The film Fargo, like the television series, begins with a warning that it is based on “a true story” and that, “at the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.” It is a joke within a fictional universe with a sense of black humor. So when he reads that comedian Richard Gadd was inspired by his own life when writing and starring in My Stuffed Reindeer, he almost wants to believe it’s a joke.
It is not so much a matter of not giving veracity to history as of wanting to deny a reality that, analyzed coldly, is chilling. It is a story about harassment that leads, unexpectedly, into a story also about sexual assault and the way in which it traumatizes and blocks survivors. And yes, it is biographical, as its author has once again confirmed, who had already used his experiences directly when creating.
In an interview for The Guardian, the Scottish comedian acknowledges that he altered some of the events and especially the chronology so that My Stuffed Reindeer could have the dramatic climaxes that a television series requires so that the experiences “exist in the sphere of art.” ”. “It’s very emotionally truthful, obviously: I was severely harassed and severely abused,” he acknowledges.
Let’s remember that, in My Stuffed Reindeer, the protagonist is Donny, a frustrated comedian whose life changes when a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) sits on a stool at the bar where he works and he appears friendly. This leads the character, who is a relatively fictionalized version of Gadd, to go down a sick rabbit hole: he begins to receive compulsive emails, obscene comments and the life of that woman, who thinks they are in love, begins to revolve around him. he.
In real life, Gadd was harassed by a woman 20 years older than him and who, like Martha in the series, called him “baby reindeer” in its original version. In the four years that she harassed him, she sent him 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters and, mind you, 350 hours of voicemails and 41,071 emails. Therefore, Martha’s impulse to send her emails from her iPhone coincides with her pursuer’s impulse.
“At first everyone in the pub thought it was funny that he had an admirer. Then he began to invade my life, to follow me, to appear at my gigs, to wait outside my house, to send me thousands of voice messages and emails,” she recalled in a conversation with Time magazine.
There’s another parallel to reality: Gadd, like Donny, was tortured by the way he hadn’t stopped his stalker’s feet more firmly when he had the chance. “People are afraid to admit that they made mistakes, and I think that a lot of human mistakes are made to make people happy,” he explained in the interview, where he acknowledged that he did not want to “upset someone who was vulnerable.” .
His personal relationships also suffered due to having a stalker who controlled him. He fell in love with a transsexual woman, like in the Netflix series where she is played by Nava Mau, and the obsession of her attacker destroyed any possibility of the relationship going anywhere, by also becoming obsessed with who her new partner was. he.
One of the interesting elements of My Stuffed Reindeer, in fact, is the way in which it contradicts the usual treatment of harassment in audiovisuals. “Stalking on television is usually very sexual. It has a certain mysticism. It’s someone who is very sexy, who is very normal, but suddenly they become weird little by little. But bullying is a mental illness. “I wanted the series to have the layers of harassment with a human quality that I had not seen on television before,” he had stated in Tudum, the Netflix website.
And what about the event that occurs in the fourth episode of My Stuffed Reindeer and that serves to understand the protagonist’s behavior from the beginning, so dependent on the attention of an unbalanced stranger? The sexual assault he suffers from a colleague is also based on an experience of his, which he had already used as a source of inspiration for Monkey See Monkey Do, a monologue that premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2016.
The main difference, as the reader can sense, is that he did not expound on how he had been a victim of sexual violence in an improvised way in front of the public, but instead worked on the text in the hope that it would be a cathartic experience. Now what he hopes, by exposing himself on television, is that reliving this achievement of traumas will serve the audience in some way: that the sacrifice will be worth it.
Eight years ago, when he spoke about sexual assault live, he experienced recognition from those in attendance: he won the award for best comedy show.
