![]() I do, however, recognize the utility of ‘millennial’ as clunky shorthand for the kind of lifestyle precarity currently overrepresented within a cultural landscape that can imagine all manner of horrors and dismantled taboos except for the conventional plight of writers who remains broke and unfulfilled long past the age of thirty-five, after which point what was once aspirationally bohemian quickly becomes embarrassing. Generational cohorts often hold as much analytical weight as blood type theory or, even worse, neo-Jungian typology. Disclaimer: I am not a believer in generational pseudoscience. Perhaps more than any other television offering since Lena Dunham’s gloriously excruciating Girls, I May Destroy You picks at the scabrous surface of the ‘millennial’ authorial self. Less of a simplistic archetype, hers is an authorial voice of amalgamations attitudinal trends shared within peer groups, half-baked ideological commitments, marketing savvy, behavioural tics and the unchecked impulses of digital natives. ![]() Arabella is trying to be more than this kind of writer, except when she is forced to be this kind of writer in order to survive. A kind who fits within an evolving taxonomy that is tricky to define, unless you are stiflingly defined by it. We know this ambivalence as the writer’s predicament, or at least the predicament of a certain kind of writer. These contradictions haunt Arabella’s creative life, making the show a difficult watch in less obvious ways. How can an individual attempt to heal when their very professional life depends upon the cannibalisation of their pain? How do you begin to move on when self-promotion relies on the incessant prodding and baring of your wounds? I have been unable to stop thinking about this show and how deftly it exceeds the cacophonic focus on the neon-emblazoned Big Issues it wears on its sleeve. In their world, consent is a murky terrain of anguished complexity, retroactive clarity and presentist shibboleths that characters attempt to hack a path through in their own frustratingly human ways. Her closest friends, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), support her while hesitantly testing their own boundaries. I May Destroy You unspools this assault’s gnawing consequences, portraying Arabella’s quest to determine - and potentially reconcile with - what has occurred. She wakes to foggy recollections of being violated in a dirty toilet cubicle, a depressingly familiar scenario. There, the rest of the night melts into a haze of drugs and friendly strangers. Faced with the terror of the blank page, she distracts herself by partying with her friend Simon (Aml Ameen) at a bar duly named Ego Death. Arabella spends more time avoiding writing than actually writing, a bitterly accurate portrait of fidgety self-sabotage. One episode in, we are plunged into the clamour of performance anxiety and fevered procrastination. A Twitter personality and author of the PDF-friendly self-published sensation Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial, Arabella has a lot to live up to. Initially, we witness Arabella struggling to meet a looming deadline after a brief stint in Italy visiting a noncommittal, drug-dealing lover. The show stars its creator Michaela Coel as Arabella, a flailing writer grappling with the aftermath of sexual assault. I May Destroy You, a critically acclaimed BBC and HBO co-production, follows another meandering twenty-something submerged in Ostia’s waters. Aimless melancholy saturates their post-war seaside lives. In Federico Fellini’s 1953 classic I vitelloni, five unemployed layabouts spend a deserted Sunday ambling along its inching edge.
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