The words appear as if typed on a screen, the blinking cursor at the end awaiting its next command. The hypercompetent police that she dreamed of all along then arrive, to save her from a man much weaker than she is. After each of these two possible endings, Arabella tacks a new index card to the storyboard for her autobiographical writing project, feeling out how well they satisfy.What hit me first was how the title edits itself. He mutters terrifying threats to himself - menacing warnings that imply his own past sexual victimization - and the oblique back story, combined with the spectacle of his psychopathy, turns the narrative’s spotlight from the survivor to the perpetrator, so much so that even Arabella is forced to show him kindness. The episode then returns to the moment Arabella has recognized her rapist, and when she confronts him in the stall about what he’s done to her, he psychologically crumples. She then drags his bleeding body to her home, where she hides him under the bed - the place where she puts everything she doesn’t want to deal with. The trio pilfer his drugs, lure him into a bathroom stall, then inject him with his own sedative, leaving him to stumble into the night until they reach an empty street, where Arabella exposes his genitals and beats him unconscious.
#I may destroy you stealthing scene series#
With the help of Terry and their old classmate/new friend Theodora (Harriet Webb), another survivor of abuse, Arabella pulls off a series of ruses. The concluding episode begins with a grotesque girl-power exercise, in which Arabella changes into a platinum wig and a shiny, tiny, black dress that Catwoman would’ve worn during her clubbing days. It’s I May Destroy You‘s self-assured specificity - or rather, the stylized departure from it - that first tips us off that the finale will comprise a series of fakeouts. But the series is also shockingly warm, life-affirming and subversively funny given its central subject matter, in part because of Coel’s go-for-broke comic performance, and in part because her character is situated in a bracing and lovingly sketched milieu of Black struggling creatives. Most poignantly, she’s briefly asked to reconsider her friendship with Terry, who’d left her vulnerable at the bar, then kept that fact from Arabella for several months. She’s forced to reconsider who she is - “prior to being raped, I never took much notice of being a woman I was busy being Black and poor,” she says - as well as the world around her. Coel uses the expansive canvas of television to explore the many different thoughts, emotions and reactions Arabella undergoes in the year after her assault, from her initial denial and minimization of her own pain (“there’s a war in Syria”) to speaking out against Zain and fomenting social-media outrage. I May Destroy You has been equally refreshing in its wide-ranging depiction of the psychological aftermath of rape, which for Arabella becomes a life-swerving incident, yet hardly the totality of who she is. The show is also sensitive to the relative privilege that law enforcement accords female victims like Arabella vis a vis gay (Black) men like her friend Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), who’s further hampered by a hard-to-categorize sexual assault. The series is attuned to rape’s many incarnations, including Zain’s (Karan Gill) non-consensual condom removal, or “stealthing” - an act that Arabella initially doesn’t even realize constitutes sexual assault. With I May Destroy You, Coel set out to tell a kind of rape narrative that had been seldom told before, one whose freshness is as striking as the show’s Black British hipster milieu, its children-of-African-immigrants characters and its timely tale of a pop feminist writer who’s woefully naive about male manipulation. Conspicuous is the absence of stories that reflect the humanity and resilience of survivors - and the spectrum of sexual assault that can make rape not just a deeply painful experience, but an unexpectedly confusing one, too. Other narratives have rendered sexual assault a metamorphosing event - or, perhaps more accurately, an annihilating one - in which victims become vengeance machines, as in the rape-revenge genre.
Traditionally, too many stories have underplayed female trauma by using a woman’s rape primarily as an impetus for a male hero’s actions. I May Destroy You premiered amid a renewed debate about how film and television should depict rape and sexual assault - an issue that gained greater urgency after the #MeToo movement. As the series writer, creator and co-director, Coel grappled with precisely those questions in her semi-autobiographical drama’s cerebral yet satisfying finale, which evokes the difficulty of finding closure after trauma while indicting the unnaturalness and repulsiveness of the answers so often offered up by pop culture.
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