Issue #2: The catharsis and trauma of watching I May Destroy You (TW: Sexual Assault)
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! We were thrilled and overwhelmed by the response to our first issue and that high carried us through two extremely grueling weeks. We messaged each other every day about postponing our deadlines and apologised profusely for missing them all (again!). It was hilarious but worrisome, especially because we cared so deeply about what we were writing.
When we were discussing this issue, there was no question in our mind that it would have something to do with I May Destroy You, THE show everyone is talking about right now, but we didn’t expect to come up with two ideas that would speak to us equally. It didn’t take us very long to decide that we would dedicate this entire issue to this lovely, funny, devastating show. But this is a show about sexual assault and its aftermath, so we understand that it might not be for everyone. Please take care of yourself and delete this email if you don’t want to engage with it. If you wish to speak to someone, you can reach out on these helpline numbers.
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If you choose to continue reading, you can expect two thoughtful essays, one slightly mad at the show for making us feel so many things and another in awe of it for the same reason. There are spoilers, so tread carefully. We ask questions that are important but difficult to answer - how do we process trauma in our life, in pop culture, what do we make of it, how much do we carry it around and how do we make peace with it. We don’t have the answers, but we have a lot of opinions. Because of how intense this issue turned out to be, we chose to answer one of the funnier recommendation requests we got. A vampire mockumentary! What a time to be alive!
We’re also introducing a new section in this issue. Due to the sheer number of shows we consume, we figured we should tell you what we’re watching right now! It might help you decide on your next watch. So here we go:
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Teenage Bounty Hunters: Jesus-loving twin sisters catching criminals and talking about boys? Sign me up! A funny, heartwarming, unassuming show that makes me wish that my brother and I were free for some low-stakes shenanigans in our neighbourhood. Streaming on Netflix.
Masaba Masaba: A fictional take on designer Masaba’s what-I’m-assuming-is-a-very happening life. I’ve just started this show and I don’t know what to expect from it, but I have a good feeling about it. Streaming on Netflix.
—
Shahana
Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century): A Turkish show based on the life of Ottoman ruler Sultan Süleyman and his Sultana, Hurrem Sultan, this show is a delight for those who love period shows, drama, and royalty. It’s not at all feminist, but it was the 16th century where women had to do whatever they could to survive—but the show is filled with powerful and awe-striking women, who go from being slaves to Sultanas. Streaming on YouTube, with English subtitles.
Churails: A Pakistani show about a group of women who secretly expose and punish Karachi’s unfaithful and abusive husbands. I’m five episodes in, and it looks okay—not great, but not bad either. Streaming on Zee5.
We hope you have a chill Sunday, with minimal Monday dread, and your week ahead is manageable and uncluttered. We are exhausted from everything and writing this issue was no joke, but we’re very proud of it and hope that some of what we discuss resonates with you.
Lastly, shout out to Prakriti! Your email gave us so much joy and we hope that you were able to find something worth watching from our newsletter!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Why I Watched ‘I May Destroy You’ Even Though I’d Promised Myself To Never Watch Another Woman Get Raped On Screen Again
by Kashika
[Trigger Warning for sexual assault]
[Spoilers ahead]
I am not very thrilled about writing a personal essay in the second consecutive issue of Continue Watching (it feels self-important and myopic?) but, then again, I take TV very personally. There was no way I could have taken a step back from the first season of I May Destroy You and given you a critical analysis of what the four endings meant and how the one I identified with the most revealed more about myself than I cared to delve into in the middle of a goddamn pandemic.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have the mental fortitude to view this show from a distance. Because here is what I thought this show was about before I started it: a writer—Black, millennial—living in London doing millennial, London things. Here is what the show is actually about: Arabella Essiedu, a Black writer in London, goes out one night with her friends, only to wake up the next memory with faint memories of witnessing someone being sexually assaulted. Over the course of 12 episodes, she realises that it was her who was raped and tries to put the pieces of that night and her life back together with the help of her friends.
Consuming any art about sexual assault can be deeply difficult and triggering, but the comprehensive, nuanced manner in which creator, writer, co-director and star Michaela Coel deals with some 10 different ways in which men and women are violated by people they know, people they love, people they’ve just met and so on is a massive punch in the gut. I was not prepared for it. Especially because, a few months ago, I’d decided (and very publicly announced) that I am not watching another woman get raped on screen again.
After years of watching women being brutalised on screen “for art and realism”, I was done. I was sick of it. Thanks to my job, I didn’t just have to watch these scenes, I’d have to critique them, analyse them and find deeper meaning in them. When all along the meaning usually was that people think it makes for shocking TV, which is always good for ratings. This was especially clear to me while watching Game of Thrones, where practically every female character was raped at least once. Shahana once wrote about the serious rape problem in Outlander (which I do not watch because of its extreme old-timeyness) and I felt physically sick after just reading about it.
