I May Destroy You - Michaela Coel

xp to FGTI a new, agented author would always be discouraged from independently getting in touch with their powerful publisher by their agency while technically in breach of their contract, and British literary culture is very funny about directness. If a writer has burned through her signature advance, it is especially infra dig to ask one’s publisher to release more funds, and the richer the publisher the more offended they’ll be.

Everyone in British publishing knows a Susy Henny and it was hilarious to watch UK writers on Twitter fully cringe when faced with the character.

one notable thing in the school flashback episode was how well the young actress channelled the older version of Terri. Quite remarkable. I think it was just about the only thing I liked in that episode, tbh, although I did appreciate the series on the whole.

You didn’t appreciate Babycakes on the soundtrack?

oh yes! haha.

@ suzy ahh ok that makes sense. Yeah I couldn't read if the conversation about houseplants that preceded Bella getting dropped was ingenuous or not-- if Suzy was "having a moment" before letting her go, or if her decision to let Suzy go was strictly to try and cover up the fact that Suzy had kept Zain on. Agree with Tracer Hand that it's likely all of these things put together.

just finished the last episode and bawled through most of it. this is an immensely rare thing Coel has made, utterly devastating and terribly clever, funny and painful and sharp and complicated and totally unique. I'm really kind of in awe. So I guess now I'll read the thread and some of her interviews.

Morning, I wrote this https://t.co/2q5K7ZWzxJ

— Bolu Babalola (@BeeBabs) August 4, 2020

Ignoring what is clearly a cry for help, Biagio has rejected Arabella’s impulsive visit and manipulatively locked her out of his home.

that episode just filled me with dread, start to finish.

Watching it tonight, in for a treat :)

i think it's pretty reasonable to describe that episode as an emotional breakdown for Bella moreso than a cry for help.

When she sheepishly states that she has left her passport in his apartment, he wordlessly, coldly slides it to her beneath his door. It’s a moment that slices into sinews. In response, she jolts, physically rocked by his rejection.

“Wow,” she says, in a moment of quiet, stunned realisation. And, as if this is not enough, she chases it with “Rah.”

Your invert the sexes point makes no sense when the show has done its best to show everyone’s side, even the rapist’s. Biagio is a prick too, he blamed Bella for her rape!

He also fucked her when she was off her face and he was stone cold sober.

That said I'm not surprised in the slightest that he kicked her out of his flat.

Oh yeah totally, he’d been ghosting her for ages!

She was imagining this grand love story where none existed because it suited her to believe that, because nothing else was going right, because it was Italy, because he came through and delivered evidence, and she latched onto that like it was some highly significant token of his love, when from the very beginning we've seen that he doesn't really give a shit. It's true that he called... what, a couple of times? I guess when he was bored or lonely himself. But that was it. And yes everything ulysses says - I was shouting at the TV, like 'OF COURSE THIS HAPPENED! JESUS!!!'

When you see how she deceived herself about her father as a child...

He was calling her repeatedly in earlier episodes, though. She was initially totally ghosting him. All of which makes me keener to remember what they were arguing about right at the start of Episode 1.

Your invert the sexes point makes no sense when the show has done its best to show everyone’s side, even the rapist’s.

Bf pointed out last night that “James, the rapist” existed entirely as fantasy— Bella never actually positively identified him, except in fantasy. His identity, personality characteristics (and even his specific culpability) are all projections. I felt the point was that Bella played out a few scenarios and then opted, instead, to stop trying to find him— going to Ego Death every night was not an act of healing.

I didn’t think Biagio/Bella was a gender-role inversion. The couple just had a different dynamic— Biagio as low-key nice guy with a sober-predatory edge and an outdated attitude toward rape culpability— I remembered being told by Italian friends that culturally they generally have an “it’s your own fault” attitude toward over-consumption and it was normal practice to abandon a male friend if they got too fucked up in public— and Bella believing they had a major connection that was part her own continental fantasy, part escape-from-trauma, and part entitled fixation.

Can't go by
A man from
Ostia

Hey Ninetto

Remember that
Dream
We talked about
It
So many times

I kept thinking about that mainly because I didn't know exactly where Ostia was and that was my sole Ostia reference.

