Sometimes the people you are supposed to know best completely throw you off course. Those you are supposed to identify with and seek for familiarity surprise, alienate, even appal you.

If the past five years of the entertainment industry have taught me anything, it is that my “kind” can do all three. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations, the explosion of #MeToo has exposed widespread toxic masculinity in its most frightening form: at big business’ head of the table, as the fabric holding together the entire arts sector. But the list of names that have fallen from grace post-Weinstein represent a vital opening of the floodgates. A wake-up call signalling how workplace abuse will no longer be tolerated, concerning the world of producers, directors, actors responsible for how we give our lives and money to the small or big screen. For the past few years, we consumers have been left wondering whether the men bred by this broken system have daughters, wives, mothers. Wondering how – because of course they do – they were able to ruin so many women’s lives so easily.  

Retaliation has taken many forms, but perhaps the most purposeful has been within cultural production itself. Films and television series have shown no hesitation in addressing #MeToo head-on – take Jay Roach’s Bombshell (2019), based on the accounts of the Fox News women victim to CEO Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment; or the more effective The Loudest Voice, the miniseries released in the same year tackling the same case. Other televisual examples include The Morning Show, starring Jennifer Anniston and Steve Carell and centred on a fictionalised equivalent of the Weinstein case. As for cinema, notable releases include Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, an ambitious revenge comedy that was nominated for five Academy Awards in 2020; and Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019), an impressive exercise in narrative economy poised between fact and fiction, skewering the elephant in the room while he is entirely absent from it.

These works vary in approach, style, but also quality. The culmination of their contributions to this debate and their storytelling experiments was Michaela Coel’s masterful I May Destroy You, whose first season debuted on BBC One and HBO in the summer of 2020. Coel creates, produces, writes, directs, and stars as Arabella Essiedu, a Twitter-sensation-turned-novelist who tries to rebuild her life after being raped on a night out in London. Armed with friends, therapy, and the efforts of the officers assigned to her case, Arabella pieces herself back together over twelve half-hour episodes while tracking down the man who did it. She replays the night in her head alongside visits to the Soho bar she last remembers being at. She tells best friend Terry (played by Weruche Opia) her reasoning when the stage is being set in the opening moments of the season finale: “A criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.”

First, however, Arabella must remember what that criminal looks like. Memory is what ties episode twelve back to one, drawing on the eleven in-between as reference points. In its first moments, I May Destroy You establishes an equilibrium only to devote the rest of a television season to unravelling it. Under this internal logic, the series immediately slices up its geography into distinct dramatic spheres: we are introduced to Arabella in Italy, saying goodbye to an ostensible boyfriend before she is transported back to London, her identifiable hometown. Here, by the time we hit the episode mid-point, she has returned to where Terry and flatmate Ben (Stephen Wight) are waiting. In this time, she has received multiple phone calls from her agent probing for second book draft progress.
 

The series wastes no time demonstrating its own narrative instability – geographically, professionally (on Arabella’s terms), and socially (on her friends’ – after Terry and Ben, we quickly meet an entirely different group on Arabella’s first night out back). We are already invited to look closer and question reliability claims despite not knowing where the drama is headed, or when exactly it is headed, if we do have prior knowledge of the subject matter. We assume Arabella’s romantic relationship but are confused by her mumbled aside during the exchange with Biagio (Marouane Zotti): “So… are we boyfriend and girlfriend?” The uncertainty is compounded by his response to her attempts of ensuring a fixed line of contact: “When I’m ready to call you, I call.” In these early moments, I May Destroy You undermines its own scene setting responsibilities by reverse engineering and foreshadowing Arabella’s fractured experience post-trauma. We are introduced to a narrative situation defined by the exact impending instability we will soon pinpoint the source of.

We are far from any calm pre-storm, from any liberated sense of security before the series’ dramatic pivot. Rather, degrees of injustice prevail on every level of the storytelling even as Coel lifts her curtain and the cast first decorate the stage. As it must, justice will come, but her drama begins by accentuating the distance from redemption, catharsis, or closure, so is at this point best understood as a duplicate of her character’s work-in-progress. Arabella reassures her agent that there are “some minor revisions and then we’re ready to go”, but like us he can see through the lie, suspicion that is confirmed by the end of the first episode (titled ‘Eyes Eyes Eyes Eyes’) after he finally reads the draft. There is much work to be done and a lot of ground to cover here, but only eleven fleeting half-hour windows in which to do it.
 

The picaresque quality to the opening episode sees Arabella, just on the night out, be stopped by a fan who quotes her book back to her (in full and unison, as its author joins in), pause on the streets of London to bump a line off a friend’s knuckle, briefly attend (and participate in) an open-mic night, all before arriving at the bar where the night takes its sinister turn. The series’ remainder is interspersed with Arabella’s frequent returns to the crime scene, so here it consolidates that setting’s dramatic importance. Adopting a montage effect, Coel shows her protagonist drinking, dancing, drinking, before a harsh cut to the Morning After. Arabella types at her laptop before snapping back into reality and, like us, wonders how she got here. She sniffs her armpit – both confirmation that last night happened and resistance of full disclosure regarding how it ended. After she feels disoriented and unwell in the meeting with her agent, then out on the streets when it is cut short, the episode briefly reveals what happened simultaneous to her half-formed memory of it: locked in a cubicle, a man rapes her as she regains enough consciousness required to realise what he is doing despite being unable to stop it.

Another episode central to the way Coel’s series constructs trauma comes at its mid-point: episode six AKA ‘The Alliance.’ We are introduced to the character of Theodora (Harriet Webb), or “Theo” for short. Arabella comes across her support group for rape and sexual assault survivors on social media after seeing what old classmates are up to. Attending a session at the beginning of the episode, Arabella refutes Terry’s claim that “the poster girl for Childline can’t help anyone in trauma.” After a thoroughly productive experience, Arabella confesses “I wish I got to know you in school”; Theo reassures her “We’ll just start now.”

