Baby Reindeer: Everybody Sucks
Moving in with Eden has meant more consideration of what I watch. For instance, when I started the first episode of Game of Thrones as a comfort watch one day when I was ill, I didn’t get much more than 10 minutes in before I started to see it from a different perspective. Knowing the harrowing and yet somehow glamorised rape scene which ends episode 1, I turned it off. Why on earth was something like that my comfort watch?
When we’re both looking for something mindless and easy, it’s normally Brooklyn Nine-Nine, if not a Disney classic. If we’re feeling intellectual, Eden will usually show me one of the bottomless pile of obscure mid-2000s indie films that she can remember all the details of but which she can’t remember where or when she watched. We both liked True Detective season 4, which leant into the magic realism of the series and made the most of a creepy setting. We both didn’t love Masters of Sex, a sort of Mad Men office drama, only in the university halls where Dr. Masters and Dr. Johnson first researched female sexuality — somehow, even though they really did sleep with their patients and each other, the show was tedious and almost everyone was vaguely unlikable.
There’s only one show we’ve really been transfixed by, though. Baby Reindeer was binged in two nights, and might’ve been binged in one if not for Eden coming close to a panic attack at one of the most visceral scenes I’ve ever seen on screen. Even then, we could barely look away. It had phenomenal acting, a brilliant script that seamlessly cut forward and backward in time, cinematography which swooped and dived its way around scenes, an instantly-recogniseable noughties aesthetic, gritty realism, scenes that made you laugh out loud, a pace so intense it practically left you gasping for breath, and above all, it really happened. Based on a true story. And even as that story got more and more absurd, the sense of realism heightened, because fiction could never be so creative.
And it was this, really, this extra dose of intensity, which brought with it a sense of unease. This show was so spectacularly bingeworthy, so shocking, so gripping, because it offered its audience of voyeurs a probing insight into the dark and contradictory corners of two minds in pain. Both of those minds are real. Only one of them got a say in the matter. I watched it, this magnificent TV show, thinking, This should never have been made. Every action has an equal opposite reaction, and surely this violent delight would have a violent end.
At first I felt mainly for Richard Gadd. The man looks like I fed a picture of myself to an AI image generator and asked it to make me look tortured. “More tortured.” “Slightly more haggard.” “Now a bit more tortured.” There was never any doubt in my mind that all this really happened, and there’s no doubt in my mind now that for Richard Gadd to relive it all was the self-care equivalent of a gunshot round to the knee. Yes, maybe there’s some benefit to reliving your trauma in the privacy of a therapist’s office — but to relive not one, but all, of the worst moments of your life, on screen, for millions of people to see? Your own sexual harassment? Your own violent rape? What kind of fucking clown at Netflix gave this the thumbs up? It’s bad enough that Richard Gadd took this on stage as a one-man show — you would’ve hoped a mate might sit him down and advise against it — but developing a TV series was one giant leap too far. Let’s not forget the difference between performing something and filming something — on film, you rarely nail take 1, more often it’s take 6, sometimes it’s take 20. Which means Gadd spent days of his life reenacting the time when a TV producer drugged and raped him. And months of his life reenacting conversations, arguments, and sex scenes with a fictionalised version of a woman who really did make his life hell, who really did nearly drive him to suicide.
Which brings me to Martha — where my mind should probably have gone first. I’ll forgive myself, though, because the show cannot help but position itself on Richard’s side. The presentation of Martha is unflinching and honest, and, as we’ve found out, an essentially bang-on accurate portrayal of the real woman, and as she descends into increasingly dark behaviour, you are heavily encouraged to hate her.
