My Baby Reindeer Days

A midlife reckoning inspired by the hit Netflix show

Andy Horwitz reflects on seeing himself in the Netflix show Baby Reindeer

These days, the TV shows I watch fall into two categories: shows I watch while washing dishes and shows my wife and I watch together. If we’re lucky, our five-year-old goes to bed on time and we have about an hour to watch something for grown-ups that we both will enjoy, something thoughtful enough to be engaging but not too heavy or depressing. I had heard a little bit about a show on Netflix called Baby Reindeer, about a guy and his stalker. We heard that it was interesting and unexpected, that it had a twist to it, that it was based on real life but there was, as always, some dispute over its truthfulness.

From that description, I expected it to be good, if overhyped. What I didn’t expect was to be drawn in so completely, to be deeply moved and driven to tears.

Years ago, long before I was a 55-year-old married, heteronormative, middle-class suburban dad in Los Angeles, I was a denizen of the NYC avant-garde experimental demimonde, an avatar of polymorphous perversity, an actively bisexual downtown experimental performance artist and writer. I was also, perhaps not coincidentally, a hot mess. Trying to quiet the voices in my head, I turned to drinking, drugs, sex, and drama, but they only made it worse. Going out for drinks after an open mic soon turned into pre-show drinks, turned into skipping the show to focus on the drinking, turned into benders almost every night. That time I went to a cast party at Lucky Cheng’s and got lost in a rabbit warren of backrooms, coked-up and frantically seeking the exit at 4 a.m. That time I fell in love with an alcoholic, cocaine-and-sex-addicted coworker. Stories abound.

SPOILER ALERT. If you haven’t yet seen or heard about Baby Reindeer on Netflix, it is, at first, the story of struggling comedian and bartender Donny Dunn, who gets entangled with a stalker, Martha. But it’s really about shame and self-hatred. It’s about the insidiousness of abuse. And it’s about being attracted to staying in (or returning to) a familiar situation, no matter how painful, because you’re afraid that the promise of happiness, safety, comfort or love is just another cruel trick.

It’s a simple enough premise that gets deeper and more complicated as we delve into Donny’s psyche, his attachment to Martha, the sexual abuse Donny experienced, his self-hatred and confusion, the way it all conspires in a toxic stew, the way he can’t escape his situation or himself.

After three episodes focusing on Donny’s growing entanglement with the mentally ill Martha, episode 4 focuses on a humiliating trip he took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years prior. He had booked himself into a pub as the venue for his comedy act where he faced a room so hostile and indifferent that the bartender at first wouldn’t even turn off the television during Donny’s set.

One night, Donny receives an invitation to a hip club where all the successful comics hang out. There, in an awkward meet-cute, he is befriended by a famous writer and showrunner by the name of Darrien, a self-described “Buddhist, polyamorous pansexual with a taste for the finer things in life.”

It’s worth noting at this point that Donny calls his comedy “anti-comedy.” It is, indeed, weird and even unsettling. Watching it, I was reminded of NYC’s early-90s alternative comedy scene, Lower East Side venues like Surf Reality, Collective Unconscious, Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, Fez Under Time Café, and Eating It at the Luna Lounge, that programmed both avant-garde cabaret/performance and stand-up comedy. There was a lot of crossover, but there was a pretty significant divide between the stand-ups and the performance artists; navigating that divide to become commercially successful was tricky.

So, I could relate to the elation and appreciation that Donny feels when Darrien takes him under his wing and helps him polish up his act. By the end of the Edinburgh run, Donny is playing to enthusiastic packed houses in the pub, really killing it.

Back in London, Darrien invites Donny over to his place with the promise of writing opportunities and mentorship. Over the course of many weeks Darrien grooms Donny, drugging him, sexually assaulting him and, eventually, raping him, all while stroking his ego with promises of creative success.

Donny starts to fall apart as he begins to realize what’s happening to him, and when his girlfriend leaves him, he really veers out of control. He narrates his downward spiral as follows:

I started to feel this overwhelming sexual confusion crashing through my body.

I thought it might pass, but it became an insecurity, which grew into a raging madness within me.

I could never tell whether these feelings were because of him or whether they always existed deep down.

Did it all happen because I was giving off some vibe I wasn’t aware of?

Or did what happened make me this way?

I started having reckless sex with people of all genders in this desperate pursuit of the truth.

Watching this, hearing this—I felt a chilling sense of recognition.

As a kid, back in the early 1980s, I did a few shows at a local community theater in Baltimore. I performed in a musical and worked the spotlight for another show when I didn’t get cast in a role. I was too young to drive so my mom would drop me off and pick me up, but sometimes the cast and crew would go out after weekend rehearsals and I would need a ride from an adult.

The light board operator, an obese, unkempt but jocular guy in his thirties or forties—let’s call him Lazar—was always friendly to me. When I operated the spotlight, we joked around over the headsets. Kids gossiped about him sometimes in rehearsals or the dressing room. “Don’t go to his place,” they would say, “he has dirty pictures, he’s creepy.” But he was always nice to me, so when he offered me a ride, I accepted.

