The Uniqueness of I May Destroy You
(Spoilers for I May Destroy You follow)
Warning: brief descriptions of sexual assault
Once in a while there comes along an artistic work that is so singular you cannot believe it got made in the first place. This may sound odd but I believe that the limited TV series I May Destroy You, written and co-directed by Michaela Coel with Sam Miller, is one of these works. It sounds odd not because it is a TV show about the aftermath of sexual assault (there is a demand for these kind of stories) but because of the way that this story is told. To call it a TV show about the aftermath of sexual assault feels reductive even though it is an apt description. I May Destroy You is not afraid to add ambiguity and complexity where other shows would be straightforward and didactic. The show focuses heavily on the survivor’s psychological state in a way that is uncommon for this type of narrative.
I May Destroy You follows Arabella, a writer living in London, who is feeling the pressure from her literary agents to finish a draft of her second book. It is clear in the way that she communicates with the agents that she has been procrastinating and stringing them along. She is given a hard deadline and plans to pull an all-nighter to finish the draft. While working on the draft she gets a call from her friend Simon to go out for drinks. She meets up with him telling herself that she will hang out for an hour and then get back to work. Arabella, Simon and some other friends end up at the Ego Death bar…
What happens at the bar with the striking name will set the tone for the whole series. The way that this pivotal event is shown, however, is atypical. It starts off fairly standard with a montage of Arabella and her friends on the dancefloor. The shot lengths are very short and the action happening in them is fast and frenetic. This makes sense because the song they are dancing to is very upbeat. The upbeat song suddenly cuts out and is replaced by a slower, gospel-sounding song. At first the fast action on screen doesn’t change, which is odd in itself. Then the shots of the dancing are intercut with shots that have much slower action in them, the first of which is a closeup of Arabella with a distant look in her eyes. The subsequent slower action shots consist of Arabella stumbling to the entrance of the bar in slow motion. The intercutting of the fast action shots with the slow action shots is very disorienting for the viewer, especially when the intercutting becomes faster. Then something even stranger happens, when Arabella reaches the entrance of the bar there is a cut to her sitting back at the office the next morning, working on the draft. Clearly something went wrong because we can see her strained smile and the cut on her face when she meets the literary agents to show them the draft. When she gets home and opens the door to her room we see a very low-angle shot of her staring into space as if she remembers something. She looks down at her hand on the doorknob, there is a cut to a closeup of her hand turning the doorknob and then there is an abrupt cut to a low-angle shot of a man in what looks like a bathroom stall, thrusting as he looks down at the camera. We are then brought back to Arabella in her room with a puzzled look on her face and the first episode ends. It is clear that the shot of the man in the stall is Arabella’s memory and a sexual assault has taken place.
The narrative of I May Destroy You unfolds in such a way that we cannot fully distance ourselves from what is happening. When she is disoriented in the bar we are disoriented by the editing discussed previously. When Arabella has a blackout due to a spiked drink we experience something similar on a narrative level with the sudden jump forward to the next morning. When the memory of the assault comes to Arabella we experience it in a form that is just as abrupt as her realization. It refuses to let us see the sexual assault and the events that happen after as things happening to ‘that poor soul over there’. This kind of distancing is possible with more typical depictions of sexual assault which deal with the acts themselves and the perpetrators but not with how they affect the psychological state of the survivors. Throughout the rest of the series there are abrupt cuts back to the bathroom stall that come without warning. There are revelations about that night that also come abruptly since that brief flash cannot possibly be the full picture. We experience all these flashes and revelations along with Arabella, we cannot see her as a ‘poor soul’.
In episode 2 we see Arabella still trying to piece together what happened the previous night. She tells her best friend Terry that she has this “thing” in her head about a guy “doing something a bit dodge”. Arabella is clearly skirting around what the memory actually is and even shows Terry a video YouTube about false images in the brain. When more memories come to the surface and she investigates based on what Simon tells her happened that night, she comes to realize that her drink was spiked. She heads to the police station with her friend Kwame to report her realization. The supportive female officer she meets tries to convince her of the true nature of the memory. In fact, the officer has to convince her it is a memory in the first place. Arabella balks at the terms “assault” and “memory” being used to describe the “thing in her head”. When she finally accepts that the “thing in her head” is a memory of her sexual assault she is distraught.
During the course of a film or TV show the audience comes to identify with the protagonist in some way. What happens during the course of the narrative affects how we identify with the protagonist. We would identify with Arabella differently if I May Destroy You was, for example, a revenge story. Seeing Arabella painstakingly go through the mental process of acceptance helps the audience to see her as a character with more depth than simply being a vessel for trauma and revenge. Her reaction to the traumatic event is a natural one which brings the audience closer to her. The audience is invested in her finding healthy ways to cope with what happened.
Arabella still has to deal with friendships, romantic relationships, work and more, despite what has happened. The show does an excellent job of opening up to explore these aspects without losing the psychological core. In fact, having that psychological core allows for some fascinating commentary on the environment Arabella has to navigate. The easy way to do commentary would be to give the characters dialogue that would be the equivalent of the writer(s) standing in the room and explaining what the “message” of the episode is. I May Destroy You avoids this kind of commentary and allows the viewer to really consider the kind of environment in which such traumatic events happen too often.
