‘Baby Reindeer’ explores the complexity of trauma

Richard Gadd’s life is on display in Netflix’s new show “Baby Reindeer.” The drama-thriller miniseries premiered on April 11 and is inspired by Gadd’s autobiographical one-man performance of the same name.

The show follows struggling comedian and barman Donny who meets a lonely woman, Martha, who claims to be a lawyer. After he offers her a cup of tea, she becomes obsessed with him and begins to stalk him incessantly.

However, Donny and Martha are not just characters on a screen. The whole show is a dramatization of Gadd’s real life. In reality, he was also stalked after offering a woman a cup of tea and faced this trauma for years before she was finally arrested.

“I felt sorry for her. That’s the first thing I felt,” Donny said in the show, referring to his and Martha’s first meeting which led to years of torment in his 20s.

In the show, Martha initially begins by emailing Donny constantly and showing up to his work every day. The stalking progresses as she follows him home, assaults him, and publicly humiliates him and his girlfriend several times.

In total, Gadd received 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages of letters from his stalker.

Where this show excels and what is different about this portrayal of stalking and abuse is its display of the many nuances that come with trauma.

Martha enters Donny’s life when he is extremely emotionally vulnerable. In Episode 4, it is revealed that just before meeting Martha, Donny had just faced a series of assaults by a television executive that left him both traumatized and sexually confused. At this time, he felt like less of a man and was seeking validation in all sorts of self-destructive ways.

It becomes clear to the audience after this episode that the show is not just about a stalker, but about a man who is coping with experiencing extreme abuse.

The abuse starts from outside sources and ends up coming from within. Donny starts to seek out harmful experiences after the abuse in order to cope with his experiences, leading him to sympathizing with Martha several times and the two forming an unexplainable and complex bond.

The show highlights how having a stalker is a complex experience that isn’t black and white. Martha makes Donny feel more masculine while simultaneously destroying his sense of safety.

Donny spirals after the police finally take his stalking allegations seriously, trying to understand Martha and why she acted the way she did for years. He had an overwhelming desire to understand her and to make sense of what had happened to him. This again showcases the use of escapism through his trauma with Martha to avoid dealing with the core of his emotions: the abuse he faced before even meeting her.

The most impressive part of the show is the capability of Gadd as not only an actor but as a human. In acting out this autobiographical story, he had to relive some of the most traumatic experiences of his life. But he is proof to audiences that you can turn your traumas around and that there is a way out.