Who hasn’t been there? A deadline looms, but inspiration won’t come. In the pilot of “I May Destroy You,” a mesmerizing twelve-episode series for HBO and BBC One, written and co-directed by the aggressively free-minded Michaela Coel, Arabella (Coel), a young East London writer who owes her book agents a draft, abandons her laptop and slips into the night—just for an hour. She and an acquaintance drift to a place called Ego Death Bar. A late-night crew parties and shares a round of shots. At some point, the bar begins to disintegrate and blur. Arabella dizzily claws her way to the door. Is the scene comedic? Then a temporal blackness: Arabella bolts awake at her writing desk, a gash on her forehead. Somehow, she meets her deadline, but the next day a reel of horrible action colonizes her brain: a man, sweating and panting, thrusting in a bathroom stall. It will be a while before she can acknowledge that the image is a memory. Many of us have been there.
Coel, who is thirty-two, was born to Ghanaian parents and grew up in East London public housing with her mother and sister. A prodigiously talented writer, director, showrunner, and actor, she has an anthropological interest in all kinds of physical congress, in what happens when one body encounters another. In 2015, she made “Chewing Gum,” a joyful series adapted from a one-woman play she wrote while in acting school, in which she portrayed Tracey Gordon, an awkward virgin fanatically attempting to shed her chastity. Tracey’s entrance into womanhood is a cringe comedy: dressed in nauseating tribal costume, she dances for a white paramour, the seduction a hilarious failure of grunts and flailing limbs. Coel is an astonishingly inventive physical performer; a cerebral clown, she brings to mind, in her wiriness, and her willingness to contort her angular face, both Lucille Ball and Kim Wayans. Coel treats sex as slapstick and desire as an embarrassment, and finds a freedom in abjection. This black woman cannot live, or create, in the margins.
Like “Chewing Gum,” which drew on an early-adult dalliance Coel had with Christianity, “I May Destroy You” is a semi-fictional portrait of the artist and her social world. In 2018, Coel revealed that she had been drugged and assaulted while working on Season 2 of “Chewing Gum.” Arabella, like Coel until a few years ago, lives in a cluttered East London flat with a gentle white male roommate, Ben (Stephen Wight), who supports her like a piece of old furniture. Coel and Sam Miller direct the series with an unaffected intimacy—we hardly notice how many shots of Arabella feature her sitting on the toilet, her panties hugging her calves. Arabella has improvised a family in her mates Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), a gay aerobics instructor with a Grindr addiction, and Terry (Weruche Opia), an aspiring actress. The world of these characters, who have scrambled together their own avant-garde, feels lived-in. Combat boots are scuffed; there’s not a lot of money, but everyone wants to be seen, flirted with, consumed. Arabella carries with her a trippy ikat-print bomber jacket like a comfort blanket, and loves her pink ombré wig like someone who’s been told that she alone can get away with wearing such a flashy thing.
Essiedu and Opia are understated and frequently superb, while Coel channels her enormous energy into a standout performance. A wreck of charisma, Arabella dodges inquiries about the status of her book, willing her white agents into shell-shocked submission. At a trashy night club in Ostia, Italy, where Arabella sojourns with Terry on the publishing agency’s dime, she gets high on “ket” and coke and upstages the go-go dancers. She lives precariously, attracting bemused protectors; as she staggers out of the night club, the moralizing drug dealer Biagio (Marouane Zotti) follows her home, picking up the house keys that she drops, and later becomes her on-off boyfriend. As ever, in Coel’s hands, cheer can turn to darkness in an instant. Soon after her night at Ego Death Bar, Arabella, realizing what must have happened, calls Terry: “Yo, T., I just got spiked, you know.” At the police station, she describes to two kindly female officers the image that has been replaying in her mind. “Who is he looking at?” one of the policewomen asks. Arabella, who has been quipping and alert, suddenly shrinks and crumbles, hiding her face in her sweater.
