Janet Wilson, Emerita Professor at University of Northampton and Visiting Professor at BCU, reflects on the brilliance of Michaela Coel's award-winning series I May Destroy You.
Michaela Coel (creator of Chewing Gum) wrote, directed and starred in this 12 episode series (for BBC1 and HBO) that played in June 2020, during COVID lockdowns, but the threat of the pandemic does not disturb its ground breaking approach to more deeply entrenched issues: black female self empowerment and sexual violence.
These meant the series met many of the concerns about the reception of Black British and British Asian screen culture voiced by DSMN members at the first network workshop held February 2020 just as the pandemic was manifesting: i.e. the need for greater artistic freedom in creating broader representation and a wider range of characters according to the intersectional categories of ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, especially LGBTQ1.
From all these angles the series’ take on the millennial generation made it the perfect choice for the DSMN catch up session held in December, when the network was officially on pause due to COVID, and we got together to keep the conversation alive. The series sparked a great discussion that took in its multiple narrative threads and cast of characters in their 30s who live, work, holiday and party together, and find their ways in the professional worlds of arts, health and fitness, corporate business, and acting.
A risk-taking triumph
Set in Soho, London with a little Italy thrown in for extra spice, I May Destroy You is not afraid of risk taking in the form of the bold, explicit gesture: the visceral reactions of the protagonist Arabella as she deals with her own excesses, and then her emotional crisis caused by what turns out to be a sexual violation due to her drink being spiked. This mystery holds the plot together and opens up a darker transgressive side as she has to face the fact that someone who shares her world, who she considers a friend, may have been responsible.
The series introduces confronting images of the bar and club culture, the mix of alcohol and drugs that become doorways into the intertwined intimacies of Arabella and her circle –such as her friend Terry, an aspiring actress, and Kwame, a gay guy who is an aerobics instructor.
It follows their career hopes and disappointments, sexual and friendship intimacies, and in Arabella’s case after she realises what has happened to her, post trauma therapy. These insights into how they determine where their responsibilities lie and how to define them, gives voice to the millennial generation making its way in present day London.
Assessing human relations
Underpinning I May Destroy You are issues of consent and transgression as experienced by a socially permissive circle. There are scenes of touching but withdrawal, of pleasure ending in violence, moments of regret, and the difficulty of differentiating between what will satisfy and what is unwanted. This is about malleability in human relations: boundaries stretch and contract as characters navigate the tricky social landscapes they inhabit, marked by evasion rather than transgression, and as they register what counts as a violation.
Mobile technology is the glue that holds together their conversations and separations and enables new professional and personal connections: Kwame uses the dating app Grindr: mobile phones and laptops realise aspirations and negotiate deals.
Arabella has made her name from publishing a book constructed from her twitter blogs, called Confessions of a Fed Up Millennium: after late night writing on her follow up script, she leaves the lonely haven of her laptop but even though with friends finds next day that her world has begun to crash in ways unimaginable in the fiction she is writing. There is a subtle divide along class and ethnicity: the white characters, her agent and his business partner who are managing her new book, associated with the world of publishing, present a more nervy, concerned but responsible image.
There are also reversals with Arabella’s black friend, a habitue of Soho bars with a wife and mistress, who transforms into a corporate boss by day.
Fast and furious, this series drew me in and although it was eyebrow raising to watch the excesses of this highly interconnected circle (invoking memories of my own misspent youth), I empathised with their feelings and struggles: Terry blows her interview, Kwame is raped, but Arabella at first a victim overcomes her destabilising experience by her determined search for the truth.
In fact, her very professional identity as writer shows the value of piecing together a narrative in such dilemmas: it makes more comprehensible what has happened.
Creative response
Michaela Coel, like other black artists, has said that when she was growing up in East London she could find no role models for someone like herself in the media, a sentiment echoed by some of the young female members of the DSMN. I May Destroy You is a brilliant creative response to this lacuna.
The production has been greatly admired for its risk taking and ground breaking daring, and in 20 September 2021 Coel became the first Black woman to take home an Emmy for Best Writing in a Limited Series (the series received six primetime Emmy nominations) in what has been described as an historic win; she has dedicated the story ‘to every single survivor of sexual assault’.
This is a charismatic, strong and cinematically arresting series, with unexpected complexities and angles, by turns tender, provocative, poetic.