Still waiting for some context on brain grass and long long eye gas over here

Yes, it was not even mentioned.

Alphie did you finish this in the end?

Yes I finished it last saturday at like 1am or something. Have scrambled thoughts I might put down sometime.

This just ended in the U.S. last night. Amazing final episode.

yeah, it fucked me up and i think about it fairly regularly.

far and away the best show i've seen this year. i love how deeply we got to know arabella, and how the show explained her behavior but never apologized for it. and i appreciated how, after all the things she tried to cope with her assaults, the thing that finally put her on the right path was good old-fashioned talk therapy.

also the soundtrack was cool as fuck.

lol as someone for whom talk therapy has helped overall, that was not the conclusion I took from that.

idk, bella a clear attitude/outlook attitude shift after that moment that allowed her to step outside herself a bit and be more open with the poeple in her life.

It's much more complex and muddier than that, I mean one of things that puts her on the path to getting her book written is literally sitting down and talking about the writing process with her rapist and I don't think many people would recommend that as an approach.

Show is fairly explicit that writing through it is a big part of thinking and rethinking and processing it all.

xp oh for sure, the show definitely doesn't posit anything as a panacea, and all three main characters process their assaults and resulting traumas in healthy and (mostly) unhealthy ways. i think i just really liked that scene and how coel's performance shifted afterward.

Yeah it's unclear how much of even the penultimate episode actually happens or whether it's part of her own writing process.

I think I liked that it resisted any kind of takeaway. There was some painful processing of experience, but ultimately stuff got done -- that she needed her rapist to take away her writing block I realise quite a brutal expression of what it is to do stuff, sometimes -- life goes on and we keep muddling through the disaster.

i think this show will come to define its year which is a hell of a feat for something filmed prior to and without mentioning covid.

I always think this show is called "Allow Me to Destroy You" because of this fairly obscure track from 1981, which I think about every time it comes up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7bOImSiE1A

But the real title is interesting, nonetheless. I May Destroy You (It's up to me).

I think there is a lot of delusion in there. People have a go at destruction but they fail at that, or end up being used more than using.

i thought it was a comment on how any close personal connection can eventually end in intense pain

I May Destroy You (It's not up to me).

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0arolGdyR8wkSGaawcKHkD?si=KNl5EIyZSf2WrOFNIyK4vQ
LOuis tHeorux;s lockdown broadcast has returned with michaela as first guest for the 2nd series

Also available as a podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p089sfrz/episodes/downloads

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Finished this a couple of nights back. Absolutely astonishing really and I can't stop thinking about it, getting flashes of scenes and clips of dialogue wafting up from my subconscious. Current obsessions are the family scene at Arabella's mums, which was so beautiful and heartbreakingly real (she comes out of the bedroom, having discussed her dad's infidelities *and* her rape and not only cuddles her dad but serves him food. I broke down at that point) and the final jump-shot of the roof garden. That could have been a clumsy rendering of the growth metaphor but it totally worked (I love how she undercuts her own metaphor with the whole scene in Susy's office, it's like, 'yes, I know my metaphor is cheesy and look, in other hands, it's totally wanky, what you going to do?').

I've been thinking about the birdsong that presages her visions in the final episode. It sounds vaguely mechanical but also *could* be a nightingale at a push. I've been pondering the significance but can't get much beyond it being a Keats reference (Lethe-wards had sunk or half in love with easeful death). Anyway, what a fucking triumph.

Finally got around to this, finished it last night, and nothing to add to the superlatives up thread except more superlatives. It does so many things so well, and goes deep on so many different themes and ideas. Even without more time to process it, I can confidently call it one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV.

Finally watched this. As good as billed, if not better.

I think it's one of things, now I've seen it, I'm gonna be watching most other shows and thinking "well it's good, but it's not i may destroy you good"

I watched this over the summer and completely agree.

better than billed and it was billed as very very good.

its astonishing that it came out of relatively nowhere, Michela Coel deserves every accolade she got this.

Better than Chewing gum so wonder where she will go next.
Hope we get to find out before too long.