Spoiling alert! It contains main points on the first season of HBO’s “I May Destroy You”.
There are impressive shows. And then “I can destroy you.”
In all of our quarantined visits, there’s nothing that moves us more than HBO’s exciting and emotional black comedy, which has been praised by critics and celebrities, adding Adele and Seth Rogen. He finishes his 12-episode series on Monday (10:30 a.m. ET/PT).
Created through genius Michaela Coel (“Chicle” of Netflix), the semi-autobiographical exhibition follows the free-spirited, drugged and raped British Arabaella (Coel) in the first episode. She spends much of the season looking to combine aggression and locate her attacker, with the help of more productive friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), who navigate their own upheaval and sexuality.
Kwame, a queer black boy, is also raped in an early episode, through a boy he met on a login app. The attack occurs right after consensual sex, increasing her confusion about what happened. Fighting trauma, Kwame makes the decision to meet and have sex with a white woguy, Nilufer (Pearl Chanda), who fetishizes his blackness. When Nilufer makes informal homophobic comments afterwards, Kwame shows that he is gay and she throws him with a grudge.
Arabella struggles to empathize with Kwame and demands situations with which she has had sex under false pretenses. At the same time, she is forced to confront her own imperfect prospects of what constitutes consent. It is a messy but important verbal exchange that no other task in the #MeToo era has so far addressed in such a complete and unwavering way as “I May Destroy You”.
USA TODAY spoke to Essiedu about the Kwame bow and why this exhibition is so necessary.
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Question: It’s heartbreaking to see Kwame go and report his rape to the police, only to question his experience. What do you think of this scene about how men who suffer a sexual assault may have difficulty demonstrating?
Paapa Essiedu: I think it’s something especially about black gay men and how their aggression is statistically underestimated and underestimated. But this scene also looks, what does it mean to be a breaking into a police station? Historically, we know that black men are thought of as perpetrators or aggressors; they are considered criminals in such spaces. So, like a black kid, when you walk in as a victim for help, especially as a black gay kid, it turns out to be anything that doesn’t matter to those institutions and therefore you stay out.
If you compare Arabella’s joy in reporting her aggression with Kwame’s in reporting hers, there’s a pretty big gap. This says a lot about these establishments as a whole and those that deserve attention.
Q: Especially now with dating apps, it can be very easy to dig deeper into what you need to get out of one connection, regardless of the feelings or experience of the other person. What inspired you to the fullest about Kwame’s encounter with Nilufer?
Essiedu: Kwame is in survival mode: there have been so many cases where it has been forgotten or invalidated, and you really need to do everything you can to take control. That’s what brings him to this stage with this woman who has a lot of fucking politics. She tells him some really problematic things that he tries to forget just to get that monkey off his shoulder, in a way other people do on connections.
There are many other people doing unfortunate things in this episode, and it has flaws. Sometimes he’s wrong. But this is the show’s wonderful good fortune: it exists on the knife’s edge where one thing he does is his fault and another thing he does is his fault, so who is to blame?
Q: How does this program expect others to better perceive consent?
Essiedu: I have the impression that our education based on consent and what that means is so far what we want to be. These gray spaces or this lack of definition in our concepts of consent are the ones that allow predators to benefit. This is what allows other people to use force to put others in oppressed or repressed positions. This is due to this lack of clarity about what we hear when we communicate about consent and what we expect from you, but also what we expect from our own behavior toward others. So I hope this screen is a great indicator or a directional pole that will help us get into a more conscious place.
Q: What can you say about the end?
Essiedu: This is the episode I’ve seen 3 or 4 times. I have the impression that (Michaela) has portrayed a woman who is relentless in her quest to love, forgive and know herself, in a way that requires a wonderful dose of courage. When you see it, there is something that gives me hope, that can be done and that you can appropriate your experience.