in a web of conflicting emotions and feels helpless with no place to turn for assistance. When the show seizes its hero's agency and portrays him as a hapless victim, it becomes irritating and obtuse and, in fact, even loses its narrative urgency -- the dictum, in film, of course is to show things and not tell them; in the victimization episodes, beginning with the fourth installment in the seven-part series, things go badly wrong and the hero's voice-over does all the heavy lifting: the viewer is, in effect, told again and again that the comedian/bartender protagonist is a victim of sexual assault (wholly unrelated to the stalker plot) and, therefore, all of his bad decisions can be excused. This sort of thing may be plausible in terms of actual psychology, but the decision to cast the hero as a somnambulant drug-addicted victim leaches the urgency and interest out of the story. Baby Reindeer is nothing if not "meta" -- it's a dramatization of a play or monologue that was a dramatization of the rather operatic oppression of the hero by his female stalker and that stalking was itself performative in character, a play within a play within a play. Baby Reindeer, in other words, is keenly aware of the sort of criticisms that I am here lodging and the show takes pains to disarm that critique by acknowledging it and, even, exposing the hero's musings to considerable amounts of corrosive self-doubt.
The narrative begins in media res with the gaunt, bearded hero, his big eyes all inflamed, reporting to a police officer that he has been stalked by a woman for the last six months. The cop ask why the victim delayed so long in making his report. This triggers an extended flashback that comprises the first half of the seven episodes. The fourth episode is a pivot to a more introspective perspective on the events shown in the first three shows. This pivot is either a brilliant digression that establishes the hero's ambivalent motivations or a serious mistake, the point where, as the Fonz would have it, the "show jumps the shark." (I subscribe to the latter view but, clearly, there can be legitimate debate on this point.) In the first three episodes, we learn that Donny Dunn (Gadd's fictionalized surrogate) is tending bar when a plump, plain woman comes into the joint and orders a diet Coke. Donny feels sorry for the woman and chats with her. She imagines that he is trying to seduce her and responds with thousands of emails and text messages encouraging him. (She has nicknamed Donny "Baby Reindeer" because of his winsome appearance, hence the name of the show.) Donny finds that the woman, Martha, is a compulsive liar -- she claims to be a lawyer in an office representing well-known political figures in the UK -- and has a pattern of engaging in criminal stalking; in fact, she has been disbarred and served prison time for committing crimes associated with stalking. Donny is a feckless, if gentle, soul: he's living in the home owned by his ex-girlfriend's mother (we learn the reason for Donny's break-up in the pivotal fourth show). Donny fancies himself a comedian, but, in fact, his stand-up is execrable. Nonetheless, he participates in various comedy competitions -- his only fan seems to be Martha whose infectious laugh at one of his gigs energizes the crowd. Donny is carrying on a desultory relationship, mostly consisting of platonic dates, with a trans woman, Teri, a clinical psychological therapist. (Donny's sexuality is ambiguous -- he has disdain for his "heteronormative" mates at the bar.) Donny tries to end his encounters with Martha who spends every night in the bar where he works. When he ends contact with Martha, she sits at a bus stop outside the house where Donny lives, half comatose and shivering in the cold. Donny has pity and tries to establish a limited relationship with her -- but, of course, this goes awry. Martha discovers that Donny is dating Teri and confronts her, hurling insults and shouting that she "looks like a man". Martha then beats Teri viciously and leaves her bleeding and with a hank of hair ripped out of her skull on the barroom floor. This prompts Donny to report Martha's stalking, something that he does, however, only belatedly -- and, then, fails to report the assault committed by Martha on Teri.
The fourth episode attempts to account for Donny's ineffectual response to Martha's threats and violence. In a flashback, we see that Donny participated in the famous "Fringe" festival in Edinburgh five years earlier. (Donny says that if they laugh his show is "stand-up"; if the audience doesn't laugh, it's "performance art.") Simply put, Donny isn't funny -- his stand-up is cringeworthily bad. An older man with a red beard praises Donny's work. This guy, who works in the TV industry, is a sexual predator who gets Donny high on various arcane drugs and, then, apparently shoves his fingers up our hero's rectum. Donny doesn't like this action at first, but is too high to resist. Later, he comes to believe that these encounters, seemingly involving some form of digital penetration and fellatio, have turned him into a homosexual. (The show's sexual themes are ostensibly liberated and fashionably tolerant, but, in fact, there are weird undertones of self-loathing and homophobia.) The sexual predator, who has "groomed" Donny and ravaged his confidence, turns the protagonist into a drug-addict. It's this addiction that has caused Donny's girlfriend to end their relationship. The show posits that Donny's experience of sexual assault has made him passive and unable to act responsibly with respect to Martha's stalking. (We're told this but the evidence on the screen is scant; the show traffics in retrograde notions of homosexual passivity.) Donny begins having promiscuous sex with partners of all genders. At first, he's impotent with his beautiful transsexual girlfriend. But, when he begins imagining sex with Martha, he's aroused and successfully has intercourse with her. After reports to the authorities, the police intervene and warn Martha away -- she seems to meekly accept their admonitions and promises to leave Donny alone. Donny, in fact, feels some chagrin about Martha's compliance with the police warnings. But, of course, Martha then returns to her old tricks with a vengeance, harassing the hero's parents.
