Memory as a Form of Justice in ‘I May Destroy You’ and ‘The Tale’
CW: Rape, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse
“What is it for, the past, one’s own or the world’s? To what end question it so closely?”
— Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold
Justice is, in many ways, a form of remembering. Memory and memorialization can play a critical role in the dispensation of justice, and in the struggle to keep victims, crimes, or perpetrators among the unforgotten. In the aftermath of war crimes, for instance, memorialization has long served as a form of reparation for victims. Memory as evidence, in the form of eyewitness testimony, has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system. In these ways, not only does memory have an intimate bond with justice, it is also the pivot around which justice systems are oriented.
But can memory, or the act of remembering, itself be a form of justice? When legal justice fails, where the formal justice system falls short, can memory-justice become a sort of liberatory project for survivors? This essay is an attempt to think through the entanglements of memory and justice for survivors of sexual assault in particular, through the lens of two recent onscreen projects — Michaela Coel’s 12-part series I May Destroy You and Jennifer Fox’s Emmy-nominated “fictional memoir” film, The Tale. Coel and Fox think beyond legal justice for sexual assault. In fact, their focus is not on legal justice at all. Instead, their projects examine whether an act of remembering can allow survivors to arrive at a version of justice. In both, survivors actively commit to memory what time and trauma may have buried or blocked out. Both seem to suggest that the act of piecing together fragmented and buried memories of past assault or abuse can not only serve as a way of coming to terms with a painful experience, but also, in the process, arrive at a survivor’s version of justice where legal redress has either failed or is simply not available. For both, justice lies in achieving some kind of closure — coming to terms and then moving past — using memories as a form of “meaning-making” or making sense of the past.
In Michaela Coel’s incomparable I May Destroy You, a 12-part series for BBC One and HBO, the 20-something Londoner and breakout writer Arabella Essiedu is sexually assaulted during a night out after having her drink spiked. When the drug wears off the next day, Arabella has no memory of the assault. But a cut on her forehead that she can’t explain, a broken phone, and repeated flashbacks of a man bearing down on her in a cramped space signal that something must have gone wrong. The series is an exercise of recollection — piecing together disjointed memories of the night like putting together a puzzle. Arabella fills in the gaps in her memory by talking to friends she was with that night, retracing her steps through Uber and ATM receipts, and discussing the crime with the police and a survivor’s support group.
But as the gaps in her memory begin to close, legal justice becomes more and more elusive. After nine months of investigation, her case is closed without being solved. The police officers who are in charge of her case are sympathetic but stuck with a system that relies largely on her ability to recall the events of the night which is still fragmented at best. After a DNA test of her belongings clears their only suspect, and they are unable to gather further evidence, they declare it a cold case.
The formal routes to justice thus closed, Arabella turns to her memory and her art. At the time of the assault, she had been in the middle of writing a book. By the penultimate episode of the series, that book is still incomplete and her original publishers have canceled the contract. It is at this point that she sees David, the white young man who her mind identifies as her assailant, at Ego Death Bar, where she had been on that fateful night. Once she sees him, the missing pieces of the puzzle fall into place with agonizing clarity
But Coel does not just stop at retrospectively putting together the loose ends of Arabella’s memory of that night. She does something more ambitious. She fragments that memory even further by actively reconstructing several versions of how the night may have ended. In one of most cathartic onscreen moments, Coel in effect gives the Arabella the power to choose between three potential endings, three versions of survivor-oriented justice, three ways in which to bring a painful traumatic memory to some semblance of a just closure, without ever erasing the fact of her rape.
The first scenario is a vigilante justice of sorts in which Arabella and her female friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Theo (Harriet Webb) drug, strangle, and beat David to a shocking, brutal death. It’s a justice served violent and bloody, gesturing at the towering rage that often rises from sexual violation. Arabella takes his body back to her apartment and stashes it under her bed where she had earlier stored the ephemera of other traumas she’d prefer not to face: the clothes she wore on the night she was raped, the sonogram from a forgotten abortion, the outfit left behind by Zain, a colleague who assaulted her when he removed his condom mid-intercourse without her knowledge.