Arabella’s philosophy of art is distinct from that of her creator. Explaining her career path, she tells another writer, “Everyone on Twitter was, like, ‘You should make a book.’ ” For Arabella—the author of the self-published “Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial,” drawn from her viral tweets—writing is either something to avoid or an act of improvisational bombast. Her black fans often stop her on the street, shouting her pithy sayings back to her. Coel, by contrast, a meticulous psychological observer, resists rhetoric; her ear is so attuned to the rhythm of East London chatter that, when characters talk shit to one another, it feels not written but overheard.
“I May Destroy You” is a beguiling study of friendship and casual trauma and writing as a path—albeit not a simple one—to reinvention. The arc of the narrative deals with the aftermath of Arabella’s assault. She tries not to dwell on it. “I just make sure I’m around someone, anyone,” she tells her therapist. “If I’m not, I say, ‘There are hungry children . . . not everyone has a smartphone.” On the therapist’s advice, she takes up painting. She experiences panic on seeing a waiter serve glasses of water in a hotel lobby. She shaves her head, then goes back to the wig. Her symptoms blend into the usual chaos of her adult life, becoming baggage and also momentum. “I May Destroy You” embraces sprawling tangents, and these further furnish its nonjudgmental world view. Two episodes take us back to Arabella’s adolescence, in which she and Terry act as unwitting protectors of the entitled black teen-age boys around them. In another episode, an adult Arabella grapples with the memory of her rolling-stone father’s infidelity. Coel exerts a kinetic control over the story’s many threads and characters—especially the calm Kwame, the attitudinal opposite of Arabella, who is also a victim of sexual assault. The tone is never stable. “I May Destroy You” is a hangout vehicle, a detective story, a nonlinear travelogue, and a comic bildungsroman. Because Coel focusses on hustling black women and black queer people, I could say that the show is political, but mostly the writing steers away from didacticism. It resides in the gray areas of the post-liberation sexual economy: the punishingly banal moment when a consensual hookup between two men turns forceful; the awkward atmosphere when a gay black man goes stealth, thinking that he can find safety in a white woman, who, in turn, fetishizes black men.
In “I May Destroy You,” violation is the omnipresent, cultural weather. Coel treats perpetrators with curiosity, and refuses to infantilize or pity the victims. In the fourth episode, Arabella’s exasperated agents suggest that she confer with a Cambridge graduate, Zain (Karan Gill), also a writer. At the meeting, Arabella blushes as he finishes her sentences. The two end up having sex; Zain removes the condom without Arabella’s consent. At first, Arabella is merely annoyed that she has to take a morning-after pill, and they start dating. But later, listening to a podcast for sexual-assault survivors, Arabella concludes that Zain breached a boundary. At an event for writers hosted by her publishing company, she takes the stage and outs him publicly. “He is a rapist,” she says, high on her strange new power. “Not rape-adjacent, or a bit rape-y—he’s a rapist.” Her dramatic speech breaks the Internet, and she becomes a sort of rape-survivor influencer, a phenomenon of our confused time. Isn’t it the dark genius of many black women artists to turn their hardship into material? Her gift is the ability to create communion around the particularities of her race, her gender, her voice. When Arabella suggests that she pivot the topic of her book, her publisher, a haughty black woman, shouts, “Rape! Fantastic!” Later, Arabella develops a queasy friendship with an old high-school acquaintance, Theo (portrayed with eerie subtlety by Harriet Webb and, in flashback, Gaby French), who runs a therapy group for sexual-assault survivors, and who similarly draws on victimhood for affirmation.
In the so-called #MeToo era, there is a basic hunger for narratives of sexual assault and consent. How can artists maintain their creative dignity when encouraged to exploit their own selves? Coel’s honest mimicry of empowerment talk, and her depiction of the murky appeal of the social-media outrage cycle, at times approach the satirical. Toward the end of the series, some of its daring tonal ambiguity is lost, as plotlines are coerced into social commentary. But at its best this show is abrasively psychological; it is, as all good art can be, “triggering,” because it sounds and feels and moves the way we do. In Coel’s universe, as in ours, pleasurable experiences are everywhere imperilled, always risky, always subject to audit. And yet we yearn for experience. We tend toward survival and evolution. We put our trauma to use. We finish the goddam book. ♦
