‘Baby Reindeer’ banks on the new compassion for frail men

Netflix has told us right at the start that it is “a captivating true story." All this actually happened, according to the writer and creator of the show, Richard Gadd, who also plays the lead, but as Donny Dunn. 

So, early into the drama, things are already very tense because you believe there was such a man and there was such a woman, who is called Martha in the show, and that she grew obsessed with him and sent him hundreds of emails and thousands of messages, and eventually did worse.

Baby Reindeer, I could tell, counted on me to feel for the man. But, at first and very often later, I was moved more by Martha, a woman filled with fierce love in a world that just could not love her back. Yes, Martha is a menacing stalker, but I wanted Donny to be made of sterner stuff. 

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That’s what my world would expect of me as a man, and I expected that of Donny. But then, the gambit of the show had worked. Millions of people felt strongly for Donny. No other way could the show have been the big hit it has been, especially in the West. 

And it occurred to me how modern such sympathy is for fragile men. And this is where modernity is headed: towards a deeper compassion for men in situations that are traditionally terrifying for women.

But then, I come from a country where the bar for misery is so high that I could only see how lucky he was. He was playing the role of a bad comedian doomed to fail, a loser who had no hope, but in my eyes, he appeared to have a very good life in the heart of London. His lifestyle would probably put him in the top 1% of India. 

He even had a lovely ex-girlfriend who let him stay in her mother’s flat. Forget me, imagine a Palestinian watching the show (somehow); you think he is going to feel sorry for Donny? To feel the trauma of Donny, your humanity is not as important as the per capital income of your nation.

In Britain, where Baby Reindeer is set, a writer can assume there will be no contempt for a weak man who is being destroyed by the attention of a resolute woman. 

But maybe the writer, Gadd, sensed that there would be some emotional dinosaurs even in the West who would need something more powerful to feel for the man. So he escalates his trauma, or what he seems to consider trauma.

In a lonely alley, Martha pushes Donny against the wall and grabs his crotch. He freezes, shocked. He feels humiliated, and walks away. He is actually shattered. The show is from a world and for a world where there is no distinction between what happens to women and men. 

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In the more antiquated world all around, it is not easy to comprehend how an adult hero can be molested by a woman and ruined by the experience.

Consider this moment in Larry David’s series, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is a young man who has claimed that when he was 17, a beautiful 37-year-old actress had “taken advantage of" him. “That’s the trauma?" jeers David, accusing him of being a fraud.

Donny, as though fearing the gaze of the ancient among us, explains why he feels so traumatized. Before Martha stormed into his life, a man had taken advantage of him. A successful TV writer who had befriended him and promised to take his career far, had plied him with drugs and assaulted him. Donny says that the event decisively propelled him towards homosexuality.

Psychoanalysis is a modern thing, though not as modern as compassion for men assailed by women. You would never encounter psychoanalysis in the great epics, or Shakespeare, or even in the classics of Dickens’ times. 

But after Sigmund Freud promoted the idea that things can be hidden not only in chests and lockers but also inside your head, and that they can be found, there was a revolution in reading the mind, most of it as spurious as reading the palm.

But another trait of modern compassion is that a man is granted the right to interpret his frailty and feelings, and his whole personality, as effects of powerful causes. In the modern world, no one questions anyone’s trauma. 

So the person who finally does is from a more familiar world—Fiona Harvey, who says the character Martha is based on her. She appeared on Piers Morgan’s show and said that the writer Richard Gadd has made up the whole thing, and that he may not have been sexually assaulted at all, that it was probably “conceived in his mind." 

She denied that she ever stalked him to the extent he claimed; that she sent him only “a handful" of emails and very few messages. And that she never assaulted his transgender lover, as shown in the show. She suggested that she may have shown some interest in Gadd, but he made up the horror of it all. She has sued Netflix, claiming about $170 million in damages.

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Gadd has since named Harvey as his stalker, claiming that she “often attempted to touch me in inappropriate (and sometimes sexual) ways." He has also said that his work is a “fictionalized retelling of my emotional journey through several extremely traumatic real experiences." Yet, it is promoted as a true story. In a true story, how a story is told can be dramatized, but key events can’t be made up.

The identity of the woman who Gadd felt stalked by is out, but Gadd has not revealed the name of the man who assaulted him. That is odd, because the defining quality of our modern times is that even men can reveal their rapists.