BLURRING THE LINE

‘Baby Reindeer’ forces us to ask if an abuser can be a victim

IF YOU’VE WATCHED the Netflix series Baby Reindeer, chances are, the words “sent from my iphone” haunt you. The seven-part autofiction thriller-drama tells the story of Donny Dunn, a bartender trying to make it as a comedian, and his chance encounter with a lonely woman, Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning), that turns into an obsession — for her. Through the course of the show, she stalks him, showing up at his place of work, disrupting his gig, attacking his partner, and threatening his parents. She sends him hundreds of hours worth of voice messages and a total of 41,000 emails. Yet, she is not the most disturbing part of Dunn’s life.

As we later learn, a younger Dunn was previously assaulted by an older writer, Darrien (whose real identity remains unknown). It is a dark, twisted narrative that depicts, accurately, survivor guilt and blame. But what it doesn’t necessarily do, is allow us to feel sorry for the victim — at least, not entirely.

British comedian Richard Gadd, playing Dunn, is the writer of the show and the survivor. His play by the same name debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2019 and later moved to the Bush Theatre in London for a five-week run. Similar to the approach taken by Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby in her Netflix special Nanette, while performing, be it on stage or on camera, Gadd is both the art and the artist. Both comedians, who have suffered abuse and/or hate, turn their trauma into art.

Instead of laughter, audiences at both shows were privy to some of the most devastating details of these comedians’ lives. While Gadsby’s special focuses on her experiences of discrimination as a queer person; Gadd describes his sexual assault. However, through

Baby Reindeer, Gadd really did end up controlling his own narrative.

Many works of art, be it films, books or paintings, are the result of survivors and victims making sense of their trauma through another medium. For instance, Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi — who was raped by her famous painter father’s friend Agostino Tassi — explores her trauma through paintings that are far more visceral depictions of scenes from the Bible and other mythologies than their usual representation (for instance, Judith Beheading Holofernes, now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence). French writer Vanessa Springora’s 2021 Consent: A Memoir details how she was groomed from the ages of 14 to 16 years by writer Gabriel Matzneff when he was more than three times her age. Director Jennifer Fox’s The Tale (2018) is her way of reckoning with her sexual abuse by her running coach and two-time Olympic medallist Ted Nash when she was 13.

In all the examples above, there is a clear “victim” and a clear “perpetrator” — as is in the case of Gadd’s harrowing assault by Darrien. But even as Gadd unflinchingly portrays Darrien’s abuse, there is a marked sense of hesitation in labelling Martha as his “abuser”. And by simultaneously narrating two stories, Gadd complicates the binary between the “perpetrator” and the “survivor”.

The repercussions of this abuse manifest themselves in his “confusion” over his sexual identity, anxiety, need for validation and worst of all, in his seeking out Darrien. As the audience, one can’t help but flinch over these decisions by the protagonist.

The story with Martha begins similarly. She recognises the “deer in the headlights” within him instantly (as Gadd himself admits) and goes on to exploit it. The power dynamic in that relationship operated not within the gendered framework of him as “man” and her as “woman”. Rather, it was dictated by his traumatic assault by a 50-yearold writer who promised him fame but instead, left him vulnerable to a seemingly gentle, middle-aged woman.

In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Gadd said, “It would be unfair to say she was an awful person and I was a victim... That didn’t feel true.” To The Independent, he said, “I can’t emphasise enough how much of a victim she is in all this.” He sincerely believes her to be a subject of the “system”.

And herein lies the survivor’s dilemma — a Stockholm syndrome of sorts, where the victim begins to not only understand the actions or the motives of the abuser but is also able to sympathise with them. Societal pressures force victims to make up their minds one way or another — but as Gadd showed us, it is not as black-and-white for those who have suffered severe trauma. There can be no “rational” response to an experience that was unconscionable to begin with.

The repercussions of this abuse manifest themselves in his ‘confusion’ over his sexual identity, anxiety, need for validation and worst of all, in his seeking out

Darrien. The story with Martha begins similarly. She recognises the ‘deer in the headlights’ within him instantly (as Gadd himself admits) and goes on to exploit it. The power dynamic in that relationship operated not within the gendered framework of him as ‘man’ and her as ‘woman’.