Baby Reindeer

I’ve watched Baby Reindeer, and want to say just two things from a perspective that frustratingly little, as I see it, is being talked about. 

Further spoilers, beware.

It’s an astonishingly accurate film in terms of describing the effects of sexual abuse. For me, it stands in fair decent with Patrick Melrose. Surprisingly, both films are with male protagonists, whereas more violence is perpetrated on women (it’s the statistics, even about children).

1. Yes, that’s right: that’s exactly what happens, and nothing ends with the end of the actual violence, it continues both in the psyche and — my point now, rarely speaked up — in the body, and you hang on for years in the trigger of arousal through violence, and in self-harm through sex (and promiscuity relationships are often self-harm), and the inability to intimacy, closeness.

It’s like a bad signal — the image is rippling, it’s streaking, you lose connection with your own body and bang! — you don’t want it, but you want it. You’re thrown out of proximity, the signal’s lost.

That’s how it works: the abuser’s attitude about himself is appropriated and becomes a habit, absorbed like oil — I must be like this, I’m vicious and dirty, that’s why he chose me.

That’s why he did this to me. 

So this is how the trauma of being abused by a loved one works. Not a stranger. It’s inflicted from the inside out. Even if it seems to hurt the body just a little bit, a hole opens up inside and it feeds on itself.

Abuse is wicked. Grooming is wicked. Manipulation of power is wicked. I would very much like to see the abuser prosecuted.

2. And yes, that’s right: that’s exactly what happens if you’re queer. Violence takes you from the idea of recognising and accepting yourself to the idea of being broken, damaged and having to fix not the trauma but the queerness — which is also internally labelled as trauma. 

And oh, how much self-conversion therapy is done on oneself through it. I’ve been there myself for over fifteen years.

It’s a pity that neither the hero (nor, apparently, the author? it’s all autobiographical and created years later) has come out of this point of perception yet. And so it remains — the trauma made me gay, I am like this now, I don’t know who I am.

And even more unfortunate, of course, is that the rapist went unpunished — not in the film, in which it looks very natural and logical so far yet — but in life. Unlike Marta’s prototype. 

And it is logical in the film because there’s also an incredible authenticity to the consequences of abusive behaviour. That fucking ‘I watched your monologue, you did good, that’s brave’ from the rapist, and the hero’s inability to confront him, to see things as they are, to call them what they are, to be outraged — but just submission to him again — are very true too. I remember.