My own tendency toward recklessness has landed me in some dodgy situations (though thankfully nothing as traumatic as Arabella’s) and the uneasy feeling of picking through that is at odds with the hapless victim narrative we often encounter online. Hands up who’s acted stupid and irresponsible on a night out in the clurb, or on holiday? I most certainly have. However, do any of us watch our drinks constantly? Do we make sure we see the barman at all times when he pours the drink? We don’t!”. #GOLDEN GLOBES I MAY DESTROY YOU SERIES#This is classic victim-blaming, but in an interview with the Economist, Coel (who suffered a similar attack in real life, upon which the fictionalised series is based), points out both the truth and the fallacy in such thinking: “The fact is, if you were watching your drink, you would have seen somebody put some things in it. In the series, Arabella’s Italian lover screams at her, upon hearing of the attack, that she “should have watched her drink”. But can acknowledging a degree of accountability actually give survivors some power? Let me elaborate before you cancel me. (Why should women and queer people have to worry about this risk and not straight men?). It belies a difficult truth: while many victims of sexual assault don’t partake in risky behaviour, there are plenty more that are targeted precisely because they do. I found myself internally screaming at her to “have some common fucking sense” before checking myself. But I can’t help but think the series is prompting us to consider our own susceptibility to the victim-blaming narrative we’re exposed to again and again in tabloid media. As viewers, we can’t help but grimace and feel a sense of foreboding in scenes where, in a flashback to a holiday in Ostia, Arabella staggers around an Italian nightclub, on her own, off her face and clearly vulnerable. The power and the pitfalls of finding one’s voice on social media have never been so well-represented on screen. (If it’s not clear by now, this post contains many spoilers!). Glued to Instagram Live, she fails to offer meaningful support to close friends who also experience sexual violence, but are less able to articulate their feelings about it. Rather than healing her, it fuels her anger and dims her capacity for listening to the friends surrounding her and trying to offer IRL help. In her vulnerable state, Arabella becomes addicted to the gratification and vindication of the “first-person industrial complex”. We are rightfully made to feel the trauma of her sexual assault, but feel discomfort at the marketing and weaponising of that trauma in a social media machine that feeds off pain (and particularly Black womens’ pain). I May Destroy You ’s protagonist, Arabella (played by Coel), is both captivating and flawed. But I May Destroy You takes a more nuanced tack, going further to illustrate the grey areas and complexities of these issues. Yes, it’s a film, so wouldn’t be directly competing with I May Destroy You for nominations, but it explores similar themes of rape, revenge and gender politics in the wake of the #MeToo era. A more apt comparison for the series might be with A Promising Young Woman, up for four Golden Globes. It offers a complex and considered exploration of agency, sexual politics and social media (both its capacity to empower and to exploit). I May Destroy You, on the other hand, is about a Black British writer/Twitter personality trying to piece together her life after blacking out, being spiked and raped in a nightclub. The trick is to have very low expectations.) (Nb – none of this actually bothered me too much while watching it. It presents the influencer gig economy as liberating and empowering for ambitious young girlbosses and posits that it’s fair game for Anglophone women to explore their “wild side” in stereotypically “sexy” and exoticised European cities without worrying much about social repercussions. Emily in Paris is about a basic bitch who moves from New York to Paris to work for a marketing agency, becomes an influencer and falls for a series of très beaux Frenchmen (and one Frenchboy). “Race-hate storm” aside, drawing parallels between Emily in Paris and I May Destroy You feels a little misguided, like drawing parallels between Cosmopolitan magazine and Nabokov’s Lolita.
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