Playing With Fire: A Review of "Baby Reindeer"
Unpacking (and relating to) Richard Gadd's masterpiece
When you watch something that really makes you feel something, when it’s time to talk about it, it’s hard to know where to begin. Baby Reindeer was a difficult watch. It started off fun—dark, a little odd, but fun. About halfway through the series it turned unsettling. Shortly after, it became painful. Stab-in-the-gut painful. Then, just when I was about to write the whole thing off as too much, the show turned back around, ending with some hope.
In short, Baby Reindeer is a masterpiece. After all, isn’t this the exact trajectory of the experiences in life that catch you off-guard, lure you in, then scar you? They start off fun—they seem wrong, a little dangerous, but fun. Then, somewhere along the way, things take a turn. If it had started out that way, you would’ve run as fast as you could, but now you’re invested. It’s not so easy to turn back. So you see it through, and the situation gets worse, and by then it’s kind of your fault, isn’t it, for staying? If you manage to make it out alive, you’re broken—a walking invitation for other broken people to wreak havoc on your life. And at the end, it’s up to you whether you can move on, look the whole experience dead in the eyes and let it go.
Alright. Let’s back it up. For those of you who haven’t seen Baby Reindeer, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m not going to spoil much about the show, but I’ll probably spoil a little bit, so if you want to go in blind like I did, I suggest you watch it before you read this. It’ll take about a day. John and I binge-watched it in one sitting.
Now that my minor spoiler alert is through, let’s unpack this thing.
I refuse to butcher Richard Gadd’s story by summarizing it, but I want to talk about it, address the wisdom within it. There are some “emotional truths” (Gadd’s words) in this story that can be applied to just about anyone who has earned the status of ‘victim.’
In fact, they apply just as much to my life as his.
So, here goes. Here is the place I was transported to, sitting on the couch watching TV with my wonderful fiance and my dog and everything I’ve ever wanted, having just been thrust through the screen into my own past nightmares.
When I was eighteen, I dated an older man. It was a mistake; I was drunk for most of it.
I watched him die, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Alright, now that that band-aid is ripped off, this is what happened.
When I was sixteen, a friend of mine got me a weekend job at an Italian deli. At the time, her sister was dating one of the guys who worked there. His name was James. (That’s his real name—he’s dead now, so what’s the harm, right?) My friend’s sister was twenty-one at the time, and he was about ten years older than her. James liked his girls young.
It seemed normal. After all, whenever my friend talked about him, she acted like he was the coolest guy in the world. Two years later, the happy couple had been broken up for a while, my friend was no longer my friend, and he pursued me.
This is the part I’m really not proud of. A lot of people get caught up in toxic people because they’re rich or powerful or talented in some way, or they promise their victims some kind of success or fame or glory. This guy was slicing cold cuts. Still, just like all the other naive young saps who get mixed up with stuff they don’t really understand, I stayed because he gave me something I wanted. In this case, it was an escape.
Perhaps you’ve been there. I was eighteen, just starting college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and none of the options that were available seemed to really do it for me. Plus, I liked to drink, and as long as I stayed with this guy, I could drink whenever I wanted, as much as I wanted, and I’d always have a place to crash at the end of it. Most eighteen-year-olds are sneaking into guys’ family homes avoiding their parents; It didn’t seem like a bad deal.
Anyway, what happened after that just kind of happened. First, we became ‘friends.’ We’d talk during work, down vile 99-cent liquor-store shooters in the walk-in freezer. One day, he invited me to his house. It could’ve ended right there; I knew what was going to happen. Instead, I decided to go. I wanted the thrill, and I liked the attention. Use your imagination. I refuse to go into more detail than that.
At that point, it was all in good fun, and I swore to myself I wouldn’t get attached. A few weeks later, James was telling me that he loved me, talking to me like I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. What did I know? I was a baby who thought I was a grown-up.
My dad found out. He went there and threatened the guy. That’s when I became really good at lying. To my dad, I said he broke up with me after that. To the people who knew, I made the whole thing sound a lot more ‘normal’ than it actually was. I shaved a few years off his age, glossed over the whole alcoholism thing. When you’re in situations like this, it becomes second nature.
