Of course, Coel, who not only stars in the series but wrote and co-directed each episode, doesn’t tip her hand immediately to let us know that what we’re watching isn’t strictly reality.
“Ego Death” comprises three fantasies and a coda, each fantasy echoing the others and pushing the show further into uncomfortable territory, questioning what it means to find closure. What follows, though, isn’t a simple narrative of vengeance and closure, but something far more ambitious and trickier to parse. After hanging around the titular bar for nights on end, Arabella finally sees her attacker at the bar with his friend and is overcome by a rush of memories, seemingly jarred loose by her epiphany about her book in the penultimate episode. In the finale, Arabella is confronted by the memories of the night she was drugged and raped - memories that have been out of her grasp throughout the show, save for one lucid image of her attacker, David, looming over her in a bathroom stall.
Undergirding the finale’s neon-lit escapades is a series of questions that don’t have easy answers: Is closure a reality, or is it a lie that life can abide by neat narratives? Are we bound forever to our traumas, or is it possible to heal from them? And, if we can, how do we make that a reality? Within the folds of this single season of television is one of the most profound considerations of not only the stories we tell about sexual assault, but the stories we tell ourselves - and others - in order to process trauma, to move through it, if not necessarily beyond it. “Ego Death,” the final episode of I May Destroy You, cements the genius of Michaela Coel with its nimble handling of a subject of considerable magnitude, both cultural and emotional.
0 kommentar(er)
