The Female of the Species is Deadlier Than The Male: Killing Eve

Villanelle is able to transgress the conventions of passivity and propriety that women are traditionally beholden to—her actions are both liberating and terrifying.

Only when we see the defying of narrative convention do we begin to realise how deeply ingrained our perceptions have been in terms of what genre can do, particularly how implicitly masculine many modes of storytelling are.  BBC1’s Killing Eve, the adaptation of Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle for television by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, deconstructs the typically masculine spy genre. It  provides a stellar example of how to create a narrative that not only includes women but places female characters at its centre.

While some detective shows like The Fall and Top of the Lake feature leading female detectives (Stella Gibson and Robin Griffin), they are generally characterised as the lone woman amongst a sea of men eager to undermine them. As the above examples suggest, women are allowed to pursue but are rarely shown as those being pursued; criminality is reserved for the male characters.  This is not the case in Killing Eve.  The series follows MI5’s Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh of Grey’s Anatomy) in her pursuit of assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer of Doctor Foster), whose targets range from Italian Mafia men to Russian politicians and Chinese colonels.

Part of what makes Killing Eve fascinating – and undoubtedly worthy of a binge watch – is the fluctuating relationship between the pursuer and the pursued.   The cat-and-mouse game at its core slowly becomes a game of equals. Neither of the two leads is one dimensional. The audience is granted insight into Eve’s intense search for the assassin, while also being presented with Villanelle as a fleshed-out character. With her brazen playfulness and confidence, she becomes a perversely likeable psychopathic killer, changing from predator to prey as she becomes intent on outsmarting Eve.

Indeed, it is not long before Eve and Villanelle become fascinated with one another. Their shared fixation on capturing the other veers into an erotic obsession – or what Waller-Bridge has termed ‘espionage love.’ Eve, it can be argued, is the proxy with which the viewer can indulge in the horror and compulsion of Villanelle’s violence. This  morbid fascination is evident elsewhere in the rise of female viewership and listenership for true-crime stories and podcasts. Many argue that this obsession with true-crime is part of a ‘shadow hypothesis’ in which women, through these narratives, develop compensatory strategies to deal with violence perpetrated by males. However, this theory fails to consider why female viewers are becoming increasingly enraptured by women committing  acts of violence amongst themselves.

Instead, Eve marvels at Villanelle’s ability to transgress the conventions of passivity and propriety that women are traditionally beholden to—her actions are both liberating and terrifying. “She is outsmarting the smartest of us and for that she deserves to do or kill whoever she wants,” Eve confesses in the opening episodes. It is Villanelle’s transgressions that compel Eve to work outside the bureaucracy of MI5 (her original position at the start of the series).   

For her part, Villanelle is obsessed with the chase, especially the challenge that Eve provides. Their conflict highlights the idea that it is only women who are truly capable of recognising female value and the worth of one another. This is further implied by the fact fellow spy Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) is the only other agent who believes that the assassin being hunted is actually female and recognises Eve’s intuition when she questions the idea that only a man could be capable of such actions. We see this in the pilot episode, for example, during a debriefing after the assassination of a Russian politician. It is only Eve who is convinced the assassin is a woman; the victim’s femoral artery was slashed in the street while he walked with his girlfriend, and Eve asserts that only a woman would not be considered a passing threat and thus would have been able to get so close.

Moreover, Killing Eve deeply contrasts the recent Hollywood trend of an all-female cast. This trend, it can be argued, is at times just a shallow gender swap without any re-examination of the actual problem: the mode of storytelling itself.  Killing Eve is thoroughly detailed in its portrayal of the ways women operate within and negotiate their roles in modern society.

Villanelle’s missions are successful due to the gendered expectations of certain occupations, which she is able to exploit in order to gain both access and invisibility. Throughout the series she performs various roles, such as nurse, sex worker, aspiring perfumer and waitress. Her time spent in disguise illustrates the ways in which women are overlooked and underestimated. Interestingly, while Villanelle uses her femininity to gain access, she does not use her sexual prowess; Waller-Bridge deliberately avoids this trope , stating that it leads to stagnation and mitigates the exciting possibilities that can occur when sex is not an option.

What is perhaps the series’ most refreshing element is the characterisation of both Eve and Villanelle as complex individuals, without any root cause or underlying trauma as motivation for their actions. In recent years, many detective and crime series have used the trope of the ‘defective detective’; this refers to the use of a mentally ill or deeply traumatised character whose work is either informed by their condition, or a a means to overcome inner demons. One simply has to look to Carrie Mathison’s bipolar disorder in Homeland, Saga Noren’s Asperger’s in The Bridge or the harrowing death of Veronica’s best friend in Veronica Mars to see the popularity of this trope. For Eve, her life is nothing out of the ordinary except for her fascination with female assassins, a pastime which compensates for her unchallenging and thankless paper-pushing job at MI5.

It would be easy to create sympathy for Villanelle by providing a backstory of trauma or vengeance as a motivating factor for her behaviour. However, to do so seems to limit the capabilities of women by suggesting they cannot be as cold-blooded as their male counterparts and that some sort of emotional justification is needed as a prerequisite to all feminine violence. Indeed, it is evident that the character of Villanelle has been thoughtfully shaped by Waller-Bridge, whose critically acclaimed comedy series Fleabag presented audiences with a sex addict whose issues, while exacerbated by a recent traumatic evident, could not be pinpointed or explained away.  In episode two, for example, audience expectations are subverted when Villanelle undergoes a psychological assessment that does not yield any anomalous results. Seeing Villanelle as a professional fulfilled by her work is an unsettling concept for her handler and, arguably, the audience as it calls into question the prejudices surrounding the gendered possibilities of violence and its motivations.

Killing Eve is never heavy-handed in its approach to the issues of gender roles and femininity. Instead, by exploring subversion, the show seeks to establish a precedent that favours forward thinking over fanfare.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *