I MAY DESTROY YOU AND THE POWER OF IF

Meet me at the intersection of I May Destroy You and William Shakespeare. Spoilers ahead!

I recently found a quote scribbled in an old scrapbook of mine. In bright, pink marker twenty year old me had scrawled “Much virtue in if,” beside an outline of my own hand in the same color ink. I initially thought, Wait, am I brilliant? Is it possible I’ve been a genius this whole time? It was uncredited, just handwritten words surrounded by stickers. A quick Google search stamped out my pride and revealed that no, I’m not a genius, and in fact, the quote was written by an actual genius, William Shakespeare (you may have heard of him?). It belongs to Shakespeare’s “pastoral comedy” As You Like It, and it’s actually just a snippet of the whole line. The line is spoken by Touchstone, Duke Frederick’s jester, who is explaining to Jaques, a lord of Duke Senior’s, how to successfully end a disagreement with another gentleman (by agreeing to disagree, essentially). Following a long list of rules, Touchstone ends the lesson with perhaps the thesis of the entire play, “Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If.”

The very use of the word “if” suspends reality and ushers you into the realm of infinite possibility. By definition, if is the introduction of a conditional clause, “on the condition or supposition” that something that has yet to happen could happen under contingent likelihood. It’s both confounding and illuminating to give the word “if” so much weight, but in the context of a show like I May Destroy You, it’s the ultimate tool for relief. 

To put it mildly, I May Destroy You destroyed me. I was not prepared for the ways it would stretch my consciousness while still feeling like an indulgence. Michaela Coel’s sprawling mosaic of sexual ethics offers pieces of all shapes, sizes and colors to create a master mood piece. She aims to set your brain ablaze and her aim is swift. Every minute detail of I May Destroy You feels like it’s been projected straight out of Coel’s virtuosic forehead and onto a screen. It’s autobiographical, personal and universal in ways that other survivor stories don’t quite manage. 

I May Destroy You is a fictional redo of Coel’s real life rape which occurred as she was writing the second season of her BBC comedy, Chewing Gum. She takes echoes of her experience and places them on her avatar, Arabella Essiedu, a London based writer struggling to eke out her second book. The twelve episode series recalls Arabella’s varied social encounters and their aftermath, as well as the sexual brushes of her friends Terry, Kwame and Theodora. With visceral candor and an evolving sense of justice, the show manages to comment on many things; trauma, consent, recovery, morality, friendship, memory and responsibility. But the final episode in particular sheds light on a complicated but essential facet of a survivor’s story; ownership and the power of if.   

The finale of I May Destroy You entitled “Ego Death” (the name of the bar in which Arabella is date raped in the first episode) is an experiment in weaponizing, absolving and sexualizing our deepest wounds. It begins immediately where the penultimate episode ends, with Arabella spotting her assailant at Ego Death, prompting her memory of the night of her assault to flood back in full and unrelenting color. Throughout the season, Arabella’s memory of that night is foggy at best, composed of violating but unclear fragments. Now we and Arabella know the man who drugged and raped her is David, and he’s returned to the scene of the crime. Astonishingly though, the reveal of her attacker is not the point - it’s not even the most engrossing or satisfying feature of the episode. 

“Ego Death” plays out in four acts. The first begins with Arabella’s initial rush of memories after she spots David. What follows is a violent revenge fantasy aided by Terry and Theodora, in which the trio inject David with his own drugs and beat him to a pulp, culminating in Arabella stuffing David’s bloodied body under her bed. Suddenly, we’re back on Arabella’s terrace with her roommate Ben, a scene we saw in the episode before the finale.  It isn’t until the end of the first act that we realize these are drafts of Arabella’s final chapter of her impending book (which she’s finally gotten a grasp on thanks to Zain aka “Della” and no thanks to being dropped by her agents and publisher). Arabella has committed herself to a prodigious process of outlining her book using index cards taped to her bedroom walls and it is here that her healing takes place. As the second act begins, we’re ready for it, but still unsure of its authenticity. Coel is sly in divulging what’s fantasy and what isn’t. Now it’s Terry who has a plan and it involves getting Arabella extremely high on cocaine so as to counteract the effects of the date rape drug David puts in Arabella’s drink. Much like the first act, David is slimy and predatory, and coaxes Arabella into a bathroom stall, but when Arabella reveals that she knows David’s game, she’s met with emotional backlash and he begins to cry. Police rush into the stall they once occupied to find it empty. Arabella has invited David to her home, and listens to his teary monologue about his past rapes and motivations. It’s a scene of radical empathy, one we’re not trained to tolerate when watching a victim of rape come face to face with her rapist. Arabella and David both cry, until the police show up and take Act 2 David away with them. 

