Why I’m grateful for Baby Reindeer, the anti-hero alternative we desperately need

Conversations around the nature of stalking have reached a new, if temporary high thanks to the Netflix series Baby Reindeer. It has been the streaming channel’s top program for the last month in more than 70 countries and the sensational prod for a plethora of news stories, not least the Piers Morgan Uncensored interview with the alleged real-life female stalker depicted in the series.

One of the less-discussed aspects to the streaming phenomenon has been how writers and artists can be quite predatory creatures themselves. During Sydney Writers’ Week, it may even give authors pause to question how they make use of so-called “lived experience” and “their story to tell”. Although I remain sceptical of many a writer’s desire to give pause to anything in this era of righteous confessionals, other than a book-length celebration of how finely they exist in the world.

In all the discussion of stalking Baby Reindeer has provoked, no one has discussed how writers themselves can be predatory - but what are they hunting?

Novels of narcissism – otherwise known as the art of modern memoir – have become the de rigueur formation for prose and poetry provocations that rarely get beyond the depth of padded-out opinion columns and victimology therapy sessions.

Who needs to worry about the dangers of AI – or what Noam Chomsky described as “hi-tech plagiarism” and “a way to avoid learning” – when identity marketing and career opportunism are undoing writers by choice, and the entire literary and media industries into the bargain. Sadly, consumers seem to want this, insofar as books and films are increasingly targeted to the purely affirmative spins they supposedly demand, part of the great thinning out of not only who we are but who we might struggle to be.

And yet, the success of Baby Reindeer proves something else is stirring below such trigger-free narrative services: how hungry people are for an honesty and depth that might cure us of the comforting delusions being mass-produced out there.

Created by Richard Gadd, the series also features him as the central character Donny Dunn in what is declared to be “a true story”. As Donny, a barman and failing comedian, Gadd is effectively playing himself. As the story progresses he reveals covert modes of abuse in how he treats his female stalker “Martha” and his other relationships – while also allowing himself to be horrifically abused in his hunger for success by a well-known male writer.

Out in the real world, Gadd’s female subject is meanwhile disputing what is “true”, whatever the continuing debates around her sanity and the accuracy of how she has been portrayed. A media feeding frenzy has materialised around her new-found celebrity, an ethical cesspit all its own. It’s as if Baby Reindeer has broken out of its frame and carried on, yet another set of episodes in its see-sawing depiction of how people need and use one another. How codependent and complicit are we in the dramas behind our stories?

In theory, most writers should have an aware and subversive relationship to these identity traps and issues of representation. As far back as the 19th century the French poet Arthur Rimbaud declared, “I is another”. But the gap between reality and fiction, the nature of the “truth” and the need to tell an interesting story, can be a major grey zone.

Novelists will tell you any first-person usage is not them, but merely a character, even if that character is amazingly just like them. Rimbaud went deeper and darker, relishing his demons, if mischievously shrugging off responsibility for how he appeared. “I is another.” Whoever Rimbaud was in his poems, it was only ever an old him at a given point in time, or him in a heightened way that was performed, exaggerated, intensified for the purposes of literature. An old crime, a ghost, half-true half-lie: a figure as complex and fluid as could be.

Has social media caused authors to forget this paradox of being and storytelling intention, to become lost in the blur between who they are and a retailed performance?

Perhaps this is just negative evolution. Thanks to social media, we are caught up in a bizarre performative world where who and what we are thrives algorithmically on box-ticking identity exercises in gender, race, sexuality, and other generational demographics.

There’s only a poor understanding that sites like Facebook are not selling products to us – they are capturing our information and selling us as the product to corporate and government interests. Why we would choose to reduce ourselves even further to such categorical sales-points is an indictment of how happily we are manufacturing ourselves into lesser states of being.

It’s a condition made even more complicated by the speed, as well as pseudo-intimacy, of our communications. Literature and journalism now operate in a time of accelerated zeitgeist energies that often exhausts our capacity for complex thought and feeling.

Think of the last five years alone: #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, COVID and its lockdowns, identity politics, gender dysphoria, The Voice, Ukraine, Gaza … next, next, next … our online life generating rapacious consumer versions of each concern, always intense and well-advertised, and all too quickly devoured before the next subject rolls on down the line.

Apex predators of human consciousness, writers tend to be in on to each glitch in the matrix with indecent haste. Many years ago, Janet Malcolm identified this vampiric impulse in her notorious introduction to The Journalist and The Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Prince Harry made millions from his memoir Spare. Credit: Steven Siewert

Malcolm’s psycho-analytic interest in the way we consciously construct limiting narratives to protect or bury our worst sides, our shadows, is much less referenced. Most especially as it relates to the story-maker, be they journalist, author or opportunist.

Prince Harry’s memoir Spare could be the ultimate example of this, top of the pile for all those Harrys, Harriets and others whose idea of oppression is not owning a home and hosting an ABC television program by the age of 25. Wounded souls decrying censorship while being forensically offended by their world of insinuations and microaggressions – and wondering how, like Harry, they might profit from the hurts involved.

One hopes the new publishing industry for “sensitivity readers” to restrain such transgressions will reach out further to the offence of privilege and the way what used to be called first-world problems now chews up literary space while a third of the country battles food insecurity. Each individual’s suffering is, of course, relative. But there’s something deluded and self-congratulatory in how aristocratic certain literary life-struggles can be.

The English author Graham Greene gave a different insight into this with his oft-quoted maxim, “all writers have a chip in ice in their hearts”. It’s a misunderstood wisdom, usually truer for writers when they engage in literary reflection rather than the way they live day-to-day. It’s when a writer coolly sits down to remake history in their favour that it can be damaging, most especially via the “true story” and “memoir” where journeys of “coming through” can mask, with saintly and disingenuous skill, the more dubious and messy realities.

Anti-heroic narratives, self-implicating and triggering tales, a furious and dangerous sense of how authors represent themselves and thereby invite our antipathy as much as our sympathy, all feel like they are missing in action and, indeed, often shut out. Baby Reindeer is an anomaly in that climate, a confrontation with how we define and ruin and recover ourselves. And not always happily, or even with much surety at all.

Strangely, there seems to be a notable French tradition that goes back to Albert Camus’ The Fall and continues with the work of Michel Houellebecq and that country’s latest literary comet, Edward Louis, whose working-class roots may explain as much as his homosexuality in how he dares to use the autobiographical form so unflinchingly. These are not authors whose primary targets are self-congratulation and a reader’s comfort.

But what if Graham Greene’s analysis of the ice that exists in the heart of writers relates to an intentional shallowing of literary insights? What if it is now part of a new and rather thoughtless cynicism, the act of “sincerity” going to market? Not so much riders on a storm as writers in a swarm, finding their category and pleasing their reader to death. “I is still another”, it’s just that they – like you – are working hard to make sure you never really have to ask who.

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