She accepted the award dressed in a traditional Ghanian kente-cloth gown designed by her mom.įor what it’s worth, Coel doesn’t put too much stock into the BAFTA recognition. The show was a hit in its native Britain, and in 2016, Coel was awarded with a BAFTA for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme. Much of this was directly owed to Coel’s very physical performance, which constantly found her pushing against the walls of respectability, whether she was sucking someone’s nose as foreplay or seductively sticking chopsticks down her cleavage. Cringe comedy in the truest sense, Chewing Gum was as deliberately unsettling as it was uproariously funny.
Like I May Destroy You, Coel also created, wrote, and starred in the Channel 4 sitcom. It's this beautiful mesh and it's so hard to articulate and dissect.”Ĭoel initially broke out with Chewing Gum, an irreverent mid-2010s comedy about Tracey Gordon, a 24-year-old woman determined to lose her virginity. “As it began to do that, it began to hold a mirror up to me, which is where it does become quite meta, in that it becomes very hard to know where Arabella is beginning and where I'm ending. It’s no wonder, then, that Coel, speaking to me from London over Zoom last month, referred to her experience writing the show as “incredibly therapeutic.” “The show definitely made me think very deeply about my perspective of the world and of myself,” she said. A precisely-crafted protagonist created to serve as a cipher for reliving Coel’s trauma, Arabella can confront her rapist in person and on the page. Coel may not ever get the justice she wants from the man who assaulted her, but Arabella can. Each imagined scenario, it turned out, was a cognitive projection of a possible denouement to the novel Arabella had spent the entire season struggling to finish.īut it also felt cathartic, a clear testament to the power of art and its ability to offer us all the opportunity to rewrite our own histories.
Finale of i may destroy you tv#
Utterly transfixing in its execution, it was one of the most thoughtful conclusions for a TV show that always seemed impossible to close out. I May Destroy You’s first eleven episodes were also dizzyingly hypnotic, but the finale, in particular, played out like a Lynchian fever-dream - it stopped and restarted with no warning, morphing from one imagined reality to another while forgoing any delineation between them, trusting that the audience would eventually pick it up. It takes a while to register that these are merely mental renderings of fictional scenarios.
Finale of i may destroy you series#
From there, the episode then distorts into a series of dreamlike sequences, tracing Arabella as she imagines confronting her assailant in a number of different ways. Immediately, the once-foggy memory of what, exactly, befell her that fateful night crystallizes into clear focus. In the finale, Arabella finally recognizes the man who drugged and raped her in the pilot.
In its pursuit to tell the story of writer’s block-addled author Arabella Essiedu and her efforts to process the trauma of a rape she barely remembers, the freshman HBO series - a meta examination of creator, writer and star Michaela Coel’s own experience with sexual assault - has consistently upended expectations.īut in its closing half-hour, the show warps into something even more spellbinding. I May Destroy You can only be described as beguiling.
0 kommentar(er)
