![]() One of Arabella’s partners screams at her for not watching her drink in a nightclub, as if the possibility of being drugged and assaulted is so commonplace that she’s at fault for not consistently anticipating it. ![]() But I May Destroy You questions why risk and vulnerability have become such accepted components of sex and dating that they’re generally shrugged off altogether. She knows that humiliation is often a sexual rite of passage: In one scene, the main character (also played by Coel) takes her friend’s advice, to just sit on her boyfriend’s face, a little too literally. Her debut series, the raunchy, semi-autobiographical Chewing Gum, was about a devoutly religious, Beyoncé-worshipping 24-year-old who can’t stand not having sex any longer. law, she points out in Australia, it’s merely categorized as “a bit rapey.” Even entire countries can’t agree on what’s rape and what’s not.)Ĭoel is as far from a moralizing writer as could be imaginable. In another, Arabella sleeps with a man who removes his condom midway through without telling her when she finds out, she’s initially angrier at the inconvenience of having to pay for emergency contraception than she is about an act she later discovers is classifiable as rape. In one scene, Arabella’s best friend, Terry (Weruche Opia), texts a friend boasting that she’s just had a threesome, while her expression suggests that she feels more violated than she’s letting on. In the absence of a frank discussion or the kind of meticulous, preemptive line-drawing that’s a lot to ask in the heat of desire, the question of how to define a sexual experience comes down to interpretation, and interpretation is always subjective. Subtly but devastatingly throughout I May Destroy You, viewers see why that might be. Arabella, who’s so eloquent at parsing the nuances of human behavior in her writing, is surprisingly myopic when it comes to sex and consent. The evening sparks a process that rebounds through all aspects of Arabella’s life: Something happens to her, she interprets it based on partial information, and then she receives new information that changes the context and upends her thinking. The next morning, after turning in pages of work that her agent describes, politely, as “abstract,” Arabella has a deeply unsettling flashback of a man in a bathroom stall who seems to be assaulting her.Īfter a hazy evening, Arabella (Michaela Coel) has a deeply unsettling flashback. There are frenetic scenes of her doing shots, staggering around the bar, trying to stay upright. She’s planning to get back to work within an hour, but things get blurry. (When she Googled “how to write fast,” I winced.) She initially says no when a friend invites her out for a drink, then changes her mind. Wearily, she sets up for an all-nighter in their office with caffeine pills, cigarettes, and all the other accoutrements of the ineffectual, overcommitted writer. In the first episode, which debuts today on HBO, Arabella returns from a jaunt in Italy (funded by her indulgent but nervous agents) to a deadline that’s long overdue. And as a black woman, she’s exposed on yet another level, whether to companies seeking out people of color for online kudos or to fans who desperately want her to mirror their own under-portrayed perspectives.Ī writer less volcanically talented than Coel might struggle to weave one of these themes into a 12-part series that she’s able to explore so many different layers of power while creating such a compulsively watchable show is striking. As a woman, she’s also inherently vulnerable when she sleeps with strangers. As a character, Arabella is brash and irresistible and sexually fearless. (As Lili Loofbourow wrote in The Week in 2018, “The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears,” a dynamic that the viral New Yorker short story “Cat Person” had probed the month before.) But Coel, who created the show in part based on an event that happened to her, is also aware of how exploitation can play out in art-how one woman’s traumatic experience can easily be manipulated and transformed into sales figures or a social-media storm. The most obvious way to interpret I May Destroy You is as a brilliant, explosive consideration of modern sexual mores, and of how flimsy the line can be between gratification and exploitation. “You’d better get going, missy,” she tells Arabella. Susy’s eyes flicker with concern, and then burn with interest. In the fifth episode of I May Destroy You, Arabella (played by Michaela Coel), an up-and-coming, internet-famous writer, explains to her literary agents and a sharklike publisher, Susy (Franc Ashman), that she’s just come from the police station, because she was raped.
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