A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I was having trouble listening to Taylor Swift’s album without this strange feeling like there was a worm crawling up my spine.
That feeling persisted until an unlikely source of insight.
Netflix’s juggernaut new series, Baby Reindeer.
For those who haven’t seen it, I suspect you will — it’s tracking bigger than Squid Games, Stranger Things, and other blockbusters, and for good reason. We’ve never seen anything like it and the show cuts in so deep that I think it’ll end up part of our cultural fabric, a fairy tale for our times. (Albeit a very, very effed-up fairy tale.)
The story is simple: Donny, a down-on-his-luck comedian in London who moonlights as a bartender, serves a drink to a woman named Martha at a bar, and she begins to stalk him. Not just stalk him — hunt him, publicly shaming him everywhere he goes, to his girlfriends, to his colleagues, to his audiences, to his friends, to his family, to everyone, everyone, everyone, until he has nowhere left to turn. There are reasons that Donny struggles to shake Martha. An inherent complicity to it all.
But it’s the public shaming that I’m interested in.
Because it’s a fear we all live with in 2024.
Every time you open TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, it’s videos of ordinary people caught on camera doing something they’re ashamed of. Falling down steps. Dropping their groceries. Struggling with parallel parking. Missing an easy goal. Lisping their vowels. Walking with an unusual gait. Literally living their life, but now it’s been caught and beamed out for views. Much of the time these videos are posted without permission. I imagine a healthy portion of the people featured don’t even know they’re being filmed until they become a viral meme.
We’re all guilty of watching and laughing. Me, included.
But at what cost?
At the base of it, we’re commodifying shame. Training people, old and young, to catch their friends and family and teachers and bystanders in embarrassing moments and publicly humiliate them in the hopes it’ll get clicks and likes and follows. Yes, it’s innately human. Yes, it’s funny in doses. But when these cameras are everywhere, like we’re in some 24/7 Shame Surveillance System, it starts to get under our skin. And little by little, I think we get that same persistent, wormy feeling I have listening to the new Swift album.
The feeling that something’s gone fundamentally wrong.
Eleven years ago, during my first-ever school visits for The School for Good and Evil, I was a human gaffe machine — I tripped in wires and fell off a stage; I accidentally peed with a headset mic on while 800 kids waited in an auditorium; I had an allergic reaction and had to give presentations with one half of my face swollen like a balloon. None of this was caught on camera. Today all of it would have been and it’d be the first thing you’d find when you searched my name. Ordinary moments of humiliation, usually endured and forgotten, are now preserved for eternity.
Yes, I guess being a public figure, however minuscule in my case, makes you an easy target. For Marthas to find their way into your orbit. But truth is, authors are generally immune from this sort of thing. People come for the books, not for us, and the books stand the test of time more than the noise of YA Twitter. (Case in point: JK Rowling is selling better than ever.) That’s not to stop people from trying. I’ve seen more smear campaigns against authors than I count, sometimes within the author community itself. But if you live your life and make your art with integrity, I firmly believe that sanity and truth win out.
And yet – I worry that we’re slowly losing this collective sanity.
In Baby Reindeer, Donny is relentlessly tracked and heckled by Martha, so he has nowhere to go, while his phone is besieged with tens of thousands of her texts and emails and voicemails. As a viewer, we despise Martha. Hate wouldn’t be an unreasonable word. We want her punished for what she’s doing to Donny. But at the same time, if we’re watching rationally, we realize that this is art — a fiction, a version of the truth in which he admits significant complicity in everything that’s happening. There is nothing to be avenged here. This is an act of confession. The art is in the release.
And yet, this is not how it’s playing out. Since the release of Baby Reindeer, viewers have tracked down the real Martha and made her life a living hell. They’ve misidentified another one of Donny’s abusers and upended things for him too. In defense of Donny, they’ve become stalkers themselves. The desire to publicly shame, to avenge something on behalf of the artist is trouncing the actual catharsis of that art.