So, when I started watching I May Destroy You, not knowing that not only is it a show about sexual assault but also that it is based on Coel’s own experience, I was not prepared for anything.
I watched the first two episodes back to back, and even though it’s very clear that Arabella has been raped in the first episode, I was as much in denial about it as she was, and started the second episode thinking that it was a real possibility that she witnessed someone else getting assaulted. In the second episode, there is a heartbreaking scene where, while reporting the assault, through the questions she’s being asked by the very kind detective, Arabella realises that she’s actually remembering her own assault and breaks down. I remember crying with Arabella, shutting the TV, and deciding that this was not a show for me. Not my scene. Not right now.
Over the next few days, I saw many, many tweets about people being destroyed by the show—stale observation at this point—read articles comparing her writing to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s, whose Fleabag I inhaled. As an aside, it makes my heart sing that Coel is being celebrated as much as PWB, because while both have similar backgrounds—London, theatre, writer-producer-actor credits—Coel had to also deal with systemic racism while getting her shows made. This was enough to instill major pop culture FOMO in me, and I decided to cautiously go back to the show, but with a condition: only one episode per week. And to offset the claustrophobia I feel while watching something triggering, I’d watch a Korean show as a palate cleanser (I chose She Was Pretty).
Over the next few weeks, I watched as Arabella tried to make sense of the flashbacks from her broken memories, retraced her steps, talked to her friends, joined a survivors’ support group and pieced her life back together. We met Terry and Kwame, Arabella’s two best friends, who try to make her feel better in their own way—by being there for her, by taking her on an exaggerated self-care journey. We also see Terry’s and Kwame’s experience with assault, their consent being violated, them trying to deal with it in their own way, and every episode is brilliant and devastating.
All of this to say that while I was fully sold on the show, I don’t know what I was expecting from the end. Regardless, I was not prepared for what happened.
I hate loose ends and open endings. I want every question answered and every plot point explained. So what happened was immediately uncomfortable for me. Through 11 episodes, we saw Arabella do many things to deal with her trauma, one of which was going back to the club where she was raped for nights on end. In the last episode, we see her go there one more time and then we are presented with three scenarios. In one, Arabella sees her rapist, remembers everything and ends up killing him in a classic revenge fantasy manner. In the second, she sees her rapist, remembers everything and gets him arrested. In the third, she takes him home, has tender, passionate sex with him and asks him to leave in the morning with a simple ‘go’.
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And then there is a fourth ending, which I realised a few days later was the real ending, where she doesn’t go back to the club, goes on living her life, self-publishes her second book and continues to move forward. In the real ending, the rapist is never identified or arrested, he is horrifying still free to assault other women, but Arabella has to move forward, which is what Coel also had to do in real life. This is how she explains it in an interview with Vulture, “I had to let it go and realize that I was still alive if I let it go, and the trauma did not need to define me. I could let go of the trauma, and I would still be here. The trauma — it pulsates, and it’s everywhere, and I’m not trying to dictate anybody’s lives, but speaking for Arabella, the trauma becomes the thing that feeds her, and sometimes the idea of her and me letting it go is scary simply because you don’t know what life is without it. And so it’s like jumping off a cliff.”
In this answer, I think, is the crux of why I continued to watch the show even though I was so uncomfortable with its subject matter. Arabella was raped, Terry’s consent was violated, Kwame was raped, Arabella was raped again, Kwame violated a woman’s trust, Arabella put Kwame in a scary situation, Terry left Arabella in a scary situation— so many instances of sexual violence were dealt with in the show that it emotionally exhausted me. And yet, I went back to it.
Episode four, in particular, which introduces stealthing—where your sexual partner removes the condom during sex without your consent—obliterated me, triggered something awful, and made me feel like I was in an overcrowded lift for hours. I stopped watching for two weeks and then went back again because I read that Coel addresses this in a powerful way. “He's a rapist, not rape-adjacent, or a bit rapey, he's a rapist under UK law,” is what Arabella saying while outing this guy. Not stealthing, rape. I cried again.
I was not intelligent or present enough to figure this out while I was watching these episodes—because I was so focussed on taking care of myself—but now when I look back, I think I understand that I watched I May Destroy You because I knew somehow that no matter what happens in it, it’d be a story of healing and coming back from the trauma of your assault rather than letting it destroy you. That even though there were so many ways in which people were hurt in the show, they would all turn out okay. That I would turn out okay.
