![]() They end up at a London bar, Ego Death, where Arabella is drugged and orally raped by a white man. I feel that due to this shift, it’s only increasing the odds that shows like I May Destroy You come along – series that are so inspired and intimate, so meaningful and eloquent, they’ll finally kill the outdated perception of TV as ‘not real art’.Ĭoel plays Arabella, a working-class black writer, who decides to party with friends instead of working on a deadline for her publishers. It’s becoming increasingly common in British TV for the creator/lead writer to take on more creative control like this, and it’s a change I am more than welcoming of. When she accepted her Leading Actress BAFTA in 2021 for her main role in the show, Michaela Coel said to the other nominees “I wrote my words – I know that your talent to take words a writer has written and to make it sound like your own is unbelievable.” Coel wrote and starred in I May Destroy You, which also won best mini-series, as well as co-producing it and co-directing alongside Sam Miller ( Luther, Snowpiercer). As teenagers, we see in a flashback to 2004, she “cried rape”, and it was Arabella and Terry who told the teachers the truth.I May Destroy You is great. But is one such partner right in her fury on the discovery she has unknowingly slept with a gay man? Arabella befriends an old classmate from school, Theo, who runs a sexual assault support group. He swears off men for a while after, and starts dating women – it feels safer. Her other friend Kwame ( the equally excellent Paapa Essiedu) regularly uses the Grindr app, and immediately after sex with one hook-up, is forced back down onto the bed. It feels like justice at first, but the burden of anger and power weighs unbearably heavy.Īrabella’s best friend Terry (Weruche Opia, a revelation) feels liberated by a threesome she later discovers it was a set-up. The two reconcile, but not before she used her influencer wield to “cancel” him in public. As many have noted, Coel’s blend of comedy, pop culture, irreverence, and silliness into these sequences compounds their everyday banality and, how those less violent violations can too, well, destroy us. Viewers assaulted in similar ways may in turn only have discovered it – or had their conflict validated – by this show. Only when listening to a podcast does she realise this is another form of rape, and become incensed. At the time, she is irritated, but the event is unremarkable. Weruche Opia in the final episode of I May Destroy You (Photo: Natalie Seery)Īrabella is raped again in the show, when her – up to then, nice – boyfriend removes the condom, mid-intercourse (known as “stealthing”). That refusal to identify him as one specific black-and-white villain, even when his crime was the show’s most overtly malevolent, allowed Coel to examine all the other villains we don’t notice, but who do just as much damage by breaching others’ boundaries in complex, insidious ways. Her attacker was a stranger, a faceless spectre tethered to her forever. In I May Destroy You’s central aggression though, the issue of “consent” is never really in question: Arabella was barely conscious when she was dragged into a toilet cubicle, and only remembers it in flashbacks. ![]() That sub-genre is new: rape and its many forms have been in fiction before, with nuance, as on Girls, or near-acceptance on Game of Thrones, but only recently has a wave of art pushed sex and relationships under closer inspection – see Sex Education, Normal People, Nina Raine’s 2017 play Consent. ![]() I May Destroy Youwas described at its outset as a “consent drama”. Television has never forced self-examination as relentlessly as this: the viewer’s own ego was shifted in the process. ![]() It was the death of Arabella’s ego we witnessed, week after week, but Coel’s push-and-pull storytelling, her almost stubborn resistance to assert judgment on any character – right down to that dream-nightmare confrontation of her rapist – led us each to look inwards and assess our own uncomfortable contradictions. Each has felt like the tightening of a spring, winding the viewer up and charging us with new ideas like a hot coil, until its close, which permitted no closure, just an undoing. Each instalment of Michaela Coel’s masterpiece, based on her own rape and 191 drafts in the making, has subverted our understanding of sex, race, and celebrity, youth, trauma, and truth, with gymnastic agility and imagination. ![]() After 12, near-perfect episodes of I May Destroy You, through which she grasped for reason and sense and control and self, it was where she returned in its breathless onslaught of a finale to mete out violent justice – no, revenge – no, forgiveness, in three alternate fantasies. Arabella Essiedu was spiked and raped in Ego Death Bar. ![]()
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