It remains the one story that goes on, without end, pulsing through your blood like a strange new oxygen, something you learn to carry but never set down.If you're not watching Michaela Coel's TV series. But for a writer, someone who’s accustomed to wrestling stories to the ground, giving them a beginning, a middle, and an end, the shattering effects of sexual assault may prove too difficult to deconstruct and repackage in a way that makes sense. As anyone who’s experienced trauma knows, it lives both as a visceral force and as a story you tell yourself. So, too, does the show’s conclusion, a narrative departure that dives into the meta layer of Arabella’s work as a writer. In current-day scenes around the dinner table, the dynamics among Arabella, her mom, her brother, and her dad are rendered so delicately, through small gestures, looks, and words unsaid, that the episode lingers long after the series is done. It explores the notion of consent from a different angle - what kind of treatment we deem acceptable from parents or siblings that we might never allow in a different kind of relationship. Through flashbacks to her childhood, it reveals a mother and daughter captivated by an absentee father, a man of the house who was never around, but around whom the house turned nevertheless. The most bittersweet episode offers a snapshot of Arabella’s family. The experience leaves him so shamed, he ricochets into an ill-advised experiment to sleep with a woman, then into celibacy, then back into promiscuity. You can practically see the confidence leave his body like air from a balloon, his shoulders slumping and his eyes turning downcast, as the police treat him with skepticism and embarrassment, eventually dismissing his claim (a doubling of victimhood that stands in stark contrast to the care with which female detectives treat Arabella). In one heartbreaking scene, Kwame becomes emboldened to report his own encounter with nonconsensual sex - a Grindr meetup that turned ugly. In moments big and small, the show illustrates how we parcel away trauma. She allows them to own their sexuality, to say stupid shit, to let down their friends, to make mistakes and still be worthy of love, a gift we often don’t give even to ourselves. With uncommon sensitivity, Coel writes each character as a full, flesh-and-blood human exploring and testing all the bounds of that experience. Nor their friend Kwame, who subsumes his desire for real connection in a parade of Grindr encounters. ![]() Nor does it judge her childhood bestie Terry, who ditches a drunk Arabella on an Italian vacation to have a threesome with two men. ![]() This is a setup that practically baits the audience to judge Arabella, given the fate that befalls her. And it is in this space that the series does some of its most rich and compelling work. It also involves detours through her friendships, her career, a recent romance, and her relationships with her family, a sort of unconscious game of connect-the-dots for both audience and subject. On the surface, this involves her trying to piece together the night of the crime, an effort that serves as a plot to drive the series forward. Through 12, half-hour episodes, I May Destroy You winds through Arabella’s attempts to process what’s happened to her. Facts are elusive, the truth a memory Arabella constantly chases. She is a complicated protagonist, and this is a series where moral quandaries and psychic pain hang in the air thick and hazy as smoke. The act of seeking justice doesn’t bring Arabella any real closure - either in practical or emotional terms. It’s a step few women of a generation prior would be willing to take.īut for all the progress that moment suggests, the show is not interested in a tidy narrative of female empowerment. As soon as the protagonist, Arabella (played by creator Michaela Coel), realizes that she was drugged and assaulted the night before, she goes to the police. ![]() To viewers over the age of 40, I May Destroy You, the new HBO series about the life of a young millennial in the aftermath of her rape, may be striking in its bracingly modern approach to both sex and sex crimes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |