Baby Reindeer's fat stalker + the thrill of the Kendrick/Drake beef + Ripley & more

I know I’m a little late to the conversation, but I want to talk a bit about Netflix’s latest hit series, Baby Reindeer. I have a feeling quite a few of you have seen it since Netflix is the most popular streaming service by far. The show is a dramatization of a stalking experience that the creator and star, Richard Gadd, went through. What I like about it is that first, that it’s not a stereotypical depiction of stalking: Donny (Gadd’s fictionalized self) makes some pretty terrible decisions along the way that enable Martha (his stalker) to continue pursuing him. Second, the show gradually reveals itself to be about much more than stalking. It’s really about how trauma fucks with us psychologically and leads us to make bad decisions. The show is a hard watch in a lot of ways (major trigger warning for sexual assault in ep 4), but I think it’s doing something novel by displaying Donny’s own complicity in the stalking. The story has been written about from many angles - including the way it takes on Gadd’s queerness and relationship with a trans woman - but it’s the casting of a fat actress (Jessica Gunning) as Martha that I want to talk about.

The first episode or two in particular are pretty rough in terms of fat representation. Martha is pathetic, delusional, gluttonous, and eventually violent. She is a lawyer but doesn’t seem educated or employed, and she has the most horrendous spelling you’ve ever seen (as shown in the many texts we see her sending to Donny). The depiction reinforces many negative stereotypes we have about fat women: we’re undesirable, pitiful, and will glom onto any man who offers us even an ounce of attention or compassion. The philosopher

Kate Manne

, who has written an incredible book called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia that I highly recommend, published a Substack post recently critiquing the decision to cast a fat actress in this role.

First, I want to say that I agree with everything Kate says in this post. It felt shitty to see this character reinforce tropes about people who look like me. If I never see another onscreen portrayal of a fat woman like Martha, it’ll be too soon. And yet, when I started to research the woman who stalked Gadd in real life (fans of the show sussed out who it was quickly), it seemed to me that casting a fat actress to play her was probably an attempt at accurate representation. In recent weeks, she has identified herself publicly as Fiona Harvey—and was even interviewed by Piers Morgan.

And this is where I feel so conflicted. I do not want thin actors to portray people who are fat in real life. I’ve railed many times against fat suits, which seem to have made a comeback in recent years. In 2020, I published a feature in the LA Times in which I wrote that fat suits worn by thin actors—such as January Jones (Mad Men), Gwyneth Paltrow (Shallow Hal), and Eddie Murphy (The Nutty Professor)—had gone out of fashion. At the time, there were several shows featuring fat women as protagonists, including This Is Us, Shrill, Dietland, Good Girls, and Orange Is the New Black.

Four years later, I no longer feel so optimistic. Recently, we've seen many prestigious actors donning fat suits to portray fat characters or depict real-life fat people, a trend that dehumanizes fat people by reducing us to our body size and magnifying this one aspect of us. These include:

• Sarah Paulson (playing Linda Tripp in American Crime Story: Impeachment)

• Viola Davis (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)

• Renee Zellweger (The Thing About Pam)

• Tom Hanks (Elvis)

• Emma Thompson (Matilda the Musical)

• Olivia Colman and Keegan-Michael Key (Wonka) 

• And most famously, Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his performance in The Whale. 

What’s so striking about this list is that almost all of these people have numerous Oscar nominations, and most of them are Oscar winners!

When it comes to fat representation (especially women) on TV in general, I struggle to name more than a few starring roles. There’s Bridget Everett in Somebody, Somewhere (a wonderful show), Michelle Buteau in the hilarious, amazing Survival of the Thickest, and Queen Latifah in The Equalizer. I know the third season of Bridgerton just came out on Netflix and apparently Nicola Coughlan has become the star, but let’s be honest, she’s not even plus-size. She’s a size 10-12, which is actually smaller than the average American woman!! The fact that she’s considered “large” in all the media coverage of the show is frankly just evidence of how appallingly unrealistic Hollywood’s criteria for body size is.

To sum up, we’re at a point in which fat suits have made a comeback at the same time that the number of prominent roles for fat actors seems to have decreased. Then, you add in the explosion in popularity of Ozempic and similar drugs. My guess is that any actors considered even slightly larger than the (very thin) Hollywood norm are feeling pressure from all sides to take Ozempic even if it’s not medically necessary. And when you combine all of these things - it feels pretty clear that we've gone backward in terms of diverse body representation on screen.