Before long, I was basically living at his house. We drank, we smoked. We hung out, listened to music, watched TV. It got a little scary at some points, and I was getting a little too used to drinking vodka at ten o’clock in the morning, but for the most part, it was a good time.
About a year and a half later, he died on the toilet—from cardiac arrest, presumably due to alcohol withdrawal. He said he didn’t feel good so I followed him, then all of a sudden he started shaking and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. When I called 911, desperately feeling for a pulse, he was wedged between the toilet and the wall. They needed two guys to pull him out.
I rode in the front of the ambulance to the hospital. I met his mother and sisters, learned that he hadn’t spoken to them in years. My mom came. I’d put her through Hell for the last year and a half, yet she sat there with me, took me home afterwards. Ma, I hope you never read this, but if you do, thank you and I’m sorry.
I was devastated. And for months afterwards, I wanted him back. That was the hardest thing to reconcile. The fact that I wasn’t a ‘victim.’ I mean, I was, in a way. I was blindsided. Manipulated. But I wasn’t held there at gunpoint. I chose to stay there day after day. I was as guilty as he was.
How do you live a normal life after that? This is something I think Baby Reindeer really gets right: the shame. The shame of knowing that you kept going back, even though you knew deep down that you shouldn’t have. How can you believe you’re worth anything after that?
The main focal point of Baby Reindeer is what happens afterwards. How low you feel, the mistakes you make entirely of your own accord, simply because your sense of reality has shifted and you have this vague feeling that things can’t get any worse.
After James died, I felt low. For a while, I was just in shock. In mourning. I would’ve given anything to go back to just one more day of purgatory sitting in his tiny bedroom drinking away the horror of what deep down I knew was going to happen.
However, things really started getting bad once I woke out of this strange delirium, and I realized that his death was for the best, and that if I had lived in a just world, I never would have had anything to do with him in the first place.
How did I think this was okay? What was wrong with me? What kind of sicko chooses to watch a guy drink himself to death, eroding whatever trace of self-worth they have left with each passing day?
I still had a few friends left at that point. Not many—I’d pushed most of them away already. The remaining ones I lost in the aftermath. I didn’t know how to talk about anything besides what had happened; that isn’t exactly fun conversation for kids in college. Plus, when I’d drink, a switch would flip within me, and I wouldn’t be able to stop. I just wanted to escape, to get out of the mind that I loathed that had allowed all of this to happen. The mind that still kind of missed the guy, even though he ruined me. I felt bad for him. He was even lonelier than I was, and the demons he was running from were even scarier. I felt a little responsible. A little guilty. I wondered if I could’ve prevented this in some way.
In the aftermath, one of his friends reached out to me. She isn’t dead, so for the purposes of this article, I’ll call her Jane.
Jane was another person that I should’ve been wary of. If I had been thinking straight at the time, I would’ve wondered why a thirty-something year old woman wanted to hang out with a naive, aching young girl who had just undergone the worst experience of her life.
Of course, when you’re that young, you don’t realize that you’re young, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I opened up to her. She knew James. She was the only person I could talk to about what had happened. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I imagine some of the things I said to her would make me sick to my stomach if I heard them today.
We kept in contact for a little while. Then we stopped talking. Then she contacted me again a year or two later, when I was doing better but was still young and dumb, still trusted her. I knew she was a little strange, but in my eyes, she was there for me when no one else was.
There are a few lessons I learned from Jane. The first is that not everyone who claims to be your friend wants what’s best for you.
The last time I spoke to her, things turned threatening. She never outright threatened me, but a threat was heavily implied—of what exactly, I’m not quite sure. Blackmail, perhaps?
Nothing happened, but to this day, I’m terrified of this woman. I fear the day when she shows up in my life again with some kind of dirt on me that I don’t know about.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I don’t think so. That’s the name of the game with these kinds of people, right? They ‘gaslight’ you?
She let me go, at any rate. She’d shoot me a text every once in a while, and after one of them, I told her to stop contacting me, and she did.