In order to flesh out Arabella and other characters the show is not afraid to go off on tangents. This can mean dedicating an entire episode or almost an entire episode to flashbacks. In episode 3 we follow Arabella and Terry as they take a trip to Italy. At first watch the only important narrative information we get is how Arabella meets her boyfriend(?), Biagio. When we think more about the episode we get more insight into Arabella and Terry’s relationship dynamic, which will pay off later in the series. Episode 6 flashes back to Arabella and Terry’s school days and centers around their schoolmate, Theo, who falsely accuses their friend, Ryan, of sexual assault. What is interesting about this episode is that it starts off in the present day with Arabella attending a support group for sexual assault survivors that Theo has created.
Complex situations like in episode 6 abound where other shows would rather focus on clear dichotomies between perpetrators and survivors. Biagio, Arabella’s boyfriend(?), who has every opportunity to take advantage of her in episode 3 after a drunken night out but looks after her on her drunken wanderings and makes sure she gets home safe. When he learns about her assault, however, he blames her and tells her that she should have been watching her drink. It would have been much easier to have Biagio, upon hearing about the assault, be as caring and supportive as he was in episode 3. However, we know in real life that things are not always so simple.
Zain, a writer brought in to help Arabella finish her book, sexually assaults Arabella when they initially have sex by removing the condom without her consent. Right after the act Zain plays it off as a bit of miscommunication. They soon start dating. Arabella only finds out that what Zain did was sexual assault after hearing about it in a podcast. She publicly outs him as a rapist and he is ostracized from the literary community. What makes the situation complex is that Zain is very supportive of Arabella, he helps her to finish her book even after she publicly outs him. He does not blame her for the assault, unlike Biagio. Again, it would be easy to paint Zain as simply a callous rapist who would have no problem blaming her for the previous assault but the show complicates things by having him be supportive. With complex situations like these the show would rather have us focus on the complex environment in which terrible acts such as those depicted continue to persist rather than the “evildoers” who commit such acts.
Indeed, this is the environment that Arabella has to navigate. When she first comes to Theo’s support group what she says is very telling:
“I’m here to learn how to avoid being raped. There must be some way, because if there isn’t that means at anytime someone could just drag me into a bush and it would happen all over again and I’m…I just…I don’t know what kind of world that would be?”
Arabella finds it hard to accept that she has to live in an environment where she can be sexually assaulted more than once. She finds healthy ways to cope such as painting and yoga but there’s one way that is explored in episode 9 that might not be so healthy.
After she publicly outs Zain, Arabella becomes an online celebrity. People see her as a crusader against men like Zain and she embraces her new role with vigour. It soon becomes apparent that her new role is making things worse because people expect her to be strong all the time. They unload their trauma on her online while she is barely coping with her own. At an emergency therapy session her therapist can immediately see that social media is not helping her recovery. The therapist talks about how Arabella needs to process her feelings instead of simply pushing the negative, threatening ones to the side. She tells Arabella that pushing the negative feelings to the side draws a hard line between them and her perceived reality. It creates simple dichotomies like good and evil, men and women, criminal and victim. These dichotomies help us deflect from more complicated feelings like guilt and self-blame. Processing the more complicated feelings are essential to the stages of recovery and helps us to better understand ourselves. Social media is not conducive to processing these feelings because it reinforces the dichotomies that help us to deflect and leaves no room for nuance. Arabella takes a break from social media and begins to process the feelings she has been avoiding. It is interesting that this important step for Arabella comes in episode 9 of 12. I May Destroy You truly sees what she is going through as a process. We are asked to consider her psychological state and environment in a much closer manner than other shows that would have a character like her on a soapbox.
The ultimate example of Arabella processing her feelings is in the brilliant season finale. The episode has a strange structure as the story resets multiple times. We come to realize that these resets are Arabella working out and revising the structure of her book. We are inside her head for the majority of the episode. There are three distinct storylines within the episode that give insight into how she is processing her feelings. The first storyline is a standard revenge narrative that involves using the assaulter’s drug against him, following him until he passes out, sexually assaulting him, beating him to death when he suddenly wakes up and stashing his body under her bed. The second storyline involves baiting the assaulter into assaulting again with the intention of having Terry call the police to catch him in the act but then having a change of heart. She brings the assaulter back to her house to talk to him, but the police arrive and take him away. The third storyline reimagines the whole night as a consensual encounter.
Over the course of the storylines it is not immediately clear whether the assaulter’s name is David or Patrick. In the first and third storylines he introduces himself as Patrick but given the situation he would obviously give a fake name and Arabella does not look like she believes him in each instance. In the second storyline the assaulter calls himself David when he has the breakdown that prompts Arabella to take him home. From this we can assume that his name is David. It is important to note that since the episode takes place mostly in Arabella’s mind that David is a mental construct and not the actual assaulter. Her shifting relationship towards him shows how Arabella is processing her feelings toward that night. David goes from dead and under the bed, to sitting on the bed, to having sex with Arabella on the bed. Shoving David under the bed is an unhealthy way of dealing with what happened as her therapist noted in episode 9. Letting David sit on the bed is a healthier way of facing what happened, as uncomfortable as it may be. The discomfort is shown by David asking Arabella why he is allowed to sit on her bed and saying that it isn’t right. However, David also says he does not know how to act since she is not scared anymore. He cannot torment her as freely as he could before. Having sex with David is the healthiest way to deal with what happened because it is a form of integration. She cannot change what has happened to her but she can change how it affects her. She gains mastery over what has tormented her throughout the series. She penetrates David. In the morning after, David says he can only leave if she tells him to leave so she tells him to go. The David in her bed and the David under it both walk out. He no longer has a stranglehold on her. She can walk on the beach and breathe again.