Yet, as the show points out regularly, this woman is mentally ill. Deeply, fundamentally unsuited to functioning normally in society. It doesn’t excuse her actions — but it does mean that a compassionate society should try to help her, rather than monetising her for mass entertainment. You can almost picture the Netflix execs rubbing their hands with glee at the (get this!) true story of this balls-to-the-wall weirdo and her unquenchable obsession. It must have been just too good to pass up, and in the way that corporations do, I imagine that many people had concerns about the ethics of making this show, but everyone could always pass off ultimate moral responsibility to somebody else within the corporation. The other obvious person to blame is Richard Gadd himself — and I do also blame him, but then I know what it is to be a writer and to have a singular traumatic thing in your brain, and how difficult it is to really write about anything else. So I suppose I don’t blame him for writing it — I blame him for publicising it.
Because they must have known what would happen when this show hit the website which has a larger audience than any mode of TV-watching has ever had in all of history. They must have known, even if it wasn’t a hit, that people would wander how much was truth and how much was fiction.
The internet sleuths were on the case within hours of the show going online — you don’t have to finish the show to get curious, and there are a lot of people on the internet too curious for their own good. (This sounds homophobic but I promise I’m still talking about internet sleuths.) And so, in a twist which would be called lazy writing in a TV show, the stalker became the stalked, and a small army set out to find the true identity of Martha.
Suddenly worried, Richard Gadd put out a statement begging fans not to try to find the real Martha, claiming that “Martha would not even recognise herself in the show.” He positioned himself as if he didn’t expect precisely this thing to happen — either a staggering feat of ignorance, or, more likely, a barefaced lie. Something which he probably wasn’t comfortable with, but a reasonable price to pay to get the show out. I mean, you can hardly blame Richard for not protecting Martha. But did he need to not-protect her to this extent?! Even if we swallow that first lie, the idea that Martha wouldn’t recognise herself we now know to be a lie. Why?
Because guess what. The internet detectives found her. Within a day. And she looks like this:
That is how much they disguised her.
Clearly Richard was trying to send the detectives off on the wrong track, and perhaps it worked for about 12 minutes before someone found this lady through a rather obvious Facebook connection. I won’t name her here, but you can find out her name very easily, and indeed everyone will be able to find her name for all eternity on this permanent internet catalogue of horrors we are all generating. Anyway, there are still those who believe Martha is someone else and there just happens to be a real-life Scottish woman in her mid-50s with the stalking history and precise mannerisms of the fictionalised Martha who also knows Richard Gadd, but I can’t bring myself to believe that. Gadd disguised his stalker with the thinnest of foundations before splashing her across the world’s most popular streaming platform.
And then, somehow, it gets worse. Nothing goes down better with a shit sandwich than a Piers Morgan side salad, and it was He who scored the world exclusive interview with the real Martha, in which she does a pitch-perfect impression of her fictional self, throwing in a few deceptive contradictions to boot. So now a mentally ill woman is paraded to the world for a second time, reliving her own sordid past again, just like the man she stalked. The 13 million of us viewers on YouTube are rabid consumers once again. Just when we thought we’d gotten past Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer, past throwing tomatoes at people in the stocks, we come back for another round of human bear-baiting. How we’ve missed this.
The YouTube comments are chock full of vitriol, of course — this woman is a convenient scapegoat for all manner of repressed self-loathing. It is interesting that the hate mob in the YouTube comments are less concerned with her actual crimes and more on the petty stuff. Her lies. Her weight. She is a figure of disgust to us, let’s not beat about the bush, a warning at what might happen if we indulge the worst parts of ourselves, a yardstick through which we can measure ourselves and perhaps not feel quite so bad.
One YouTube comment in particular stood out to me: “This feels like a bonus episode of the show.” It is. Because we’re all in this horror show now: Richard Gadd and Martha and Netflix and Piers Morgan and you and me and everyone else who’s benefiting from the exploitation of trauma and mental illness for the sake of ego and TV profits. We’re all culpable, which is why I felt so awful when I watched Baby Reindeer. And yet I still didn’t turn it off. I’m still here, writing about it, giving the pot one more stir, then publishing it for the world to see.
Care about people, care about yourself. Please. Time for me to log off.
