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What ‘I May Destroy You’ Got About Millennials That ‘Girls’ Didn’t
HBO’s series about women on the verge have come a long way in the last decade
In the pilot episode of I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s stunning rape mystery-dramedy for HBO by way of the BBC, Twitter-famous author Arabella Essiedu (Coel) takes what is meant to be an hour-long writing break from her book deadline to meet a friend at a bar. (Spoiler alert, this article is about to discuss all episodes of the series.) Not long into the night, she blacks out from a spiked drink, is left by the friend she’d gone out to meet, and is raped by a stranger in a bathroom stall. This story is lifted from Coel’s own life. Four years ago, during a writing break taken while working overnight on her first television series — the partially autobiographical Chewing Gum, about a religious virgin desperate for sex — Coel’s drink was spiked and she was raped by two strangers, later managing to finish her script post-assault in the haze of a drug-induced blackout.
I May Destroy You is a master class in what happens when you write what you know. Its entire season is a study in sexual assault and trauma recovery, ending in a Run Lola Run-esque rape revenge fantasy sequence in which Arabella plays out a few different versions of what she might do given the opportunity to confront her rapist. She could drug him, stalk him, violate him, and beat him to a bloody pulp (a catharsis reminiscent of Margaux Hemingway’s final few scenes in the 1976 film Lipstick); or she could bring him home and listen to his story, understand the cycle of abuse, that hurt people hurt people, and in this find compassion; or, she could bring him home for some history-rewriting consensual sex. The last two daydreams are calmer, more self-possessed, the types of fantasies one might be capable of entertaining only after a lot of trauma therapy. Fitting, then, for these to be the penultimate images in the series finale, the concluding mood in Arabella’s year of helter-skelter self-care and recovery.