Now, everyone has the right to make their own decisions for/about their bodies, and I understand on a deep level how much easier it is to be thinner in the world. However, I also feel sure that the end result of so many people jumping on the Ozempic bandwagon will be to further stigmatize fat people who either don’t want to take these drugs (due to the fairly serious side effects), or who can’t afford these expensive drugs. All of the evidence tells us you have to be on these drugs for life to maintain weight loss, and that’s a pretty huge tradeoff if you’re taking them ONLY to lose weight (and not for a medical reason like type 2 diabetes). Regardless of anyone’s individual decision, I don’t want fat people to experience more stigma and bias than we already do.

So to get back to Baby Reindeer and the character of Martha, I think what makes this portrayal painful for me is that she’s virtually the only fat woman on a hit show at the moment—and she reinforces all the worst stereotypes about us. If there were more than a handful of fat female protagonists on TV, it wouldn't matter that one of them reinforced negative tropes, because we would have lots of other depictions showing the real-life diversity of fat women’s experiences. Many fat women are married/partnered, considered desirable, sexually active, highly intelligent and capable, confident in ourselves, and/or physically active. Like all other marginalized groups, all we’re looking for is diverse representation on screen that reflects our experience in the real world.

At the end of the day, it’s not the specific Martha portrayal (which is a great showcase for Jessica Gunning) that stings so bad, but rather the dearth of roles for fat women in general.

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On the flip side of the fat representation coin, I have to shout out this great documentary that I’ve been waiting a year to write about, Your Fat Friend. It was showing in very few locations last year when I first heard about it, but has picked up some steam and has been shown at some festivals and theaters in the U.S. this year. Here’s my recent review of it at The Bold Italic.

Please see this wonderful film if you can. It’s streaming on Jolt, but only through June 17.

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There’s a lot going on in the hip-hop world and I feel like Gen X hasn’t been this engaged since the early 2000s. Everyone’s been talking about the Drake-Kendrick Lamar rap beef, and I’ve found myself more excited about contemporary hip-hop than I’ve been in 20 years! It’s been thrilling really, to see people spend so much time analyzing the lyrics, especially the Kendrick songs, which simply have more depth than the Drake songs do. He’s got double and sometimes even triple entendres in these tracks. (I’m not gonna sum up this rap beef - it’s got many twists and turns - but there’s so much online if you somehow haven’t heard about it yet.)

On a purely artistic level, this rivalry has been amazing for hip hop - it’s given us some of the Kendrick’s best work (and in case you didn’t know, he’s already a Pulitzer Prize winner). Although I think it’s pretty clear who came out on top, I actually think two of Drake’s tracks are very good and probably among the best rapping he’s ever done. If he hadn’t been going up against the greatest lyricist in contemporary hip-hop, we would be thinking differently about them, but he did, and Kendrick slaughtered him on back-to-back tracks. Now Kendrick has a #1 hit and probably the song of the summer, “Not Like Us.” And we’re finally getting to see his humorous side, which is a blast. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that both rappers are still using tired, femme-phobic disses (like calling each other “pussies”), as well as disrespecting each other’s female partners and kids as fodder for their lyrics.

There are some very ugly (even criminal) allegations the two slung at each other in these tracks - specifically in Drake’s “Family Matters” and the incredibly dark “Meet the Grahams.” Thus far no one seems to have produced proof to back up the worst allegations so I won’t get into them. But having lived through the East-West rap beef of the mid-90s and seen its two shining stars get murdered in 1996 and 1997, I was a wee bit concerned for everyone’s physical safety. Thankfully things have settled down since the apex of the beef earlier this month, and it seems like Drake has gone away to lick his wounds.