The rest of the series is a retread of the opening episodes. Martha persecutes Donny who sets traps for her that backfire on him. The final two episodes are badly disfigured by two lengthy and self-indulgent monologues in which Donny explains the situation -- first at a comedy venue and, then, to his parents who listen stoically as he sobs, whimpers, and comes out to them as "bisexual." These sequences are almost unwatchably bad and totally implausible. The scene in the comedy venue where Donny whines about being sexually abused and tries to relate that experience to Martha's stalking, in anything approaching real life, would have triggered a deafening chorus of catcalls from the audience and mass walk-outs. Here the audience submits to this nonsense and attends to every word as if it were Dostoevsky. (In fact, Donny becomes famous for his brave candor.) Further, it seems incomprehensible that Donny's parents don't know that he is gay -- when he admits to be being raped by the red-haired TV producer, his dad acknowledges that he too was a victim: "I was raised Catholic," he says. This is all simply detestable. Obviously, Richard Gadd thinks he is some kind of great writer and actor and that it is reasonable to bring the show to a dead stop so that he can pontificate histionically about his sexual confusion. This reminds me of early films featuring Sylvester Stallone (particularly First Blood the initial Rambo picture released in 1982) -- in those movies, Stallone felt that he had to treat the audience to a monologue inflected by tears and rage. Accordingly, the action stops so that the actor can strut his stuff. This sort of narcissism is on display throughout Baby Reindeer but most disastrously in these two monologues. Ultimately, Martha is imprisoned. Donny goes to confront his rapist. The man offers him a job and amazingly Donny's outrage dissolves as he agrees to work for the TV producer. (This is a curious development that is either very profound or a totally inept plot development depending upon your point of view -- since I doubt Gadd's competency, I tend toward the latter interpretation.) Even Martha gets a kind of monologue in which she sobs and cries -- this is a recording played at the end of the last episode that explains why Martha used the strange moniker "Baby Reindeer" for our hero. (Gadd's narcissism is so extreme that Martha is denied her image while the tape-recording plays -- she's not allowed to compete with Gadd in the emoting sweepstakes.) This last scene is somewhat affecting, but the show is so badly botched by this point that the damage has been irretrievably done.
There's something illiberal and ugly about the entire exercise. In one of his tearful monologues (I can't recall which because they are in substance identical), Donny describes Teri as his "Trans girlfriend." Teri identifies as a woman and objects to being characterized in any terms that would suggest masculinity. So why does Donny, as it were, "out" her by using the adjective "trans." This is part of the show's nastiness -- Gadd wants credit for being modern and nonchalant about sexual identity but, nonetheless, he has to emphasize Teri role as a transexual in this scene. It's all about scoring points. Similarly, there's something profoundly misogynistic about the show's portrayal of Martha. Indeed, one suspects that some fugitive distaste for ordinary, biologically cis-women underlies the show. Martha is nothing if not feminine. She has big breasts and a rounded figure that looks like the form of a Paleolithic Venus. She's chatty, voluble, and has a nightmarishly sharp tongue, one of the conventional weapons that women wield against their oppressors. And, most notably, she is frequently characterized by her menstrual periods. In the last encounter with Donny, she claims to be having her period and, therefore, demands "hydration" -- asserting that it would be "illegal" for the bar to refuse her water. (In an earlier scene, she boasted about her reproductive potential, her large number of "eggs" harbored in her ovaries.) In substance, Martha represents a caricature of the female, lush with reproductive potential. Is this sort of thing something that Gadd, with his homosexual leanings, despises? I don't know, but there is something misogynistic about the show and the idea must be entertained.
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