Hit Or Miss: Michaela Coel May Destroy You
Michaela Coel, after her debut success with Chewing Gum, in which a 24-year-old virgin grapples with religion and desire, gathered a cult following with its surreal yet extremely relatable portray of sexual mishaps, unveils another project to discuss the line between vulnerability and the fluidity of consent in the world of modern dating. In part based on her own life, Coel created I May Destroy You (BBC One) as a story to highlight life post-trauma, as we follow Arabella (played by Michaela Coel) through the London nightlife with her friends, coping with assault, and attempting to reclaim the narrative as a Black female writer.
Arabella, a successful author of a bestseller and a Millennial struggling to finish her project, finds herself distracted by a break-turned-into-nigh-out with her friends: Kwame (Paapa Eddiedu), avid Grindr user, and Terry (Weruche Opia), an aspiring actress. After a night of ostentatious amount of alcohol, Arabella is left with flashes of memory the next morning: struggling to stay upright around the bar, then a man in a bathroom stall assaulting her. The evident physical trauma in addition to the scarce memory leads to Arabella going to the hospital for a sexual assault forensic exam, where she met another lady who asked her whether it was her “first time.” Their exchange on the rooftop of the hospital is filled with recognition, and honestly telling for the female experience—we all go through this, and it will happen more than once.
In effort to recover, Arabella finds herself in a group therapy, where she realizes sexual experiences always end up in a “grey area.” This is a struggle within the Millennial hive mind. The well-informed conversation about consent files absent in the heat of sexual desire, during which this generation has learned to communicate without words. The divulgence of wants and needs without language leaves everything up for subjective interpretation. This nature of hookup culture reserves a dangerous space for predators, which many are aware of while omitting the risks for a rush moment of pleasure.
As she attempt to write her story, Arabella is stuck between “fighting exploitation of any kind” and “being exploited” by herself for creativity. Coel also had to navigate this while writing the series. As a writer and survivor of sexual assault, Coel adapted a semi-autobiographical struggle into I May Destroy You. As portrayed, writing about and constantly reliving the assault is suffocating. Coel emphasized the importance of writer’s breaks during her interview with The Guardian. She also brought men onto the journey while writing this show in which sexual consent is a major topic. "The conversation around consent is often about women,” Coel said, “men are sometimes scared of saying the wrong thing.” Creativity produces perspectives and discovers subjectives, which aids the often unseen bodies with newfound voices and power to reclaim the narrative. With this project, Coel has accomplished exactly that.
It is impossible to avoid the discussion of how Black men and women are viewed amidst the current political atmosphere. The killing of a Black man, George Floyd, at the knee of police, summons a global rage towards the systematic racism that has hurt and murdered many like him for generations. Coel has created another series that is unapologetically herself: Black, funny, sexual and layered. Her experience as a Black British woman in London born to Ghanaian parents, as an artist who found success in many public platforms, and as someone who feels liberated in her work, elevates the series out of salvation for the white gaze and into a new age for Black creatives. I May Destroy You is on the horizon to be one of the best drama series in 2020, not just because of the heated political air sweeping across nations, or the well-written characters and plots the audience can identify their pride and prejudice with; Michaela Coel established a space in and out of I May Destroy You, to work her humor into writing, words into characters, and ideas into revolutions.
“Where does it go?”
The trailer leaves us with this question. Where does it go for a survivor? Where does it go for a a creative? Where does it go for a believer in change? The need for action fuels those stuck between the history and the future, outdated supremacy needs to be overturned in order for change to manifest in an authentic environment. Coel has dedicated the work in I May Destroy You to that process. The world of television is going through a long overdue cultural reset, and Michaela Coel is one to follow for a new generation of excellence in media.