I remember his Ford Pinto was filthy inside, the floor littered with soda bottles and fast-food wrappers. I saw a little case with a MedicAlert logo on it; I asked him what it was. He told me was diabetic and injected insulin, he joked about being a card-carrying junkie. I was maybe eleven years old and it made me feel like a grown-up to be spoken to like an adult, to be in on some kind of grown-up joke that I didn’t actually understand. I imagined myself mature, able to take care of myself. And it wasn’t a big deal, I thought, when he started massaging my thigh, his hand slowly working its way up my leg.

I was lucky. He stopped. Maybe he had a moment of self-restraint or clarity, maybe he never intended to go further, maybe he chickened out. I’ll never know. But what I know is what I felt in the moment: the helplessness and fear of being the object of someone else’s inappropriate desire.

For years I didn’t give this event much thought; it was just a thing that happened this one time; I’m reluctant to ascribe years of dysfunction and emotional chaos to a single childhood incident. I certainly never talked about it with anyone, or wrote about it, which is notable because I used to write about sex all the time—for example, my go-to, guaranteed-to-win Poetry Slam poem in the early 90s was literally called “Good Sex vs. Bad Sex.” I experimented with all kinds of sexual scenarios and got into some magnificently dysfunctional, fucked-up relationships. Polymorphous perversity. All the time trying to get to some elusive truth, a moving target that vanished as quickly as it came into focus.

But I had pretty much forgotten about that moment in the Pinto until I started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix.

There’s a scene in episode 5 where Donny is talking to his girlfriend, a trans woman named Teri, that really hit home for me:

[Teri] How do you identify sexually? If there was a gun to your head.

[Donny] Oh, please, pull the trigger.

[Teri] Shut up, asshole.

[Donny] I don’t fancy that funeral. All the speeches.

[Teri] “Donny was a top lad with great banter.”

[Donny] Will my gran be the only one that’s speaking?

[both chuckle]

[Teri] Answer, idiot!

[Donny, sighing] I don’t know. Like, bi, maybe.

[Teri] And what makes you bi?

[Donny] Because I feel like a fraud no matter who I sleep with.

Touché.

For most of my adult life I felt like a fraud no matter who I was having sex with. It wasn’t about sexual orientation, but about some kind of damage, absence, a loss of self that goes way, way back.

The series ends with Donny alone at a bar ordering a drink. He has forgotten his wallet and the bartender extends him the kindness of buying his drink, the same kindness Donny showed his stalker Martha in the first episode. We don’t know what the future holds for Donny, and that ambiguity seems right.

It’s a cliché, to be sure, to say, “I felt so seen” when watching Baby Reindeer, but I did. I was shocked, surprised, and thrilled to see a story that, at long last, seemed to actually represent my confused experience of sex and sexuality; my magnetic attraction to dysfunction and drama, to emotional abuse disguised as love; the feeling of being embattled, the self-hatred that made me want to obliterate myself in a persona, or the pursuit of fame, or, failing that, just sex, drink, and drugs. It took me years to extricate myself from myself, and even though I would never go back, I still feel the lure, from time to time, of chaos and oblivion.

Many, many, times over the years I found myself, like Donny, alone at that bar, never knowing what the future would hold, always feeling on the threshold of figuring it out, but feeling that it was my work alone, that I couldn’t put this burden on anybody else, couldn’t truly share my life with someone else.

Then, in 2012, I met a woman who felt, miraculously, like coming home, as if we’d known each other for years. She wasn’t afraid of the hot mess that I was, saw the good inside me, and decided to stay. We got married. We left New York and moved to Los Angeles. We have a five-year-old son. We look to all the world like normal people. And I suppose we are.

But some days, when I’m at pre-K pickup talking about playdates and Pokémon, I feel like an impostor, or a spy, like Kerri Russell in The Americans, undercover in the suburbs. Wherever I go I am carrying with me that inner Baby Reindeer, that outsider looking in, that damaged kid who feels as if he’s just pretending to be normal, pretending to fit in, pretending that he knows what he’s doing, who is always on the edge of falling into chaos. I guess that’s just what it means to be an adult human in the world.

It says something about how far we’ve come as a society that a show like Baby Reindeer could not only get made, but be a critical and popular hit, nominated for multiple Emmys.

In 1994 I recorded a spoken word piece called “Getting to Know You” which includes the observation, “I read that 90% of this country is dysfunctional, abnormal, but if everybody’s that way then it’s normal. Seems like somebody somewhere made up some ideal functional function that never existed and nobody can live up to and then made everybody feel rotten about how worthless and dysfunctional they are.”

It's been thirty years now since I wrote that and I’m still learning what it means to embrace the brokenness in myself and others, learning how to be in the world with forgiveness and compassion toward myself and others. Thirty years of living later and I’m finally starting to understand what Leonard Cohen meant when he sang, in his song “Anthem,” “Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack, in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”

Andy Horwitz is a writer based in Los Angeles. His cultural criticism has been published in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian (UK) and other outlets. He started his career writing about pop culture for The Stranger in Seattle and the now-defunct Nerve.com. He is the founder of the website Culturebot.org and a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He is currently working on an essay collection about live performance and two memoir projects. andyhorwitz.com