The Anxious Works of "Baby Reindeer" and "Seconds"

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Trauma is very much a virus that lives on no matter what is happening around it. Its strength is all-powerful, and while one can bury this uneasiness by focusing on other things, it is always there, like the shadow one can never get rid of. One can make a deal with trauma, but like Satan, it’s a tricky relationship. One thing trauma is good for is art. Because it’s formless and abstract, an artist can use trauma as a canvas, and once it is placed as a foundation, one can draw an endless amount of works from that well that never runs dry.

For the last few days, I have been in front of my TV set watching the Netflix series Baby Reindeer and, on Criterion, the film Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Rock Hudson. Both works observe characters watching their lives disintegrate in the most fearful manner. After watching the series and film, I can feel the anxiety that I keep pressing down or moving into another compartment in my brain, leaking out slowly, and I can feel my body tensing in certain moments of both works.

Seconds pause on the thought of obtaining a new life by leaving the old one behind and dead. But also being contacted by a “dead” friend is unnerving in itself, and that there is a professional service that will arrange one’s death, as well as a new ‘present and future’ life, is unsettling. The illusion that we can make up or correct our past mistakes in such a manner in such a dreamed easy exit that, of course, is impossible. A fake world is an ideal landscape, but our anxieties expose that narration as an illusionary escape route at best. Baby Reindeer is also about repeatedly making the wrong decision and seeing the pattern set up where one falls in its cracks regularly.

The dictionary definition of Existentialism is a theory that focuses on a person's existence as a ‘free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.’ The TV series and film express that the main characters chose their issues with the assistance of traumatic past events. As individuals, they perceive their trauma and how that plays in their decisions dealing with issues that haunt both characters. Seconds was shot in 1965 and released in 1966, and those two years were a major cultural shake-up in American culture. The presence of the Hippie movement made an impression on the film world, with films such as The Trip and, of course, Seconds. The entranceway to find another life from the straight world into the Hippie landscape was the journey many took during the 60s, and to remove one’s past and unhappiness is usually an anxious sense of moving forward but still having one’s past appearing out of nowhere.

To be confronted by a stalker who enters the doorway where one works in public or the life of a banker who is approached by a mysterious man with a connection to what was a dead man in a train station is an unnerving experience. It’s a link in one’s schedule or form of life that suddenly opens up a memory or a series of remembrances that become a tidal wave hitting a shore. The nameless narrator in Swann’s Way is having his afternoon tea and pastry, and that brings up images for that character, but for our two characters in Seconds and Baby Reindeer, its a flood of anxiety-driven passions and failures that cripples them from having a happy life.

I don’t know if I suffer from paranoia because often I feel that is the sane way of looking at this world, but it is still part of my anxiety, and maybe that is my fuel to do what I do. Time will tell if this is the case or not, but I’m put in a position where I either had to make a choice of hiring a therapist or use that amount of money and invest it in books, music, and film. People tend to disappoint, but art rarely fails me. I can’t say I’m better or cured of my anxiety, but dwelling on works that deal with that subject matter has been helpful. So thank you, Baby Reindeer and Seconds.

Baby Reindeer is on Netflix at the time of this writing, and Seconds is on The Criterion Channel.