![]() ![]() There are some fine, flinty insights, though: “I never noticed being a woman. Making all her characters both used and users, crashing others’ boundaries even as they yell about their own, Coel’s writing is acute, full of empathy for all its flawed humans – a tad too much empathy perhaps for Arabella’s undisciplined, almost mystic creativity, her reluctant fragments of work in progress often bombastic or banal. Balanced by the sharp-tongued affection of Weruche Opia as Terry, only Paapa Essiedu’s thoughtful connection-hungry Kwame can rival her for pathos, as he flails through his own, unrecognised trauma. Flashing from terrified calm to righteous rage, from clowning to icy gravitas, she can make the drama turn on a sixpence. As Arabella’s journey takes her through several incarnations – literary hustler, dazed victim, bar-room vigilante, virago-saint of survivors – she’s mesmerising. As teenagers, we see in a flashback to 2004, she “cried rape”, and it was Arabella and Terry who told the teachers the truth.Coel’s protean performance drives it all along, pulling the show’s disparate elements into a daring Bildungsroman. 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. No matter what, it’s an unsettling revelation. It can be shocking, it can be fun (which is also somewhat shocking), it can hurt and maybe even heal. 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. Season 1 Review: I May Destroy You is fascinating TV, taking a dark subject and turning it every which way. 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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