(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.
#Golden globes i may destroy you series
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). Lovers Rock, an intoxicating film from the anthology that documents a scene of private Black joy, certainly deserved to be recognised individually for its writing and performances.“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.
It is a powerful performance, and one for which Boyega deserved his nomination, but it seems worth asking why stories about Black people are only deemed worthy of recognition when they involve white people or white institutions. In one of the films, Red, White and Blue, John Boyega plays Leroy Logan, a Black British police officer trying to change the system from within during the Eighties. Steve McQueen's brilliant anthology series of five films, Small Axe, earned just two nominations. One of the most recognised series this year was Netflix's The Crown, further demonstrating an obsession with Britain's past and an unwillingness to celebrate its present. The snub for I May Destroy You is emblematic of the HFPA's ongoing problem with race, as illustrated by Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloodsbeing entirely shunned, and ensembles like Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Judas and the Black Messiah and One Night in Miamibeing under nominated. It is telling that stories of white women kissing priests at garden parties, and of soldiers triumphing in the trenches, are seen as emblematic of Britain, while honest and true depictions of the lives of young Black people are not worth awarding prestigious honours to. Not so, for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who did not recognise the series in any category.
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