The Golden Globes Snub of ‘I May Destroy You’ Raises a Larger Question: Whose Stories Are Seen as Universal? - Vogue

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The 2021 Golden Globe nominations were announced on Wednesday, and with them came a predictable wave of outrage over the frequently questioned award show ’s various nods and snubs. Arguably most glaring was the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lack of recognition for I May Destroy You, British writer Michaela Coel ’s genre-defying HBO series about a young woman struggling to right herself in the aftermath of an ill-remembered sexual assault.

There was no shortage of praise for I May Destroy You when it aired, with The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix calling the show “a beguiling study of friendship and casual trauma and writing as a path—albeit not a simple one—to reinvention.” Coel was already well known in Hollywood for her hilarious, inimitably written sitcom Chewing Gum, but I May Destroy You elevated her to single-name status, largely because of the unsettling tonal depths to which she was willing to sink in order to tell a genuinely original—and often laugh-out-loud funny!—story about bodily autonomy and mental health. So where, to put it simply, are her awards-season flowers?

Of course, one awards show cannot and should not cement a show’s legacy, but Coel’s snubbing by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is particularly tough to swallow when one recalls the fanfare with which Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag was met at the same ceremony in 2020. (Waller-Bridge’s show scored three nominations and two wins, one for best musical or comedy TV series.) It’s facile to suggest that Fleabag and I May Destroy You are of a kind just because they both center around far-reaching stories about women (and, to be fair, it took until season two for Fleabag to get its Golden Globe noms). But it’s difficult not to wonder whether Coel might be a better candidate for awards-season plaudits if her story were just a little more, well...white (or, to put it in the coded language that Hollywood execs favor, a little more universal).

One in six American women experience sexual assault in their lifetimes, meaning that in essence the story Coel is telling should be one of the most universal of all. That said, women of color are more likely to be assaulted than white women, even though 80% of rapes are reported by white women. Coel created a piece of work that addressed that reality head-on, confidently centering a Black survivor of sexual assault and shedding light on the myriad ways in which Black survivors of all genders and sexualities are likely to be disbelieved or let down by the system that purports to protect them.

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The Golden Globes Snub of ‘I May Destroy You’ Raises a Larger Question: Whose Stories Are Seen as Universal? - Vogue
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