But revenge alone cannot mend the survivor, and In the second scenario, justice takes a more unusual turn. Arabella gets coked up, and with Terry’s help, tricks David into assaulting her again, meaning to have the police catch him in the act and arrest him. Once David realizes that Arabella is not sedated by the drugs he has spiked her drink with, he first attacks her, but then breaks down and apologizes. He reveals himself as a victim of sexual abuse, and admits to having raped others, even going to prison for it once. This version ends with Arabella trying to console David as the police take him away.
In the final scenario, probably the most surreal one of the three, Arabella introduces herself to a visibly shy David in an empty bar. At some point, she whispers ‘raper’ into his ear. As in the first two scenarios, they end up in the restroom, but this time, they make out, and return to Arabella’s apartment where they have consensual sex. The next morning, Arabella wakes up to David tenderly watching her. “I’m not going to go unless you tell me to,” he says. She tells him to leave. And he, and the bloody version of him stashed under her bed in the first scenario, walk out of her bedroom together.
These scenarios allow Arabella to transition through the various stages of revenge, empathy, and regaining control. By focusing on the survivor, the show opens up other possibilities of justice that lie outside the simplistic framework of punishment for the perpetrator. In Coel’s retelling, the memory work that survivors of sexual assault or abuse often put in by way of therapy, writing journals, and through their imagination, itself becomes a kind of healing justice, especially where the law and their communities have failed survivors.
After each of these scenarios, Arabella writes down the outcome on a notecard and pins it to her bedroom wall. At first, it is unclear what this is for. It is only in the fourth and final scenario, in which Arabella decides to stay home to work on her novel, rather than spend another night at the bar in the hope of finding her assailant, that we realize all these scenarios are possible endings for the book that she has been writing. This book that she self-publishes after losing the publishing contract, allows her to come to terms with her assault and move past it. Writing the book, and thereby regaining control over the narrative, is her own version of justice, and reconstructing memories of the assault is the vehicle through which she gets there. It allows Arabella to take control of her own life and authorship, upending conventional notions of justice.
The reel and real are entangled in Coel’s memory-as-justice project. The show is based on Coel’s own experience of sexual assault while she was working on her first show, Chewing Gum. Like Arabella in the series, Coel went out for a drink with a friend, only to wake up the next morning realizing that she had been drugged and sexually assaulted. If the book is a way for Arabella to arrive at a version of justice, the series is for Coel a way of regaining control of her own narrative. Both the maker of the series and its protagonist explore the fraught but fruitful relationship between trauma, art, and justice, asking how we might use memories to transform an experience of unthinkable suffering into a form of healing.
Taking back control by piecing together memories of abuse is also how the protagonist of Jennifer Fox’s The Tale (2018) moves towards a closure of sorts. Just as I May Destroy You is based partially on Coel’s own experience and trauma of sexual assault, The Tale chronicles the sexual abuse that writer-director Fox undergoes as a child in the 1970s and the consequent trauma that this memory triggers in her adult self when she realizes the full extent of what had happened. This cinematic memoir details the process through which she came to recognize her experience as abuse — an epiphany arrived at gradually, after years of telling herself that it was consensual.
The story opens with the adult 40-something Jennifer (Laura Dern), a professor and a documentary filmmaker, whose seemingly normal life is thrown into disarray after a few agitated voicemails from her mother. The discovery of an essay she wrote as a child and letters exchanged with two childhood riding teachers, nudge her towards a path of recollection. The story goes back and forth in time, showing her as the 13-year-old Jenny (Isabelle Nélisse) telling the story the way she saw it at the time, then shifting to when she’s in her 40s, trying to understand what really happened, why it happened, and how it affected her life since.
As a young girl, she attends a horse-riding camp where her instructor, Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debecki), lures a shy Jennifer into a sexual relationship with her lover Bill (Jason Ritter), a 40-something running coach. Together, they appeal to the young Jenny, treating her like a grown-up and letting her in on the secret of their bohemian love affair. It is easy to see why Jenny — overlooked among her many siblings — is initially drawn to them. “Funny how you live with people in your mind — inside of you they’re always the same,” the elder Fox recalls in one voiceover. “You live with them happily, never wanting anything to change.”