Jane, if you happen to be reading this and you were really just trying to be my friend and I’ve made a terrible mistake, I’m sorry.
If I’m right—then, well, fuck off.
Anyway, just like Martha from Baby Reindeer, Jane was a prime example of the type of person you might let into your life when you’re damaged. Harmful people flock to you, and some part of you likes the drama. It distracts you from what is festering inside.
Baby Reindeer made a point of acknowledging there are no bad people in the world. There are people who do awful, unforgivable things, but there are no bad people. James certainly wasn’t one. He was like a child, eaten away by addiction and guilt and weakness. He was in pain, running away from the guilt of his past. I didn’t know it at first, but he had abandoned two sons. Jane—well, I don’t really know her deal, but from what I do know, her backstory is pretty rough, too.
I genuinely hope she’s doing okay. I don’t have ill feelings towards anyone. Not Jane. Not James. Not anymore. I understand.
I’m okay.
Saying this, I’m reminded of the second and most memorable of Jane’s lessons:
“Don’t boast.”
I can still hear her saying this to me. We were having coffee. I was doing well at the time, and when I told her this, her energy shifted. “Don’t boast,” she told me. Wise words. I hear them every time I get the temptation.
I’m not boasting now. I got really, really lucky. If things were different—if James hadn’t died, if I hadn’t met John—I might be telling a whole different story. Some people don’t get so lucky. In Jane’s words, “most peoples’ problems don’t just die.”
But if anyone reading this has gone through something similar, it’s going to be okay. You’re never going to be the same, but you can be happy—and actually, coming out and shamelessly admitting it is pretty therapeutic.
Who knows, you may even find a person who you will love whole-heartedly, unselfishly, in a way that you hadn’t previously realized was possible. Who you’ll love for real—not in the messed up, abusive way that you’d loved before. And maybe, just maybe, that person will accept you, too, no matter how screwed up you are.
John, you saved my life. Thank you.
Sometimes I wonder if I’d take it all back. I don’t think so. For one, I wouldn’t be where I am now if things didn’t work out exactly the way they did.
I also would have never learned my lesson.
Baby Reindeer left me feeling hopeful. The show put me through the ringer—when Gadd was spilling his ‘emotional truth’ of trauma and degradation and pain, I was right there with him, reliving the worst moments of my life. When he showed the aftermath, how insanity flocked to him, how he actually invited it, I understood just what he meant.
When it occurred to me that he was finally liberated precisely because he told his story, I got this impulse that maybe I should tell mine, too.
I can still remember this one moment, before any of this happened. I was standing behind my counter at work resting on my elbows. It was a slow night, and James came over. He offered to read my palm. (I know, even this sounds creepy and predatory. I was young. Leave me alone.)
Anyway, my palm was in his hand, and he traced his finger over these little lines on the side, underneath my pinky finger. He said that I was going to have two loves in my life—one short and one very long.
As much as I hate calling what I experienced all those years ago ‘love,’ I think the motherfucker was right.
Thank you, Richard Gadd, for sharing your story.
Thank you all for reading mine.
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Wow, Melissa. I think this was wonderful. Hear me out. You suggest it when you mentioned lessons learned. You got to experience a voluntary deep end, and not just a peek, or via 3rd party. It enabled you to see into the dark. I have acquaintances that can't, or don't want to comprehend darkness. And not only does that blind them to the dark, they blinds them to the achievement and light of goodness--they take it for granted. The way you wrote your piece was easy for me to read, as I sensed you would face it clearly and head on. And you did. It is also a wonderful morality tale. I get bored by realism, but when stories and art have a life lessoned learned or moral at the end, it bears reading again. Like watching a Star Trek series. And kudos to your parents for bringing you up well enough, to have the ability to find the better alternative path. Congrats on who you are.
A very open and relatable story, I'm glad you found your way out of that place. The one thing I will say about the 'there are no bad people' part is this; I think that is true of the majority of people, but there are a small percentage of people who genuinely get off on hurting others and messing with their lives. I have had experiences with two people like this in my life and I can honestly say they were 'wired different' than most people. When I get a sense of someone like that, I go swiftly in the other direction.