I May Destroy You: Review
Trigger warning - Sexual Assault
In 2018, whilst giving a lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Micheala Coel revealed that she had been sexually assaulted. She retold the story to a stunned crowd, detailing an evening of drinking the night before a deadline, followed by a morning of flashbacks to a sexual assault she couldn’t remember. This became the basis for her new show, I May Destroy You.
At the centre of Coel’s most personal project yet is Arabella: a funny, messy, East London writer struggling to finish the first draft of her new book on time. Whilst pulling an all-nighter, we watch her focus fade, and her writing quickly turns into a dizzying night out. We watch her falling around the bar before the screen fades to black - unsure of whether this is supposed to be a moment of comedy. The next morning we watch Arabella haunted by flashbacks of being drugged and raped by a stranger. Though initially dismissive of these images, they keep returning, as trauma does, and Arabella is forced to work through her new reality without falling apart completely.
Even if you haven’t already watched the series, I can imagine that you’re thinking that the subject matter is undeniably heavy. Yet, not every scene focuses on sexual assault: ideas of consent become a subtle but noticeable undertone. Coel has such a lightness of touch, managing to bounce seamlessly from tragedy to comedy, and then back again. Surrounding Arabella are Terry, an aspiring actress, and Kwame, a fitness instructor with a Grindr addiction. These ride or die friends are as funny as friends always are, and become significantly more than Arabella’s support crew. Coel recalls going to the police station after her own attack, and “realising that my life was really about to change forever...my friend was with me, and as we waited for the detective, I noticed him playing Pokémon Go on his phone. And that became the tone for the rest of my thoughts”. By skillfully winding the humour that can be found in trauma, Coel enforces the idea that these events can happen to anyone. We are supposed to relate to this humour, and these friendships, as they could so easily be us.
This relatability continues in the form of a nonlinear plot. Though I have seen tweets about ‘plot holes’ throughout the series - particularly in the finale - I believe this is just evidence of Coel’s genius. As viewers, we expect neat, decisive conclusions; we obsess over ‘good’ and ‘bad’, perhaps seeking a certainty we are not given in real life. But Coel knows this, and that is why the episodes are so fragmented and uncomfortable - because we are supposed to feel uncomfortable. Arabella’s constant second guessing mirrors our own ability to rewrite our own bad experiences to make them passable, and even laughable. By scrutinising ideas of consent, and questioning what is ‘acceptable’, Coel is forcing us to do the same thing to our own experiences. It is difficult to watch, not only because of the subject matter, but also because this sort of story-telling is not something we are used to - but it is necessary. In an interview with Variety, Coel explained how “[in] manipulating how [Arabella] engages with her trauma, she’s realizing she has total power over this thing”. By witnessing Arabella’s thoughts first hand, we become a part of her healing process.
This experimentation works because the series has such a strong rooted sense of place. Shots of East London, from Hackney to Shoreditch, moving in towards the bright lights of the City provide the backdrop, whilst the closeness of Arabella and her friends provide a much more nuanced Black experience than I have ever seen in British drama. I May Destroy You becomes so much more than a programme about rape: these characters also speak to issues of being queer, poor and Black.
Coel couldn’t have known that this show would be aired under the backdrop of the murder of George Flloyd and countless Black Lives Matter protests, and yet the fact it was only makes it all the more necessary. Coel uses her own assault to push much needed black experience into a genre dominated by white-women-centred #MeToo dramas such as The Assistant or Bombshell. Thoughtless micro-aggressions and the intensity of white privilege infiltrate all areas of Arabella’s career, whilst a white girl being attracted to “edgy Black men” and Terry’s humiliating audition (“Can you take your wig off now?”) remind us of the intersectionality of oppression. Arabella heartbreakingly admits how, before being raped, “I never noticed being a woman. I was too busy being poor and Black” and in such, Coel leaves no power structure unturned as she calls out all oppression and asymmetry in Arabella’s confrontation of her own trauma.
Whilst Arabella is struggling with her own assault, her brother-in-arms Kwame is quietly struggling with his own. Complicated by his consensual sex with his rapist prior to the assault, we watch a police officer struggle to speak plainly to Kwame - a young, black, gay man and the attitudinal opposite to Arabella - when he finally builds up the courage to report his assault. This is something I have never seen explored in mainstream TV before, which is what makes the show so compulsively watchable. These are issues that need to be shown and need to be talked about, and Coel has finally given us a way to begin this dialogue. Not for a second does she suggest the police are not trying. Instead, the police officer who speaks to Kwame is clearly doing all he can, but in the same breath Coel is asking us is that enough, and opening up a conversation about why rape is different when it is a man, rather than a woman.
I know many writers have created TV shows wherein sexual assault is poignant and fully explored, but for me Coel’s nonlinear story telling is radical and so, so important. By creating a show with believable friendships and an inconsistent way of storytelling, Coel is showing how sexual assault exists in our world - and not just for straight people, either. It is not something that only happens far away, or on television. It’s something you, or I, could have experienced - experienced and not even realised. I May Destroy You leaves a legacy of complete fearlessness. I think it makes you confront things and hold people accountable, and people who have watched the show can see the bigger problem of consent and just how muddy those waters can be.
Written by Kate Birch
I'm a literature postgraduate student living in London. I love poetry and book reviews, and currently run an Instagram account where I post one of these (@slowrreads)