CAN WE CLOSE AN OPEN DOOR WITHOUT RETURNING TO IT?
CW: Sexual Violence, Domestic Violence
After Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You and Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman.
“…I keep Rewriting until I am told I must stop. I never
really finished the lecture – does anything ever finish?”
- Michaela Coel, 'Misfits: A Personal Manifesto'
Over dinner I ask what you think about resolution, and whether acceptance means something different. You say that if resolution is yes/no, a binary that you need, often, someone else to grant you, then acceptance is something internal and dynamic. You tell me between mouthfuls that acceptance is an "end to internal conflict" - I think that's beautiful, is it possible?
*
In the final episode of Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You time, timelines, and aftermath refract on the screen. It's a storyboard unfolding, Arabella and the viewer united as they live vicariously through attempts at retribution.
It reminds me of image rehearsal therapy (IRT), a form of treatment for those who experience repeated, distressing nightmares in which you work with a clinician to rewrite a recurring nightmare – you change the end in a way that you can't do to the past. If this is a scene that you will be forced to act each night on the dream-stage, at least now you can audition for the role of director and hope that your subconscious sticks to your script.
The episode 'Ego-Death' poses the question again and again to the viewer - how do you want the story to end?
*
I dream I'm in a classroom and that we're breathing in something we shouldn't - the line between the outside and my body diffuse. Men in suits hand us pieces of paper with consent forms they tell us we'd signed. They list side effects and tell us we can't separate ourselves from what came into us. I leave the room knowing the paper is the proof. I spend the rest of the dream being chased by these men. Eventually, they take the paper from a notebook that looks identical to the one I write in in my waking world.
I wake to the feeling of loss.
*
Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman reminds me of IRT with a more pastel colour scheme. Cassie, played by Carrey Mulligan, tries to achieve what she perceives as retribution for her best friend Nina.
The latter half of the film is split into segments by Roman numerals that appear on the screen. It ends with police sirens and a scheduled text message. There is pink font proclaiming "the end" as if resolution has been achieved through death and reliance on the same system that failed Nina previously.
Both Fennell's film and Coel's series ask the question that is on many of our minds: without resolution from the forms of justice we were told to rely on - mainly that of the police and the justice system - where is internal and structural resolution to be found? What does it look like for you? How far would you go to bring resolution for someone else?
*
As I wait to be called for my ultrasound, I look/try to avoid looking at the magazines on offer. Every cover, in large pastel Word Art style font, has at least one headline relating to horrific violence enacted onto women.
When I return to the office, someone on the radio from Women's Aid reminds us that our team losing at the Euros is not an excuse to beat our partners.
I wonder if I'm going to vomit the way you wonder if a roof will hold under a storm.
I reply to emails.
*
The concept of return is essential to trauma. We see Cassie returning to a club or bar each night to test if male violence will occur and the extent of it. We see a notebook marked with different coloured lines - the colour coding never revealed. We see Arabella returning to the scene where the perpetrators drugged her, a cyclical return from the first episode, set within already spiralling returns: the repetition of violence through stealthing, the return of flashbacks and images, the return of violence through her friends' experiences.
The search for resolution and healing is therefore refracted through recurring violence. The same structures that created and enabled the violence to occur are the same structures that prevent and/or hinder resolution.
*
When discussing Toni Morrison's Beloved and the term "rememory" which epitomises the link between trauma and return, Meena Alexander says of traumatic memory that it causes a "ceaseless present [where one is] forced to keep returning there, in our minds, over and over again".
The mind searches for something in the rubble, making meaning from debris.
*
One of my favourite scenes is when Arabella's therapist draws the symbol of Arabella (A), the "under the bed" (X), and the line seems to separate them (-). Arabella then merges the letters to make an amalgamation that becomes the image on the cover of her book.
There is no line between yourself and what has happened to you, you cannot hold your own history at arm's length.
*
My mind whirs at a metaphor a minute, eyes leaking letters, I cough and failed analogies splutter out. If I just keep going, I can reach the point where I can stop.
*
In the final moments of the show we see Arabella inhale before reading at the launch of her book and then it cuts to her exhaling while facing the camera on a beach and there is purple in her hair as there was when the show began. The final shot is of her running on the beach away from the camera.
Does this happen before or after the book reading? Is she happy? Is she safe?
Initially, Michaela Coel said that there would be another season of the show, then earlier this year it was announced that there wouldn't be. Someone closely related to the show has said that there is nothing more to say.
The last time we see Arabella's face she is smiling to the camera.
*
The next morning I go to the bathroom and splash my face with cold water. I wash the residue of metaphors and attempted definitions off my skin, take care to unwind the final failed analogy tangled in a curl.
You've just showered so I'm inhaling steam and the scent of your aftershave.
I stand in front of the mirror, reflection blurred, waiting, ready.
*
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