Again, we’re brought back to Arabella's terrace for the beginning of Act 3 where Ben and Arabella have their usual exchange. Like the first two acts, Arabella and Terry gather in the restroom of Ego Death, only this time Arabella doesn’t mention David’s presence and they emerge from the restroom to a fully lit bar as opposed to the dark and bustling hot spot from the previous two acts. In this act, Arabella pursues David and brings him to the recognizable restroom stall (note the male and female genders represented as one on the stall door) for a passionate hook up. They end up in Arabella’s bedroom where she takes control and penetrates David from behind. In the morning David is still there, dappled in early light and smiling at Arabella. 

“I’m not gonna go unless you tell me to,” he says. Arabella responds “Go,” and with that, the bloodied David beneath the bed and the David of Act 3 exit her room along with the ultrasound from Arabella’s abortion, leaving her to reconfigure her storyboard once more. In the final act, Arabella sits with Ben on the terrace again. When he asks the question we’ve heard him ask three times now, “What’s on the menu tonight then? You off to do your bar watch thing?” she responds with a peaceful “No.” The rest of the episode plays out in what we can assume is reality; Arabella (independently) publishes her long-awaited book, January 22nd (the date of her assault) and reads an excerpt at a well attended reading in a bookstore. She takes a final inhale, and we cut to Arabella smiling on the shore.

Much like the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, Ego Death in the finale of I May Destroy You is a place of fantasy, a prismatic window positing that healing begins in a fiction, a fabricated world induced by “if”. As Frances E. Dolan puts it in her introduction of As You Like It for The Pelican Shakespeare series, Arden is “a magical place in which one can imagine alternatives, play roles, explore possibilities.” She goes on to say, Arden “is a place where the denizens of the court go to renew themselves, and where they literally leave their mark.” Ego Death, in this way, constitutes another Arden, and Arabella’s book is the mark she leaves before she’s able to move on. Rosalind is emboldened by her male alter ego, Ganymede, as Arabella is galvanized by the dissolution of gender in her third fantasy. Pondering all these possibilities as endings to her story, all these ways the story could go “if” we let them allows Arabella to (at the risk of being cute) find her peace as she likes it, and in turn, she takes back the authority of her own narrative. She becomes the author, the owner. The judge, jury and executioner.  

Although the power of “if” is most evident in the finale, it’s a presence throughout the series and is used in different ways. Some “ifs” are used to connect hypothetical danger to reality, some are used to define threats or to distance oneself, whether those threats are based in reality or not. 

Arabella’s period of recovery follows an intensive social media addiction categorized by self-righteousness, virtue signaling, and an allergy to nuance or intention. It’s in episodes like “Social Media Is A Great Way To Connect” that “if” becomes a stake in the ground, immovable and stiff. When Kwame recounts his dubious dalliance with a straight white woman, Arabella immediately questions his morality and places him in the same camp as the men her followers on social media are calling on her to dox. But of course, these steadfast rules don’t seem to apply to Arabella, who in the previous episodes broke into her on again/off again beau’s apartment without permission, and locked a traumatized Kwame in a bedroom with a potential suitor. Arabella’s assumptions begin to crack when she realizes the conflicting features of her own father, a man who’s been an ok dad, but a shitty husband. How can somebody inhabit these two traits and live in Arabella’s world of no gradation? Her best friend Terry, who’s been essential in her recovery also played a part in the night of her assault when she told Simon to leave Arabella at the bar despite Arabella’s obvious incapacitation. The “ifs” of previous episodes are different from the “ifs” of the finale. A slight of hand between contingent probably and contingent possibility. In its own way, making these staunch presumptions is a way Arabella is able to cope and protect herself, a means to delineate who is out to hurt her and who is not. “I’m just saying, right, if you paint things to make it look like you’re a victim and I find out that isn’t entirely the case, it makes me question who you are,” Arabella says to Kwame (and then says to herself when she finds the ultrasound from her abortion under her bed). Before Arabella cracks the structure of her book, “if” is threatening. But by the time the finale rolls around, she’s able to create space within an argument to accept nuance or even chance. She utilizes “if” as a resource for creation rather than a defining box in which to place her menaces.

Closure is a myth that we wish was not. Over the course of twelve episodes, Arabella learns that even if closure is unattainable, peace hangs at reachable heights. “If” is a possibility that unfurls in all directions - it moves backwards and forwards, up and down, much like trauma. If can be tortuous and maddening, “If I had watched my drink,” “If I had locked my window.” But it can also be valuable in finding serenity and power. “If I ever came face to face with my rapist...” “What if I tell this story?” There is so much hope in “if” and “if” allows us ownership of our destiny. Even when we can’t find closure, there’s always if. 

“Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If.” I don’t know how twenty year old me knew to write this down. Here I am, eight years later, and the sentiment has never felt more prescient or relevant to a survivor’s tale. I don’t know if it’s the only peacemaker, but it’s a helluva good one.