This is what’s uncomfortable about Taylor’s album, I think. It is a purge of her last two relationships with Joe Alwyn and Matt Healy, both of whom are slung with lyrical arrows. Healy is the “smallest man who ever lived,” a boy who “only breaks his favorite toys,” a “sleeper cell spy.” Joe is presented as a quietly, resenting, light-dimming, soul-constricting depressive. Unlike Baby Reindeer, there’s no real effort to conceal their identities. And yet, on her social media, Taylor states clearly that this chapter of her life is over, that there are no wounds to be avenged. But publicly putting two individuals on blast to millions and millions of listeners globally… Well, look at this photo of Matt Healy being tracked down by paparazzi as he tries to leave his house, next to a photo of Donny being hunted by Martha in Baby Reindeer:
Add in the thousands of comments and memes and videos directed at Healy and Alwyn and the fact that both have become unwitting participants in a public shaming of their role in a consensual relationship and it leaves this bitter, strange feeling that…
…we are all Marthas.
(And I have to be real, as a Taylor fan – to say she isn’t on this game is naive. Proof: she includes a diss track called “thanKyouaImMee” about Kim Kardashian, changes the main character’s name to Aimee, claiming she wants to disguise the target, but then capitalizes KIM’s name in the track title. Hello, Martha.)
I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit, of late. Indeed, it started while listening to Taylor’s album the first time on a long road trip with my partner. He knows next to nothing about Swift and her music and life — everything he listens to is pre-1970 — but he indulged me and listened quietly, his ears attuned to every word. Finally, when I asked what he thought, he paused and said: “It feels like a misuse of power, doesn’t it?”
Ah.
The ability of artists to use or misuse their power to settle a score. That’s what I’m working out in today’s diary. Because all art is some kind of response to the world. And yes, we’d all love to use our audience as a cudgel for revenge against those who’ve done us wrong. It’s a fantasy that gives the ghost of teenagers past such endless satisfaction. And yet, it gives the adults we’ve grown into a pittance. Worse still, it drains our art of power.
The soul-feeding kind of art, at least. Some art thrives on being insular. Reality TV is 100% based on “produced revenge,” a manipulation of real-life to create fictional storylines. Bravo features real people, fitted into a larger Bravo-verse where life is an echo of art and vice versa. (Ironically, the New Yorker just coined the term “Swiftverse,” for all the real-life people caught in the public web of Swift’s art.) There is money to be made in blurring life and art. In hawking your grievances and your feuds that will stir the troops to fight the battles with you.
But money doesn’t always come clean.
My new novel, at heart, is a story of revenge, albeit revenge on a larger scale. I’m attentive to any moments where I’m being too petty. One of my only regrets in The School for Good and Evil came in Book 5, when I was so fed up with the hubbub around Trump’s tweets at the time, that I fashioned a scene with my own fairy-tale version of Twitter in the Endless Woods. It’s there for only a few pages, a comical interlude, but I’m still irritated at myself for bowing to fleeting anger for inspiration. In my ethos, things need to come from deeper than that.
As I write this new book, then, I’m conscious to run an inventory, scene by scene, that I’m not trying to settle scores. This isn’t about getting even or grandstanding or summoning outrage on behalf of a specific individual or period of the past. Otherwise, every book just becomes my own personal reality show. That’s not what I want. I don’t want a Chainani-verse. This is about telling a story that has meaning beyond myself.
Now it’s your turn. How do you feel when books or music or art sets a target for revenge? Have you seen Baby Reindeer? Did you want to find Martha too?
Until next week…
I completely agree with the TS comment, and it's really refreshing to hear as many a Swiftie friend of mine has been quick to jump to her defense. She's doing so well, and at least to our knowledge, these relationships didn't end for horrible reasons. It just feels wrong to tear these guys down when there are people being abused in relationships. thanK you aIMee also confounds me in that sense, because it almost seems like she's digging the past back up for no reason. I'm not her, and obviously we don't know what happened behind closed doors, but this whole album sort of needs a "Kim, there's people that are dying" check.
Also, Endless Woods Twitter was such a fun touch in ACOT. I, for one, thought it was really fun and a nice break from the action and chaos. I think there's always going to be a part of you or a reflection of your experience in your writing- that's what makes art art.
I gleefully settle scores in my books lol. I take it as the privilege of the artist. I turned Mattie's evil elementary school principal into a troll in Never After. My college nemesis into the most annoying character in my first novel. I haven't seen Baby Reindeer but now I am intrigued. My favorite song on TTPD is "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" because it is SO PETTY and I LOVE IT lol. "I'll forget but I'll never forgiiiiive" is so me lol.