He is afforded no privacy while the investigator takes his statement, while a door with a sign saying it must be closed is clearly left open. Don’t get too comfortable, though – for as well as Arabella is treated, her friend Kwame, a queer Black man, experiences something entirely different when he goes to report a rape.įrom the beginning, it’s clear the investigator doesn’t understand sex between men and isn’t interested in taking Kwame’s information. Like many survivors, it takes Arabella some time to accept the label the police investigators assign to what happened to her, though they generally treat her well, certainly better than we’d expect here in the States. The rape revenge movie, the Good Survivor™ who self-actualizes their way to justice-and also love! It’s lazy storytelling to retread the same arcs, but with the exception of a wonderful few, like Sweet/Vicious, The Assistant, The Magicians (which righted itself after a triggering start) and hopefully the forthcoming Promising Young Woman and Run, Sweetheart Run, it’s near-universal.ĭrawing from a personal experience of sexual assault, Michaela Coel’s 12-episode show is a fictional depiction of Arabella, a millennial writer living in London who was drugged and raped while out for a drink one night when procrastinating on a deadline. ![]() (Why else would Lad圜ops exist?) These tropes are discussed in heteronormative terms because most sexual violence on screen ignores the reality that men are survivors too, and that LGBTQ people are disproportionately affected, as are, for that matter, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).Įven when stories are primarily about sexual violence, the narratives tend to follow the same repetitive beats. Usually, when rape and sexual assault are depicted in mainstream storytelling, they are used as a storytelling device - a time-saving shorthand to further the plot for a male character who has a relationship with the victim, to show how deeply evil the perpetrator is, or perhaps to make the victim seem more sympathetic or to provide her with sufficient motivation to be an active protagonist in her own story. Only someone who’s spent so much time swimming in this topic could write it so intensely and accurately. As a result, the show has so much more to say than the usual fare, staying with Arabella and her friends for at least a year to see the changes great and small after the assault, and to examine consent across their lives from a number of different angles. With Arabella’s drug-induced blackout in the first episode, I May Destroy You sidesteps the depiction we’re most used to seeing of sexual assault – detailed, graphic imagery of “what happened” – in favor of a more guttural and nuanced portrait of the thing that lasts: surviving sexual assault. But Coel goes beyond that and puts every kind of consent under the microscope, pushing the audience to look at the aspects of rape culture that make us the most queasy, even if – especially if – they’re inside ourselves. ![]() The series starts with Coel’s pitch-perfect take on the nuts and bolts of trauma, from the intrusive thoughts and sarcasm toward art therapy to the ringing we hear when main character Arabella is triggered to Arabella downplaying her own trauma by comparing it to various global tragedies. A creator working at the current height (but clearly not yet the apex) of her power, Coel’s take on trauma and consent is the kind of prestige exploration that only a survivor could write. Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You is a tour de force creation of laser-focused storytelling. ![]() Warning: contains spoilers for the I May Destroy You finale.
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