Just when you thought millennials might have been finito with bum-rushing the spotlight to secure their “me me me” place in the sun, Michaela Coel pushes any hope Gen Z might have of saying something impactful aside with I May Destroy You, the title itself being, in part, a reference to the destruction of one’s ego, particularly the ultra impenetrable millennial ego. After the success of Chewing Gum, which aired from 2015-2017, Coel has taken her gift for the autobiographical to new, slightly less comedic (which isn’t to say the humor isn’t still very much there) heights in a narrative that acts as a sort of whodunit for finding out the culprit responsible for spiking Arabella Essiedu’s (Coel) drink while at a bar called, what else, Ego Death (the perfect symbolic name for the millennial generation). Except that the show is less mystery and more gradual psychological “denuding” as Arabella deals with the fallout of waking up the following morning and wanting so badly to believe that the inexplicable flashbacks she’s having are nothing more than “false memories.”
The evidence quickly mounts to reveal otherwise, with Arabella doing the brave thing and going to the police straight away to report she was roofied, while still in large denial about the fact that she was raped in a bathroom during the blackout. In certain respects, it would be more effective if the blackout was her own doing–if she just kept imbibing and imbibing throughout the night without any sense of self-control, for so often that is the millennial philosophy of too much and never enough. Her drink being compromised, however, does lend that get out of jail free card for taking total responsibility that millennials are so infamous for, providing an added layer to the allegory of a spiked drink. For yes, one can look at the entire millennial experience as one endless blackout in which they’re all fumbling unconsciously through the motions, guided wherever some sinister outside force might lead them (be it social media and the “influencers” thereof, startup jobs that never paid, being told to self-publish and perfect their “brand,” etc.).
Arabella herself is that millennial-helmed thing, an “influencer.” It’s what’s led her to land a legitimate book deal with a publishing company called Henny House (a name that Coel is surely trolling us with based on her stint as a judge on Drag Race) after putting out a “Twitter book” (which means a downloadable PDF) called Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial. Celebrated as a legitimate “icon” of millennial culture, Arabella has done the bare minimum for sparking the millennial concept of revolution all from the comfort of her own room (or bar stool) via smartphone.
And no, comparing I May Destroy You in any way to Girls is not correct (nor is insulting anything by comparing it to Girls, for that matter). Not only as a result of Lena Dunham’s hopeless case of white girl problems but because Arabella is a legitimate success, a true internet celebrity as evidenced by people stopping her on the streets of London to get their picture taken with her. The continued knee-jerk reaction to compare any “deadbeat” heroine to Hannah Horvath, even if she’s not white or privileged, is just one of the many ways that millennial vilification enables an effortless lumping in of their work and what they’re trying to say with it. If one had to compare I May Destroy You to any other recent millennial horror show, it would likely be Search Party, in terms of the sleuthing element and Arabella’s self-obsession bordering on delusion quite often. This, in part, is fueled by her social media addiction, which is “required” for her job.
As her new therapist (assigned to her after the assault is reported) points out in the episode “Line Spectrum Border,” however, this addiction only fuels the phenomenon of being incapable of seeing herself outside of the carefully curated perception she wants to project to others–the very one that she can no longer seem to see through either. The projection is a defense mechanism from having to address what’s really going on inside of her, aiding and abetting her evasion of genuine self-examination and reflection (the crude diagram the therapist draws for Arabella to illustrate this will eventually become the inspiration for her book cover).
As one of the key aims of the show being to ask how we (i.e. millennials) “make the distinction between liberation and exploitation” in a world where all the rules of how to be liberated have been shattered and redefined (even if only vaguely), Arabella’s quest to figure out who spiked her is as much a quest to seek whether or not she was “asking for it” with her careless behavior. The Italian drug dealer she’s been seeing occasionally, Biagio (Marouane Zotti), would seem to think she was, himself having met her when she was in a state of barely there consciousness while on a trip to his hometown of Ostia (by the way, nobody visits Ostia as a vacation milieu in Italy, but okay). He was the one, in fact, to sell her the drugs that would elevate her and her best friend, Terry (Weruche Opia), to a “higher plane.”
When Terry leaves her in the club to go on her own as of yet unknown vision quest, she is unaware that a group of strangers in the bathroom have given Arabella yet another hit of ecstasy, sending her rocketing straight off the planet. Which is the state Biagio finds her in as he waits with her outside the club for Terry, whom she still believes is inside at the end of the night. Himself completely sober (as a drug dealer, he’s learned from observing everyone else around him that “staying clean” is the way to go), he could, as Jake Ryan once said, “violate her ten different ways if he wanted to” in her condition. Instead, he acts as her guardian angel, of sorts, following her back to her lodging to make sure she gets there, picking up her keys when she drops them, etc.
So yes, having seen that this is the state Arabella freely allows herself to get in–even in the dicier territory of being in a foreign country, where so much more can go wrong–Biagio does feel she “asked for it,” especially when he–totally removed from the situation–is called upon by the London police to offer a specimen of his own “DNA” (that’s sperm) to test against the traces found on Arabella’s flannel, the one she was wearing the night of the rape. Rather than let the sting of what he has yelled at her over video chat get to her, Arabella instead hangs up on him, takes a selfie of “empowerment” and posts it to her page. The barrage of hearts calms her down (almost like a morphine drip), quells her nerves. One of the glowing hearts pops right out of the screen at the end of the episode to show just how much value millennials really do place on this ersatz form of “love.”
On the flipside of the argument of a girl “asking for it,” of course, is the fact that women should be able to live in a world where they can be “reckless” in the way that men are. In the same manner that men don’t even think twice about “turning up” because 1) that’s their inherent privilege and 2) women simply don’t pull villainous shit like drink-spiking, therefore blokes have nothing to worry about when they get to a point of near blackout at the bar or club.
And yet, worse still, as Arabella finds out quickly post-violation, is the idea that even those close to you can be active participants in a deceptive betrayal, whether it’s Arabella’s friend, Simon (Aml Ameen), who left her for dead in her blackout that night (because hey, why should her “sloppiness” be his responsibility, right?), or Arabella’s new boo, Zain (Karan Gill), who takes off a condom while having sex with her sans Arabella’s knowledge, then gaslights her afterward with comments like, “Couldn’t you feel it?” and “I thought you knew.” In this way, I May Destroy You addresses a general sentiment of “Ima do me” that insidiously infiltrates every level of how millennials interact with one another. And it has led to a dangerous capacity for callous behavior, further spurred by the emotional removal that comes with a life spent online, falsely documenting everything as though one is acting as the star in their own reality TV show.
While the future seems to be delving only deeper into that internet k-hole, it can at least be said that the bar and club settings are now emblems of a bygone, analog era–for even if they do return in some similar pre-pandemic state, they’ll never be as crowded as before–so maybe the only positive to come out of the demise of “party (a.k.a. millennial) culture” is that less women will be taken advantage of in their state of vulnerability. A vulnerability that shouldn’t even arise merely because they chose to let loose as though it was their same right as a man’s. Yet Arabella endures the catharsis (through her writing and re-telling of the story) to recognize that regardless of being male or female, gay or straight and anything in between, those classifiable as millennials are irreparably damaged by the environment they have come of age in. One that has systematically secured a desensitized approach to everything, the kind of detachment that allows one to “turn pain into profit.” And the cause (self-obsession galvanized by the democratization of “art” on the internet) is still deemed the cure. Because how can you untrain a generation that has been irreversibly conditioned to believe they cannot really be seen or acknowledged “IRL,” to believe, “I use social media, therefore I am”?
I enjoyed reading that Genna.