The real is no longer what it used to be. Our opaque era interweaves the real and the virtual, facts and opinions. Post-truth has already been named word of the year.
Literary and narrative genres also bear witness to the destabilizing mixture. Philip K. Dick with his superposition of layers of interpretations and JW Sebald with his tinkering made with shadows of reality concentrate something of our time. Autofiction too and Annie Ernaux has just won the Nobel Prize for literature with her white, cold and factual writing, crafted to reveal itself.
Screens obviously do not escape the model of fictionalization of reality. THE true crime swarm. “Based on a true story” production is becoming a genre in itself.
Series Baby Reindeer is. The mention appears at the opening of the first episode of the Netflix production. The rest shows that the real world contains more crazy stories than a thousand Münchhausen barons could produce. The result also obviously raises many questions about the exact share of reality in this very disturbing slice of mediated life.
The dark, very dark British drama presents itself as an autobiography of actor Richard Gadd adapted from a solo for the stage presented at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2019. The seven episodes tell the very disturbing relationship of the actor-character who became Donny Dunn with Martha Scott (played by Jessica Gunning) who will gradually introduce herself into his life and his privacy by constantly stalking him, harassing him at work, in the street, at home, at his parents’ house and even in theaters where he presents his awkward comedian numbers. And even worse.
Martha nicknames him Baby Reindeer from their first meeting in the London pub where Donny Dunn works. He has the misfortune of serving her free tea because she has no money, perhaps because he feels a little pity for this penniless customer who is abusing her right not to respect a healthy weight. The trap closes as soon as the cup is served. In total, the real Martha would have sent 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook posts, 106 handwritten pages in addition to curious gifts, including bobettes and sleeping pills.
The series therefore tells the effects of a stalking neurotic and obsessive, the destructive consequences of unbearable humiliation.
The performances of the protagonist and the antagonist are beyond reproach. Jessica Gunning turns out to be entirely credible in the skin of the psychopath and Richard Gadd embodies her failing scapegoat just as well.
The link in quality of form and content explains why the sinister production quickly became one of the most popular on the globalized broadcast network. She has just been dubbed by none other than the novelist Stephen King, master of horror, in an essay published by The Times where he talks about “one of the best things I’ve ever seen.”
There is obviously more than just a sado-masochist or master and slave story in this story. The mental torture coupled with physical attacks is disturbing from the start because it reverses the usual gender roles: here it is a woman who rapes a man and not the opposite as fidelity to the real world would require. Moreover, the series also relates sexual assaults committed by a man to, how shall I put it, reestablish the simple but detestable truth in this matter.
Donny Dunn’s romantic relationship with Teri (Nava Mau), a trans woman, adds complexity to the blurring of genres. The story is also shocking because it delves into what is deeply buried in the duo. The progressive revelations of Donny Dunn’s injuries and those, ultimately of Martha, resemble psychoanalysis with forceps.
And then, obviously, questions about the relationship between fiction and reality arise. Did Richard Gadd really go as far as exposed implosion? Was Martha really so infernal in her harassment? Where does the drama begin and the fiction end in this story? As much as art is abstraction, is a work not necessarily the synthesis of a new context?
Viewers tried to unravel the cards of truth and falsehood to understand what the author manipulated. Richard Gadd recently denounced this insistent search for the people supposedly embodied by the characters. He also explained that his goal was to portray his torturer as a mentally ill person, not an aggressive monster.
A woman claiming to be Martha’s inspiration claimed to Daily Mail A few days ago she was thinking of pursuing the actor-screenwriter. She explained that she was the real victim in this affair and that it was he who was chasing her.
The truth is therefore perhaps not as the fiction “based on a true story” presents it. Is it ever so, especially in our spectacle society which prefers “the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to reality, the appearance to being”?