Baby Reindeer.
I am always hesitant to watch shows that might be a little dark or scary because I get nightmares really easily. I’d say like seventy percent of my dreams are mildly anxiety-inducing and like fifteen percent provoke more anxiety than that. I used to have a dream at the start of every school year where I was driving down the highway but my brakes wouldn’t work so I had to pay extra attention, change lanes constantly so as not to hit anyone. I’ve had a recurring dream lately where I’m in an elevator that breaks through the building wall and falls at a slant across the sky. I’d consider these mildly anxiety-inducing and won’t get into the worse ones (!).
Thinking about my favorite parts of the day before I go to sleep helps, as does dancing, which admittedly makes me seem a little unhinged at night but very much helps me go to sleep right away (with sweet dreams to boot!). It’s a delicate balance, navigating my dream world, so I skip indulging in dark stuff unless I am very much intrigued. I guess Baby Reindeer intrigued me. It seemed like You (another show about stalking) but flipped, and it is like You, but it’s also much more complicated than You for a lot of reasons but especially because Baby Reindeer is based on a true story and the protagonist—at least from what I’ve heard—is played by the very guy it happened to, reliving all of his trauma (probably over and over again considering what it takes to get the right shot).
I think what intrigues me most about Baby Reindeer is this fact—how because this is based on a true story it is not as clean cut as it would it be if it were fully fictional. We do not move from A to B, from B to C, but more in a complicated zig zag that eventually and repeatedly turns on itself. The main character is being adamantly and aggressively stalked by a woman who came into the bar where he works—he was nice to her, she got obsessed with him, the causality of it and the “crazy woman” trope gives me a little pause, but here we are. So she starts stalking him but also she’s kind of friends with him and he’s messed up from his own stuff so her intense attention on him isn’t completely unwelcome. And then it continues to unfold from there in the messy way of a true story—it’s less clean cut and less predictable and doesn’t quite end in a bow.
I watched it in French, so I can only speak to that experience, but as sometimes very dark as it was and as sort of hopeless and messy as the whole situation could be, something else I liked about the show was how it felt very contained in itself, like it wasn’t trying to drag you into all of this, it was just trying to sit you down, in the comfort of your own home, and tell you what happened. I appreciated this because I think sometimes sad stories or dark stories, especially on TV, can kind of relish the pulling you in aspect, try to hold you down in the darkness instead of shielding you from it as much as they can. I liked that Baby Reindeer was a wild and intense story and showed what they needed to show to get that across but didn’t overindulge, didn’t plunge you for watching.
There are a lot of dark times in this show and the way it handles queerness is at times comforting—a gorgeous trans love interest—and at times a bit messy: the main character’s roundabout way to his own queerness, one that might veer a bit too far right to be totally agreeable. Baby Reindeer is messy—both in its storylines and in its beliefs—but because it’s based on a true story, it makes the messiness a bit more forgivable than it would be had the creator just sat down to a blank page and written it this way. There’s a bunch of hooplah around the show, people trying to figure out who it’s about, those people revealing themselves, but I won’t get into that. What’s most intriguing is how the writing and the making of this show seems almost like an act of exposure therapy. It’s a choice to work through your darkest stuff on Netflix (one of the world’s largest stages), and hopefully this is healing for the guy it’s about. If anything, the care of it—despite the messiness, despite how all of the pieces don’t totally wrap up into something tight and clean by the end—did not give me nightmares, which is enough in itself to rave about.
Image: Netflix