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Coel achieves this feat with her writing. It’s in the way she lets each person sit with their trauma and deal with it in their own way and on their own time. It’s in the way she doesn’t absolve them of their shitty behaviour when they hurt others in the same manner that they’d been hurt. It’s in the way she shows us that the revenge fantasy, while briefly exhilarating, will ultimately leave you no different from your attacker. It’s in the way that Arabella is never once questioned, always believed. It’s in the way that she lets Terry take the entire season to understand that what happened to her was not right, that consent means much more than just saying yes to sex once. It’s in the way that Coel tries to have many different kinds of conversations about rape without making any of them seem trifling. It’s in the way she tries to show empathy to her rapist in one of the endings that made me want to throw up. It’s in the way that the man who removed the condom while having sex with her comes back later and helps her, which made me scream into my pillow. It’s in the way that you can tell that Arabella will never be able to get closure by getting her rapist arrested, but that doesn’t mean her life has to stop.
It doesn’t mean that any of our lives have to stop.
I don’t think this means that I will go back to watching women get brutalised on screen again, but it means that I will wait for Michaela Coel to (I’m so sorry) destroy me again.
Shows mentioned:
I May Destroy You - Disney + Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Game of Thrones - Disney + Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐ seasons 1-7 / ⭐⭐ season 8
Fleabag - Amazon Prime ⭐⭐⭐⭐
She Was Pretty - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐
Outlander - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐ (Shahana’s rating)
Our Pain Shapes Who We Are: How ‘I May Destroy You’ Shatters The Concept Of Healing Through Your Art
By Shahana
[Trigger Warning for sexual assault]
[Spoilers ahead]
In episode five of I May Destroy You, Arabella (Michaela Coel), tells her agent (Adam James) and publisher Susy Henny (Franc Ashman) that she's just returned from a visit to the police station because she had been raped. Susy shows concern for a few seconds, and then instantly says, “You’d better get going, missy. I want to see that story.” Instantly, I was jolted back to one of my workplaces and an editor I loathed for many reasons, but one was that she routinely bullied the team into writing about intensely personal (and sometimes not-so-personal) stories they might not have wanted to write about.
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But before I get into that, a little background. I May Destroy You, written, acted in, and directed by Michaela Coel, revolves around Arabella, a young writer, dealing with the aftermath of being roofied and then raped. But this sentence is far too simplistic and doesn't really capture what the show is really about. I May Destroy You explores consent, the boundaries of sexual desires and modern dating customs, and the thin line between one person's sexual exploration and another's exploitation. I May Destroy You, based on a similar sexual assault that Coel went through, delves into how a woman’s trauma is often played out in the media as something that can be monetised and sold, and it’s something that Coel, as creator and writer of the show, is very aware of.
Coel broke into TV in 2015 with Chewing Gum, an award-winning irreverent fourth wall-breaking show about a young Christian girl desperate to lose her virginity. This fantastic profile of Coel in Vulture details the struggle she had with trying to be respected as a creator and Black woman on set.
“For the second season, Coel asked to be made an executive producer. “There was a three-hour meeting, and the exec was just like, No, no, no, no,” she says. They made her a co-producer instead... “You’re trying to pawn her off with this little crumb,” says Kirwan. “It’s like she built this house and gave the keys to someone, and they locked her out of different rooms in her own house, which is absolute bullshit.””
One has to conclude this experience led her to decline an offer from Netflix (they offered her $1 million upfront), who wouldn’t allow her to retain any percentage of the copyright. Writing is a deeply personal and difficult act; and a piece of art like I May Destroy You, that one must assume helped Coel deal with her own trauma, is perhaps even harder to hand over to a capitalist behemoth.
Back to the show itself, Arabella is struggling to finish her book before the deadline (when she googles “How to write fast,” I straight up said “Big mood, Arabella” to my screen), when she has to grapple with being drugged and raped on a night she was out with friends. Arabella has tried yoga, all sorts of art classes, support groups, being with men and staying away from men, writing about her experience, avoiding writing and thinking about her experience by doing other things—all of this to try to move on, but that’s the thing about pain and trauma—even at the risk of sounding pithy, it demands to be felt. The only thing keeping her going was that the police have been investigating her case, and she’s holding on to a shred of hope that she will get justice, and that will give her the closure she’s so desperately seeking. When that last bit of hope is taken away from her, Arabella has to deal with the fact that all the distraction was just that—a distraction. And now she has to deal with Susy Henny nagging her about the book she’s so “excited” to see, the book about “the rape!” as Susy repeats with a perverse excitement.
