A couple of boyfriends ago I was with a guy who broke my heart. I don’t even know whether to call it a relationship, given that it didn’t even last about twenty days. We met in public, one look, love at first sight, a few days later we dumped our respective partners, three weeks later he dumped me in a well of tears and despair. It was all irrational but I felt like I couldn’t sustain a life without the eventuality of our love, which probably it had only existed in my head (or not even there). So I wrote him many, many messages: I miss you, think again, see you? Then one afternoon I showed up in front of his office: I didn’t want him to see me, I just wanted to look at him from a distance, in fact obviously my intention was actually to meet him and so he caught me. He looked at me tenderly, hugged me, goodbye. I experienced that moment seeing myself from the outside as if I were the director of a bad rom com. The box office flop of my wounded imagination However, it served to make me give up: I never contacted or saw him again, my heart healed as soon as the following summer arrived.
But I keep thinking about that pathetic and dangerous scene I had set up since I finished Baby Reindeerunquestionably the series of the moment, much to everyone’s surprise. To no surprise to me, however, these seven episodes have me captivated, tormented, amazed. As a lover of behind-the-scenes television and the most refined mechanisms of narration, I found it surprising above all how overlapping and superimposable the levels of reality were: Richard Gaddthe creator of the series, experienced first hand the story told here, he sublimated everything into a stand up comedy show from which he based this series in which his character in turn re-tells the story through jokes ( it’s a self-destructive sequence of lies and unsaid). Furthermore, a plot that brings together love, obsession, social media, self-representation is a kind of tunnel from which it is difficult to escape, at least unscathed.
So I’ve been binge watching Baby ReindeerI talked about it with everyone, I even recommended it to the stones, I wrote articles with an obsession almost similar to the serial one (SEO is the Martha that we journalists deserve) in a kind of almost impregnable bubble. But then the doubts began. I started thinking back to what I had seen. Talking about it all the time with absolutely random people, from my colleague in the editorial office to the guy who was spoiling the ending for me on the subway when I hadn’t seen it yet, somehow a feeling triggered in me. underground mechanism of self-awareness. What had I actually seen? Was the victim a real victim? Is the stalker a real stalker? Was the series an exasperated reality that laudably revealed new points of view in our way of experiencing relationships or a clever mechanism of identification and voyeurism? But most of all: what is the deep reason why Baby Reindeer did it captivate me as well as many others?
A descent into (our) deepest abyss
Over the weeks I read the most disparate stories related to this series. There was the transgender actress who told how Gadd proposed an audition for the part of her girlfriend Teri and then dated her for a certain period, showing his fetishizing side of his attitude. There have been controversies about Martha’s corporeity (and therefore of the actress Jessica Gunning): those who finally saw the opportunity to represent a fat body on the screen were immediately reprimanded by those who claimed that instead this was the umpteenth revival of a poisonous stereotype (fat equals bad, equals marginal, equals out of system). And then of course there was the pernicious online campaign to find out who the real people were who started these fictional characters: the real woman who inspired Martha was found in just a few hours, through his Twitter/X profile. I promised myself I wouldn’t go looking through it. Then I did it. I promised myself not to write his name in any article. Then I did it (after she revealed herself to the newspapers because she wants to get justice, but that’s it).
More there the white rabbit’s hole, or rather the little reindeer, became deeper, the more I slipped in without escape, the more I was repelled. What was it about this very hypnotic story that made me feel that ever-increasing discomfort, that feeling of almost moral discomfort? Maybe the fact that Martha is (was) me. But you probably have been too, at some point in your life. We were also Donny, insecure failed artist and violated wounded soul who he is unable to remove pain and danger from himself. Or perhaps we have always been both, victims and executioners, obsessed and obsessing, pursuers and pursued. The person to be pitied and the person pitied. I can’t help but think of the me of a few years ago, under that exhausting drizzle near Milan’s central station, waiting to spring the trap on the person who only a few days earlier had asked him for space and freedom. How long before I turned into a nagging, unruly, insidious Martha? What saved me from falling into the black hole of my obsession?
