She wasn't simply suspended in air, waiting for something narratively important to happen to her.Īnd just as she had a story already, Arabella had a personality already, and Coel resolutely draws her as a woman who is both traumatized and flawed.
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She already had a story unfolding, and a life that a series about her could have followed.
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But this is the wisdom of the writing, at its core: This is how you demonstrate that Arabella existed in full before she was assaulted. If you went in not knowing it was a story about sexual assault, you could watch most of the first episode as a day-in-the-life pilot for a quirky half-hour about a wandering millennial, about the publishing industry, about dating apps, and about social media in general. In the early going, I May Destroy You can feel disorienting, because its upending of conventional crime and trauma story structures is so thorough. With that said, it also makes excellent use some of the best techniques that have emerged in recent television, including episodes that pause the narrative to pay attention to a different point of view, or a different point in time, to enrich the main story thread. It doesn't look or sound like any other story. Arabella changes her hair, or she puts on a Halloween costume, and the air around her changes, too. This is not a twitchy, self-conscious style that draws attention to itself for no reason it's a reservation of visual emphasis for the places where it belongs. The wardrobe and hair and knockabout style of filming conversations among friends are unobtrusive and casual in many stretches of the story, which build to those moments when they are emphatically not. You see that personal passion-project quality not only in the writing, but in the way Coel and Miller manage the visual language. It is, transparently, the most personal of projects. And she based the story of Arabella's assault on a night in her own life.
She co-directed much of the season with Sam Miller, who's worked on Luther and on episodes of everything from Luke Cage to American Crime. Pop Culture Happy Hour Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'S-Town' and 'Chewing Gum'Ĭoel doesn't just star in the series. This is not a whodunit, even though Arabella's drive to understand what happened propels some of the plot. It documents the police investigation without centering it. Arabella's is a story that widens out to show how being assaulted affects her sex life, her relationships with her friends and her family, her career, her aspirations, and her health. But it avoids the flatness that would come from drama as a didactic explainer.
I May Destroy You is about sexual violence and consent those themes come up over and over in different stories that change characters in different ways. Played by creator Michaela Coel, also the writer and star of Chewing Gum, she's not a character constructed to be traumatized she's a character, full stop. When she next comes to, she realizes she was drugged and assaulted.īut before that, she has friends, she has family, she's struggling with her path from social media breakout star to author, and she's navigating a long-distance relationship with a man she met in Italy, where she meant to be writing but then didn't, quite.
She's trying to meet a book deadline, and she's worried she can't, and in the great tradition of writers doing everything else when they can't write, she steps out for a drink. In the first episode of the HBO series I May Destroy You, Arabella has other things going on before she's sexually assaulted. Note: This review discusses, and the show contains, scenes depicting, and stories about, sexual assault. Michaela Coel plays Arabella in the HBO drama she created, I May Destroy You.
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