At this point, every time any mention of Arabella’s book came up, it filled me with a sense of anxiety and distaste. It was clear to everyone who knew Arabella that she hadn’t truly dealt with what she’d been through—but when it comes to something like sexual assault, you don’t really work through it and move on—you carry it with you from that moment on. And soon, it becomes clear, Arabella’s avoidance of writing her book was her way of circumventing this very horrible thing that happened to her. When it comes to recovery for a survivor, a way to measure their progress is them getting back to normal life—going back to their personal and professional lives.
But for someone like Arabella, whose professional life is informed by their personal life, whose job is about processing their life into art, what does it mean that they cannot? At what point on the progress bar do we place Arabella’s recovery? Is Arabella a writer if she can’t write about her own life? Are we artists, if we can’t pull from our own lives to create art for the consumption and entertainment of other people?
Cut to a few scenes later, losing all hope of ever seeing Arabella creating anything, her publishers and agents both drop her. It is at this moment that she is faced with a former sexual partner, someone who also sexually assaulted her, but who she is not afraid of anymore. Zain (Karan Gill), the aforementioned partner, can give her something, and Arabella has found whatever she needs within herself to be able to face him and take what she needs—a little kick to figure out the book she’s got inside her head. It bears mentioning that Zain assaulted her when he was supposed to be helping her write her book earlier, tainting the work they did together with what he did. Is it any surprise that it is difficult for Arabella to finish this book? The fact that she can unflinchingly take what she needs from him now is big, and it might not look it, but Arabella’s definitely moved ahead on that progress bar.
Zain helps her structure the book, but he doesn’t understand it. As he stares at the narrative they’ve plotted together, written up in index cards stuck on her bedroom walls, he shakes his head, uncomprehending. “I thought you were writing about consent,” which almost seems like a comment on the show itself. It’s now, when Arabella is free from the limitations and expectations of her publisher, of her peers, and the only one who owns her art is herself, that she is truly able to write. Her art stops being about the rape, but about her journey towards finding the peace and clarity she needs to move on. Her creation of the art is the elusive thing that she’s been looking for this entire time. Her face beams as she responds to his “I don’t understand it,” with an “I do.” This is what she needed, what everyone who creates art about their pain and trauma needs, the freedom to do it in their time, in a place where they feel safe, comfortable, and protected. This is what Susy’s needling and my former editor’s mulish handling of pain lacked—the understanding that it is not meant for clicks and sales.
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The art she finally ends up creating is a testament to the idea of Closure— it’s messy and it’s make-believe. There is no moment where things suddenly click after years of therapy and you can stare into the distance as you find the strength within you to go on, freed from the burdens of your past trauma. Our pain shapes who we are, and it will shape Arabella, and Coel’s finale refuses to give us a neatly-tied finale because life, unfortunately, isn’t neat either.
Shows mentioned:
Chewing Gum- You’ll have to get creative to find it⭐⭐⭐
I May Destroy You- Disney + Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Recommendations
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I'm looking for a fun and light show, something like Parks and Recreation. I also read Midnight Sun recently, and my vampire obsession has flared up again, so is there a vampire show I can watch?
What you’re looking for is What We Do In The Shadows. Based on the 2014 film of the same name, written by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (yup, he made Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit), the series follows the daily lives of four vampire roommates in Staten Island, mockumentary style. There is something hilarious about watching four immortals be really bad at everything, especially in a media landscape where vampires are supposed to be sexy supernatural beings everyone is dying to sleep with. The show essentially takes these supposedly powerful occult beings and forces them to deal with mundane everyday (sometimes supernatural) problems. What happens if the house is haunted by a petty ghost or animal control captures one of them in bat form? Or an ex-boyfriend is reincarnated, but you’re married and your husband is not happy? An absolutely iconic episode featuring all of Hollywood’s most famous vampires (Sorry Twihards, Edward wasn’t invited) is in Season 1, and yup, it’s exactly as epic as it sounds.
What We Do In The Shadows is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Shout-Outs
Kashika
I hope this is not cheating but because the last two weeks have been positively bonkers, I don’t think I read anything properly. One of my most trusted stressbusters, however, is watching Lauren Graham interviews and I found this gem that I had somehow missed about the Gilmore Girls revival and her book around it.
Shahana
I know we’ve already written so much about I May Destroy You, but bear with me. There will be plenty written about the writing, acting, and direction, but the way the show sounds says a lot about it too. I read this piece about creating the soundtrack for the show, and the more I learn about the actual work that goes into creating a show, the more I’m in awe.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue as much as we loved writing it. Please write to us if you have any feedback. We look forward to your emails, comments, tweets and DMs with requests, criticism, recommendations, and anything else that you want to tell us. You can also follow us on Twitter here and here. And if you haven’t already, do subscribe!