But that's no way to start an essay about literary television, is it? To the extent that clickbait headlines about the novel being dead and television dramas replacing novels have been around since the coexistence of both forms, a serious conversation about for whom is the novel dead and why might actually be a productive way to begin thinking about how the HBO Series I May Destroy You (2020) treats the literary among other kinds of cultural prestige.
It’s another link in her timeline of infinite loops, infinite kinship: Coel of the past, guiding her future self to the ark.If I read one more declaration that the novel is dead and that it is identity politics that have killed it - as though Victorian literature was not at all about identity politics - I might scream. The song also holds a deeper connection for Coel, who used to perform it in choir as a schoolgirl. “In the beginning,” she continued, the gospel number is “like a warning.” It urges the listener-the believer-to seek shelter from impending destruction, just as Arabella searches for some semblance of justice or closure after all the pain she’s endured. “Arabella needs shelter,” Coel explained.
Milton Brunson & the Thompson Community Singers, which becomes her unofficial theme.Ĭoel found shared ground between the song’s lyrics-“Can’t you see the clouds gathering? / Don’t let it be, said too late / There’s a brand-new feeling in the air / Better run, in the ark, before the rain starts”-and Arabella’s journey. Along the way the character is buoyed by the exultant gospel song “It’s Gonna Rain” by Rev. At times, it’s funny and sharp and spry at others, it’s subdued and deflated. (“A dream for me.”) Still, the engine of the series is Coel’s central performance as Arabella, which offers myriad interpretations of grief. She’s pleased that those characters are landing as much as Arabella is with viewers. (It’s showing on HBO here.) But she’s canvassed Twitter to see reactions to episodes five and nine, which put extra focus on Kwame and Terry. but has only aired five episodes in the U.S. She hasn’t been hyper-attuned to social media response to her series, which is almost fully available in the U.K. “And I’m like, Oh, my God”-here, she started shouting-“there’s a kinship!”Īfter all that searching and connecting and creating, Coel has been able to take a step back. “She was like, ‘Obviously there’s a kinship-why do you keep being shocked?’” Coel recalled. She watched season three of Insecure and was floored that its second episode and her own show’s second episode both featured songs by rapper Tierra Whack she exuberantly texted this coincidence to Issa Rae, who’s a friend. She watched Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Loveless, two films that are vastly different in tone from I May Destroy You, and found they not only helped her process, but also gave her a deeper understanding of human nature. I was super intense,” Coel said, bursting into laugher.Ĭoel does this often, basking in wonderment at art that makes life feel like an infinite set of entwined loops. The narrative closely mirrors Coel’s own experience: She, too, was drugged and sexually assaulted a few years ago, while writing the second season of her award-winning comedy, Chewing Gum. She realizes this only after writing all night in a trauma-induced fugue state, remembering the assault in one hideous flash. But then, on an evening out with friends, Arabella’s drink is spiked and she’s sexually assaulted. (“How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean / Are thy returns!”) “I could see in her show that we would have some sort of understanding,” she told me in a recent interview-a testament to Coel’s ability to find the kinship in everything, threading together works that may seem disparate on the surface.Ĭoel wrote I May Destroy You and stars in it as Arabella, a writer racing to finish her second book of Twitter-savvy millennial musings. As Michaela Coel was writing I May Destroy You, her brilliant, ruminative series about sexual assault, she found herself so inspired by Netflix’s Russian Doll-another half-hour series about trauma and repeating timelines-that she messaged star Natasha Lyonne on Twitter.Ĭoel sent Lyonne a poem by George Herbert called “The Flower”-a passionate 17th-century ode to the joy of seeing flowers in spring, and the despair of seeing them perish in the winter.
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