The rediscovery of older memories is arrived at painfully and haltingly. The adult Jennifer initially dismisses her mother’s fears about her “relationship” with her “first boyfriend” as a prudish overreaction. This is the story that she had told herself all along — that she was her running coach’s much younger lover. But as she delves deeper into her memories, she is forced to reexamine the validity of a relationship with a 40-year-old coach at an age when she was not old enough to give consent or understand abuse.
The Tale is a reminder that stories of sexual abuse and violence are easily lost in time and space; they are forgotten by perpetrators and buried by survivors. Time inflicts epistemic violence on facts and memories. And sometimes, survivors want to remember only a version of themselves. As the film begins to sort through Fox’s memories, Dern’s character remembers herself as an adolescent (Jessica Sarah Flaum) on the brink of womanhood. But when she consults a photo album, she finds a flat-chested, pre-pubescent girl (Isabelle Nélisse) with a face still ringed by baby fat. Suddenly, the scale and depravity of the abuse is brought into sharp relief. Through flashbacks, photographs, anecdotes, and fragments of information from people who knew her then, she comes to realize that she had been sexually groomed by Bill and Mrs. G. This was followed by statutory rape by Bill who gaslighted her into thinking that they were in an unconventional relationship and, therefore, only “making love”. At 40 something, it dawns on Jennifer that what she had experienced three decades ago, and what her mind had normalized as a relationship ever since, was in fact abuse.
Fox’s film is about memory and the construction of the self. Both Fox herself, and the protagonist of her film, tell themselves a certain story in order to subconsciously deny abuse and resist the narrative of victimhood. In one of several imaginary interviews that Fox uses as a plot device to untangle memories, the adult Jennifer cross-examines her 13-year-old self. The younger stubborn Jenny responds, “I’m not the victim of the story. I’m the hero.” The reconstruction of her memory allows the adult Jennifer to unravel this denial and retell the story for what it really is.
In an interview, the director Jennifer Fox points out how common it is for survivors of child sexual abuse to “wake up in middle age”. “I didn’t even use the words ‘sexual abuse’ until I was 45,” she recounts. In a separate interview with NPR, Fox takes exception to the use of the word rape by the interviewer, pointing out that it fails to take into account the full extent of the coercion and manipulation that goes on for abuse to happen. This manipulation — the ‘grooming effect’ — leads survivors to live for years without realizing the damaging nature of the abuse they suffered, she says. These are instructive points when thinking about justice in historical abuse situations. For Fox, the statute of limitation laws in her home state of Pennsylvania meant that she was cut off from pursuing charges years before she found her truth. In the film, Jennifer’s justice lay in confronting Bill with the sole intention of articulating her truth. In this, the film offers the survivor a version of restorative justice.
For Fox, who never named her abuser but spoke to him at length to unearth the details of what happened, the making of this film is itself an act of closure and some semblance of justice. In her NPR interview, she explains that recording the truth was more important to her than naming her abuser because “there are no witnesses. It’s my word against his. Nobody else was in the room with me when these things occurred. So there’s no proof. There’s no prosecution right now.” For her, catharsis lies in bearing witness and becoming the record keeper of her own excavated memories. “..he has a clock on him like everybody. And he will die, and maybe, at that point, I can name who it was. And then maybe we can have that healing,” she adds, leaving open the possibility of a healing justice.
While stories of historical abuse and injustice cannot always be proved, they can be known and told. If the function of memory is protection from trauma, it also has a role to play in coming to terms with trauma. For some survivors, permanently deleting the traumatic memories of having their bodies violated is one way of moving on. For others, coming to terms with the truth becomes an act of power. The Tale is concerned with the latter. It brings to mind an utterance from Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North: “Memory is the true justice”. For both the real and reel Jennifer, justice or closure lies in the act of remembering, unravelling a traumatic past, and reconciling their version of events with the truth.
At their core, The Tale and I May Destroy You examine what happens when survivors reach deep within their own memories or reconstruct them when necessary. Both Arabella and Jennifer are at first taken apart, and then knit back together through memories, becoming whole again after surviving the unimaginable. Built on the bulwark of their memories, attempting to move through and beyond their trauma, these cultural projects can be a point of departure from which to imagine a survivors’ version of justice.
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