WATCH: I May Destroy You
I May Destroy You is a powerful British drama series on HBO that follows the author Arabella and a group of young, black Londoners navigating friendships, dating and the ubiquity of sexual abuse. Author Arabella, played by Michaela Coel – also the series’ creator, writer and co-director (Chewing Gum), prepares for an all-nighter to meet a writing deadline. It turns out to be an all-nighter of a very different kind on the neon saturated streets and bars of London.
Arabella’s procrastination starts as a drink, then turns into a night out and then something far more serious as she blacks out. Drugs are taken. Her drink is spiked. The next morning Arabella pieces the night together, through confusing flashbacks and reoccurring memories of a male figure looming over her...raping her.
IMDY was inspired by Coel’s own experience of sexual assault, while she was making the Channel 4 sitcom Chewing Gum, her Bafta-winning comedy. The series has been billed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic as the show of the year. I hope Coel gets a similar recognition to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Coel did the fourth wall (to the camera) before Fleabag.
Coel gives a feeling of moving between different worlds within the same city (trendy publishing offices to council estates) illustrating the contrasting vision and realism of most living in London.
In one gut-wrenching scene, Arabella speaks about how the feminist cause didn’t appeal to her when she was younger, because she had been too “busy being black and poor. It’s about whether you can stop the people around you making grave mistakes. It’s about whether you can have control over your body, when people do terrible, half-remembered things to you – and maybe even things both you and they can remember, but which are equally terrible.”
However, unlike the brilliant but dark and painful Unbelievable on Netflix. I May Destroy balances the topic matter with lightness of touch. In this dramedy Coel acknowledges that sometimes the Bad Man, or Woman, is already in our field of vision.
I May Destroy You is on HBO
