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My plan for Saturday was to finally watch I May Destroy You. Then I woke up to the news of Chadwick Boseman’s death and that plan seemed even more fitting. First, because I was already sad, so a show dealing with such a difficult topic felt appropriate.
But more importantly, because for years Boseman has been, to me, a standard-bearer for the tremendous flowering of black talent that we’ve been privileged to witness, as more and more black artists and creators take the reins of their careers and help others up along the way.
I first noticed Boseman in a short-lived NBC series called Persons Unknown. I really liked him in it, but when it became clear the show was doomed, I had little hope of ever seeing him again.
That had been the pattern I had observed with talented black actors for years. They might shine for a moment, but the opportunities just weren’t there for them to grow their careers.
But as we all know, Boseman did just that. He embarked on the considered, deliberate shepherding of his career that many have commented on, choosing roles that put him in the spotlight while also highlighting black excellence and black stories, and pulling others up with him.
As he talks about in this speech, Boseman felt the responsibility of being “young, gifted, and black”, the need to take every opportunity to not only promote his own career, but broaden the space available for stories, of every kind, about black people. https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1299538040893984769
Nor was he alone. In the last half-decade or so, we’ve seen so many furiously talented black artists cannily curating their careers, creating opportunities for themselves and others, bringing distinctive voices to broader audiences.
When Boseman was cast as Black Panther, I couldn’t suppress a hipsterish reaction of “I knew him earlier”. But it also felt like a sign. That this flowering of black talent, of black artists making space for themselves and their stories, was here to stay.
Michaela Coel and I May Destroy You are one branch of that flowering. Her work is completely different from Boseman’s, but like him she insists on the specificity of her story, rooting it in race, culture, ethnicity, and class.
And yes, IMDY is just as good as everyone said, smart and challenging and tragic and funny all at the same time. It’s an absolutely original work by an artist whose clarity of purpose and intention rings out of every scene.
That, too, feels emblematic of this movement. The artists who have come up over the last half-decade know their own mind, know the stories they want to tell, know that they need to hold on to their vision. And finally, they have the opportunity to do that.
The result is utterly unique and utterly exhilarating, a story not only about one person’s strange, fitful journey to recovery from rape, but about many characters’ struggle with sexual ethics, and with being kind and decent to one another.
It’s hard to imagine a show like IMDY being made ten, or even five, years ago. Boseman isn’t the only reason that’s changed, but he feels symbolic of the movement that has brought us artists like Coel, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, and so many others.
It’s our great loss that we’re not going to get to watch Boseman over what surely would have been a decades-long career. But as he himself said, the goal was never to be The One Black Movie Star, but to encourage a polyphony of voices.
Watching I May Destroy You felt like a celebration of that project, a reminder that it is still ongoing even in the face of this one, devastating loss.