Anyway, if you were as energized as I was by this epic battle on wax, The Ringer put out an incredibly comprehensive list of the greatest diss tracks of all time, as well as a Spotify playlist to go along with the piece: https://www.theringer.com/rap/2024/5/7/24149814/greatest-rap-diss-tracks-all-time-kendrick-lamar-drake-not-like-us-jay-z-nas

In other Gen X hip-hop news, it looks like one of hip hop’s biggest moguls, Diddy (aka Puff Daddy or Sean Combs) might finally be facing some consequences for what appears to be decades of abuse and sexual assault. I believed his ex-girlfriend Cassie when she sued him late last year, and didn’t need to see the horrific video that recently surfaced of him beating her up. Still, I hope it increases the chances of him actually facing legal consequences. Perhaps others who were paid to hide evidence of his abuse will come forward (I shudder to even consider how many times he has paid off service workers, hotels, etc. to keep quiet). The reckoning with abusive men in hip hop (whose victims are nearly always Black women) has been a long time coming. I want Diddy to get the R. Kelly treatment. And this goes for his good buddy Russell Simmons too (who fled to Bali to avoid accountability for multiple rape allegations).

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TV and film recs

I wrote about it last month, but I want to follow up now that it’s over and say Shogun was a masterpiece, my favorite of the year so far, only rivaled by Ripley (see below). I also recommended the 3 Body Problem last month, and then I stopped watching it before the end of the season cuz I just wasn’t feeling it! The poor character development and inconsistencies in character motivation really bugged me.

So Ripley. What an incredibly artful show. It’s in black and white. It’s set in 1960s Italy. It’s based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was of course adapted for the incredible 1999 Anthony Mingella film starring a young Matt Damon, Jude Law at his most beautiful, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Steven Zaillian’s version of the story couldn’t be more different than the film version. It stars Andrew Scott - which means that the titular character is roughly two decades older than the Matt Damon version. I have to admit the age jump was a bit off-putting at first, because so many of us saw and loved the Minghella film. Damon’s Ripley is naive and love-struck—his murder of his friend Dickie is a crime of passion—while Scott’s Ripley is much darker, more cynical and calculating. However, we also get so much more time with the character over the course of an 8-hour show. We see him improbably elude Italian police for several episodes—despite the fact that he’s actually quite a sloppy killer. We see him covering up his crimes in painstaking detail.

One of the best parts about this version for me (a lifelong Italophile) is that we get to hear so much more Italian! The American characters have to speak Italian and there are some amazing Italian characters - particularly Inspector Ravini, who comes into the story in the second half of the series. This version of the Ripley story presents a less idealized portrait of Italy. There’s still incredible beauty, and every shot is like a painting - the cinematography is jaw-dropping, it’s like nothing else I’ve seen on television. But it’s more about light and dark, not the sumptuous colors of the Minghella film, which is why the painter Caravaggio is invoked so many times in the show. There are certain shots that will be burned into my brain for a very long time. Improbably, there’s even some humor in the series.

I just think this show was such a magnificent undertaking all around. It requires involved, concentrated watching. It’s not a “fold your laundry” type of show. And I would also suggest not bingeing it even though you can on Netflix. Savor it, draw it out for 2-3 weeks.

I’ve also caught up recently on The Curse, streaming on Paramount +. Most of the show aired in 2023, but it ended in January 2024 and it’s one of the best things I’ve seen recently. Like most things Nathan Fielder creates, this show isn’t necessarily an enjoyable watch—it’s deeply cringey and uncomfortable. And the finale is probably the most bonkers episode of TV I’ve ever seen. But when I reflect on the whole thing, I think the way Fielder & Benny Safdie delved into so many huge themes—gentrification, white liberalism, exploitation of Native culture, spirituality, the ethics of reality TV—was brilliant and very thought-provoking. And of course there’s the glorious performance by Emma Stone, who really can do no wrong in my eyes.

I was very excited to see Luca Guadagnino’s latest film Challengers, starring Oakland native Zendaya and two white boys (lol), and it didn’t disappoint! If you dig bi love triangles and are a tennis fan, you’re gonna love this movie, which oozes with sexual tension. Zendaya is a bonafide movie star, and although this role doesn’t require the incredible feats of acting of her role in Euphoria, she’s perfect as the object of desire of two best friends (who also want to fuck each other lol). It’s not high art necessarily, but it’s very well made, never stops moving, and is a highly enjoyable way to spend 2 hours!

Finally, I just started watching A People’s History of Black Twitter on Hulu, and it’s a great chronicling of how Black ingenuity really helped put Twitter on the map in the later 2000s/early 2010s, and converted the site into a crucial touchstone for pop culture and political discourse. This is one of the reasons I’m so angry Elon Musk has destroyed the site, because it’s not easy to replicate a phenomenon like Black Twitter.

Ok, I’m done! Until next time…