Because nothing is created in a vacuum. Have you watched Baby Reindeer yet?
I wasn’t going to. I watched the trailer and thought it best to avoid it. But the buzz got the best of me, and I watched an episode. I won’t be finishing it but I have some thoughts.
The thing that makes critique about this show tougher is that it’s based on a real person and real experiences. A 42-year-old mentally ill woman (Martha) becomes obsessively attached to a 20-something dude (Donny) with a flailing stand-up career. The show is a slow, torturous unveiling of both the escalation of that obsession/stalking and how/why Donny’s personal traumas contribute to his enabling of Martha’s behavior.
Thanks for reading Whyareyouyelling?! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Subscribed
The series is shown through his eyes and told through his words, and we can only judge Martha through his experience of her. Donny never actually mentions that Martha is fat. Because her size is not explicitly mentioned, the opposing viewpoint insists that the show is not fatphobic—this woman who did this thing just happened to be a mentally ill stalker who is also fat. (And it’s worth mentioning, the actress who plays Martha is very good at her job so her performance is fascinating to watch.)
Content does not exist in a vacuum. We cannot pretend that fatphobia does not exist in this TV simulacrum of a real-life person. Just because there is not explicit mention of her size, the show revolves around the implicit perception of Martha. What’s unspoken is loud and clear.
As Martha is introduced, walking through the door of the pub where Donny bartends, his voiceover lets us know he immediately felt sorry for her, that she was pathetic. As an almost-40 fat woman, my first thought was, “Why?” Well, I knew why. Intimately, innately. The show is banking on the fact that Donny’s lens is reflective of the current cultural lens, and that we automatically understand why Martha is undesirable. It is never even a consideration that he might see her as a sexual being, but he does seem to enjoy her at first—she’s weird and laughs at his jokes and she keeps coming in.
At one point, the other dudes who work at the bar come over to make fun of Donny for the ongoing attention he’s getting from this woman. Again, why? They don’t have to explain—they are counting on the audience to understand because the audience sees Martha as they do. The men’s sexual jokes about her are funny just because of her fatness. When she starts to use the same language to joke back or come onto Donny, we are meant to view her behavior as repulsive and shocking. There isn’t a lot of empathy for Martha—that’s saved for Donny. She’s complex but she’s still used as a tool purely for Donny’s self-realization.
As our understanding of Martha gets clearer, we start to conflate her undesirable fatness with her delusion and mental illness. How could she possibly believe that a younger, thin white man would have romantic feelings for her, with or without mental illness? Where does her deluded sense of her attractiveness end and her mental illness begin?
She is a liar about her accomplishments. She’s cheap. When she doesn’t order anything at a diner and Donny offers to pay for her, she then orders double what he did, which plays as dark humor. When he follows her to her house, we see that her place is a mess, with food and trash strewn about. Where does the stereotype of fat people being unhygienic and slovenly end and her mental illness begin?
There are so few representations of fat people on TV, especially women, that it’s hard to do it “right” or at least thoughtfully. But what bothers me about the commentary is that there’s an insistence that any fatphobia is imaginary—Martha happens to be fat (IRL and on the show) and she happens to be played by an excellent fat actress, which is the opposite of fatphobia.
This is where real-life context comes in. IRL Martha was discovered almost immediately—her exact language was used in the script in a way that made it extremely easy to find her on Twitter. IRL Donny insists that they did whatever they could to hide the real Martha’s identity, that they went out of their way to make her the opposite in every possible way. Except they didn’t. IRL Martha’s middle name is… Martha, as displayed on her Facebook page. She is a fat brunette woman with severe mental health issues, made obvious the moment you read her responses to the show’s portrayal of her. In fact, one of the first things she notes is that she is not as ugly as she is shown to be. My interpretation is that she is not as fat as she is shown to be.
This was Donny’s story to tell. But why couldn’t he have made the TV character’s characteristics different? Why wasn’t she a thin woman? Because our immediate suspicion of and discomfort with this character relies on our implicit bias coming into play as soon as she arrives on screen. Why did the show’s creator do nothing to hide the true identity of this person, given that it’s a fictionalization? Why does it feel an awful lot like he’s getting revenge? And that it’s pretty easy to get people on your side when you have a common enemy.
The world we live in doesn’t need to tell fat people we’re easily hated and automatically viewed more negatively. We experience it, we feel it, we witness it, we know how we’re perceived, and when it’s reinforced in popular content, that is a conscious decision. We’re not going to improve implicit bias until we call it out openly, based on facts, and actively work to combat it. Fat people are paid less and promoted less. Fat women are seen as less attractive on dating apps. (Fat Black women get the worst this bias in the dating world.) Fat people are assumed to be more lazy or dumb than thin peers.
Until we have more positive, non-stereotypical representations of fat people on TV, it’s going to stick out when the ones we do get are pathetic, delusional hoarders whose sexual desires are meant to be automatically disgusting. Content like this holds up a mirror, and it doesn’t surprise me that the knee-jerk reaction from people is that, because her weight isn’t mentioned, fatphobia doesn’t exist in her portrayal. It’s not in my head, and I’m kind of sick of the Donnies of the world getting sole control of the narrative while denying their perception is skewed.
whyareyouyelling.com 