The scene ends, prompting an extended flashback similar to episode three’s jump back to Arabella’s time in Italy, this time going further to 2004 and the high school that she and Theo attended together. The timings of Coel’s temporal fracturing are perfect, daring to pull the rug from underneath her spectator after the comfortable rhythm of one narrative tense. These two effective standalone episodes slot perfectly into the series’ replication of Arabella’s experience, which reveals necessary insights into the backstory, but only when her mind goes to them itself. Thematically, I May Destroy You is unconditionally preoccupied by Arabella’s struggle, but it is as unequivocal formally. The organisation, space, and weight of Coel’s writing is empathetic to the universality of her struggle because its recreation imagines it both as narrative subject and aesthetic. It is as much a conversation topic or story pivot as a platform for frenetic cinematography (see the depiction of her drunk state in episodes one and twelve) or on-screen layering and formal incongruity (see the proliferation of tweets and emojis during episode nine). The authentic capture of disorientation is only accentuated by its autobiographical truth, reflecting when Coel was victim to sexual assault during the writing of previous series Chewing Gum, as she first discussed in 2018 at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Concerning ‘The Alliance’, this humanism sees the series shift perspective to fellow survivors. We see precisely what led to Theo’s need to run the support group – her difficult upbringing by a single mother and stepdad; her non-existent relationship with a father denied split custody after Theo was coerced into lying that he abused her, by her mother. We glimpse a confused child’s lack of education and support as she discovers her sexual identity in a teenage minefield. The episode touches on some of the uncomfortable realities we know about high school, particularly for girls, which our system is not doing enough to address. The most central involves Ryan (Josiah Mutupa), who betrays Theo’s trust when he shares illicit photos of her after the pair are engaged in intercourse in the school toilets in-between classes.
 

Ryan’s deception provokes her own: she accuses him of rape. The episode flips the narrative on consensual sex, informing the primary storyline in the present while emphasising the complexity of the issue, here manifesting as possible situational alternatives. There is no such ambiguity or unreliability in the facts of Arabella’s experience, but the doubts, contradictions, uncertainties that the external world suffocates sexual assault survivors with means they occupy her headspace despite being unwelcome.

The third and sixth episodes of I May Destroy You are beacons for the direction Coel’s series is headed after the groundwork of its first, but they still cannot prepare us for the finale. Episode twelve – ‘Ego Death’ – serves as the series in miniature, dramatising the experiments with time and structure thus far by imploding the entire claim of realism. The final episode goes full Groundhog Day (or Palm Springs), but the catch is that the characters do not know they are in a resetting loop. Coel supplies us with four versions of Arabella, Terry, and Theo’s method of dealing with David (Lewis Reeves) after he is identified as her rapist at the end of episode eleven. As a collection, the four vignettes point to justice’s multivalence, a destination difficult to isolate and far from straightforward to reach, constantly distracted, complicated, exacerbated.

First, the trio drug the criminal and accidentally murder him. It is a Coen brothers film gone wrong – so a crime gone wrong twice – leaving Arabella to pummel David’s unconscious body without realising she is killing him until it is too late. She slings his corpse underneath her bed and everything resets. The finale mark two adopts an entirely different stance, a far cry from the rage and intent of the first and Arabella’s demand “I wanna see his penis; he saw my thing.” Instead, the operation runs completely smoothly, but once she finds herself in the cubicle with David, he breaks down crying, full of remorse for what he has been doing to women on nights out. Arabella takes him back to her place, but not for sex: they sit on a made bed and talk it out, all while she buys time for the police to arrive and burst in, carrying out the arrest.
  

Third, Arabella subverts the loop model so far and initiates everything before David even can. She approaches him at the bar, buys the drinks, goes in for the kiss, suggests they go back to her place. We even glimpse his friend lap dance on Terry rather than the reverse, an identical marker in the loop’s previous iterations except that he was the one seated. Arabella, meanwhile, falls in love with David – naturally, this is wrong, so the pieces are swept from the board and rearranged for one final version of events. Scenario four, either the confirmation of what happened or the implication that this loop will go on ad infinitum, sees Arabella not even go to the bar in the first place. As in versions one to three, Ben the flatmate asks “What’s on the menu tonight then? Your bar watch thing?”, but Arabella changes “Wanna come?” to something new: “I’m actually not going out. I’m just chilling.” We then fast forward to her book launch at East London’s Libreria Bookshop. If the series duplicates the process of turning work-in-progress into published book, then both are finally complete. The answer to the questions Coel has asked over twelve episodes – which can be summarised by a univocal one: how can you pick up your life after being sexually assaulted? – seems to be not seeking justice by wishing the same fate on someone else.
         

On I May Destroy You’s terms, exacting revenge is not the solution. And even if the finale’s loop is broken by the epiphany, the series acknowledges that the problem does not then vanish forever. To arrive at this understanding, its twelve-episode trajectory ends by wiping the slate clean and giving Arabella a second chance: book two is finished, on the shelves, stirring people’s interest, but it is only a matter of time before manuscript three is underway. It is only a matter of time before her pain resurfaces or she is dealt a new blow as a twenty-first century black woman. She and her creator Michaela Coel know this – just look at the environment the series was released into, a summer defined by mass protests and the vital escalation of Black Lives Matter. After all, those inflicting suffering around us may surprise, alienate, or appal, but it is down to every single one of us to actively stamp out the wrongdoers. Repetition becomes revision. Paralysis becomes progress.

 

Volume 29, Issue 1-2 / February 2025 Film Reviews   #metoo   feminism   melodrama   michaela cole