I May Destroy You Essay: Related - ‘Better Call Saul’ and Mechanisms of Obsessional Neurosis It introduces its viewer to a narrative situation defined by the exact impending instability they will soon pinpoint the source of. One assumes details about Arabella’s romantic relationship in Italy but might be confused by her mumbled aside during the exchange with Biagio (Marouane Zotti): “So… are we boyfriend and girlfriend?” The uncertainty is consolidated by his response to her attempts of ensuring a fixed line of contact: “When I’m ready to call you, I call.” In these early moments, I May Destroy You undermines its own scene setting responsibilities by reverse engineering and foreshadowing Arabella’s fractured post-traumatic experience. ![]() The audience is already invited to look closer and ask questions despite not knowing where the drama is headed, or when exactly it is headed, if they do have prior knowledge of the subject matter. I May Destroy You wastes no time demonstrating its own narrative instability - geographically, professionally (on Arabella’s terms) and socially (on her friends’ - after Terry and Ben, viewers quickly meet an entirely different group on Arabella’s first night out back). In this time, Arabella has received multiple phone calls from her agent probing for second book draft progress. Here, by the time the episode mid-point is reached, she has returned to where Terry and flatmate Ben (Stephen Wight) are waiting. Under this internal logic, the series immediately slices up its geography into distinct dramatic spheres: the viewer is introduced to Arabella in Italy, saying goodbye to an ostensible boyfriend before she is transported back to her hometown of London. In its first moments in episode one (“Eyes Eyes Eyes Eyes”), I May Destroy You establishes an equilibrium only to devote the rest of a television season to unravelling it. Memory is what ties episode 12 back to one, drawing on the 11 in-between as reference points. I May Destroy You Essay: Related - Know the Cast & Characters: ‘She Said’įirst, however, Arabella must remember what that criminal looks like. Arabella tells best friend Terry (Weruche Opia) her reasoning when the stage is being set for reencountering her rapist, in the opening moments of the season finale: “A criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.” She replays the night in her head alongside visits to the Soho bar she last remembers being at. Armed with friends, therapy and the officers assigned to her case, Arabella pieces herself back together over 12 half-hour episodes while tracking down her male attacker. Coel creates, produces, writes, directs and stars as Arabella Essiedu, a Twitter-sensation-turned-novelist who tries to rebuild her life after being raped on a night out in London. The epitome of their contributions to this debate and of their storytelling experiments is Michaela Coel’s masterful I May Destroy You, a miniseries which debuted on BBC One and HBO in the summer of 2020. These and other #MeToo works vary in approach, style and quality. As for cinema, notable releases include Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, an ambitious revenge comedy that was nominated for five Academy Awards in 2021, Kitty Green’s The Assistant(2019), an impressive exercise in narrative economy poised between fact and fiction, skewering the elephant in the room while he is entirely absent from it, and last year’s She Said, the Maria Schrader film that directly tackles the Weinstein case. ![]() Another televisual example would be The Morning Show (2019-), starring Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell and centered on a fictionalized equivalent of the Weinstein case. Films and television series have showed no hesitation in addressing #MeToo head-on - take Jay Roach’s Bombshell (2019), based on the accounts of the Fox News women victim to CEO Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment, or the more effective The Loudest Voice, the miniseries released in the same year tackling the same case. Retaliation has taken many forms, but one of the most purposeful has been within cultural production itself. We have been left wondering how they were able to ruin so many women’s lives so easily. For five years, spectators have been left wondering whether the men bred by this broken system have daughters, wives, mothers. It is a wake-up call signaling how workplace abuse will no longer be tolerated, concerning the world of producers, directors and actors responsible for how we give our lives and money to the small or big screen. But the list of names that have fallen from grace post-Weinstein represent a vital opening of the floodgates. ![]() In the five years since the allegations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse, the #MeToo explosion has exposed widespread toxic masculinity in its most frightening form - as the big entertainment business’ head of the table, as the fabric holding together the entire cultural sector.
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