In Killing Eve, BBC America’s hit spy thriller, the beautiful but psycho assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) has many skills—scaling walls, formulating poisons, speaking French, Russian, English, and Italian—but her most valuable attribute is one that all women have: the fact of often being ignored, objectified, and underestimated. As we watch her travel the world murdering powerful men (and one woman), she poses as a nurse, a sex worker, a maid, and a waitress, hiding in roles where women serve and care for other people, using the muteness of women’s work to her advantage. Not only would no one suspect someone so young and pretty of her crimes, but most witnesses would not even remember her.
We’ve seen all this before, in any caper or spy thriller where women have an active role. It is much easier for a woman to go incognito than a man, since no one is very threatened by us anyway. In Alias and Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Americans and Oceans 8, women spies and outlaws hide in plain sight as wives, mothers, party guests, bimbos, housekeepers, and debutantes. In Killing Eve, the first person who suspects the assassin the British government is tracking is a woman is Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), an MI5 functionary who is not actually supposed to be investigating anything. The show implies that the reason Eve catches on so quickly is because she is aware of the way that some women move through the world—projecting harmlessness, infiltrating forbidden spaces, chatting and eavesdropping, knowing more than they are supposed to. This, in fact, is how Eve has learned so much about a case that is not even hers.
Contrary to much that has been written about the show, what is new about Killing Eve is not exactly how female it is, but how it literalizes the eroticism of the cat and mouse genre. The relationship between a fictional detective and his quarry has always been suffused with rage, obsession, and desire. Villanelle, a new bisexual icon, is turned on by the thought of Eve searching for her, and enlists a tourist woman she meets in a kinky hide and seek, explicitly roleplaying her relationship with Eve. She buys Eve clothes and perfume, which is creepy and aggressive and also, somehow, romantic. But of course, this is female too: because of how female characters are always sexualized, and how for women there is no boundary between public and private. Eve and Villanelle cannot hide behind a screen of professionalism, since both quickly go rogue, acting on impulse instead of doing their jobs. The show riffs on the most female of genres, the romantic comedy, with Eve and Villanelle even meet-cute-ing in a hospital bathroom before Villanelle brutally murders four people.
Killing Eve would seem to be one in a long line of works where queer identity is part and parcel with sociopathy, a trope embodied famously by Patricia Highsmith’s nerdy antihero in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Villanelle’s bisexuality sometimes represents the anarchy of her life and the chameleonic way she reinvents herself. At one point, a scene of Eve and her husband attempting sex and then deciding they’re too exhausted is juxtaposed with a scene of Villanelle’s boss finding her in bed with both a very beautiful girl and a very beautiful boy.
But sexual desire is not the only force that binds Eve and Villanelle. As the show’s creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge told The New York Times, “They give each other life in a way that’s more complex than a romantic relationship. It’s sexual, it’s intellectual, it’s aspirational.” Their partnership has the hallmarks of a creative collaboration: the push and pull, the way they challenge and provoke and exhilarate one another as Eve follows Villanelle in Berlin nightclubs and English villages and Russian prisons and on cctv all over Europe. As Tara Isabella Burton writes of The Talented Mr. Ripley in her essay for CrimeReads about queer friendship and the psychological thriller, that element of personal challenge and aspiration is key. Ripley’s friend and victim, Dickie Greenleaf, “—handsome, loved, rich, at ease with himself —represents everything that the alienated, lonely Tom wants to be.”
Burton, who identifies as queer, finds herself contemplating relationships she’s had that fall in this ambiguous space. “They were women against whom I defined myself, or who defined themselves against me,” she writes. “They were women on whom I had a ‘crush,’ but a crush whose nature I did not then have the language to pick apart: a combination of erotic desire and a desire for emulation.” Burton echoes Waller-Bridge: these relationships are not primarily sexual, but sex is one arena through which their ambiguous power dynamics play out. In the same way, sexual identity does not supersede or swallow up the host of other traits, habits, and experiences that make us who we are. Our identities are sui generis, not divisible to their component parts. Villanelle’s bisexuality doesn’t represent the chaos she causes, but it is, necessarily, a part of it.
Maybe that’s why these stories that queer the thriller cut so deep: they speak so eloquently about the volatility of identity. “Female obsession with other females is rife,” Waller-Bridge told the New York times. “I’ve been obsessed with too many women—way more than I have been with men.” The fact that women are obsessed with women—and men are obsessed with men—clearly has to do with the way we use other people as a mirror to the careers, bodies, reputations, love lives, freedoms, and responsibilities that we want for ourselves. “The erotic is just one sphere along which the desire for self-definition manifests itself,” Burton writes—meaning that sexuality is one of many ways of looking at, or loving, or loathing ourselves.
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Burton’s recent novel Social Creature depicts a relationship like a funhouse mirror between two twenty-something women in New York: Lavinia is grand and rich and insipid, prone to ecstatic exclamations like “God I love this city!” and Louise is, well—what? She wants to be a writer but never really writes. She has no friends and barely eats, is neither ugly nor beautiful, has three jobs but can’t make ends meet, and has a wholesome, nondescript past in rural New Hampshire. She is lonely and desperate and on the verge of failure. Lavinia takes her under her wing, bringing her to torrid parties and speakeasies and introducing her grotesque prep school friends, who are like rejects from a Whit Stillman film. Their friendship is immediate and obsessive, as they go from posting Instagram snaps together to getting matching tattoos to Louise moving into Lavinia’s giant Upper East Side apartment.
Fissures quickly begin to show in their relationship, as Louise is spending too much and working too little to keep up with her new social set, and Lavinia uses Louise’s material dependence on her to demand loyalty, compliments, and favors. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Lavinia dies halfway through the book—it’s revealed on the back cover—and a panicked Louise undertakes an ingenious social media bluff, posting as Lavinia to create an illusion that she’s still alive. What is truly chilling about Social Creature is how easily Louise accomplishes her ruse. Lavinia has few notable qualities other than her charm—she’s always babbling charismatically about romance, life, art, and adventure. The reader is attracted and then repelled by her joie de vivre, just as Louise is: her charm eventually reveals itself as mere privilege. “Lavinia isn’t afraid of anything,” Louise thinks in the beginning, with awe, and of course not, what would someone with a hundred thousand dollars in her checking account be afraid of?
What was intoxicating to Louise about Lavinia were the trappings of her wealth and status, all of which are better without her. After Lavinia’s death, Louise continues to live in Lavinia’s apartment, spends her money, wears her clothes, and fucks her ex-boyfriend. The performance of privilege is clearly all anyone valued about Lavinia, because it is so easily simulated with social media that none of her friends notice when they haven’t seen her in months. This is also the lesson of this summer’s favorite scammer, Anna Delvey, who fooled everyone from European banks to venture capitalists to New York oligarchs into thinking she was a wealthy German heiress. She wore Céline sunglasses, dropped $100 tips, and went to all the right parties, and these markers of wealth were so convincing that the hotel where she stayed for months didn’t push it when they discovered they didn’t have her credit card on file.
In fact, it seems like her charmlessness has worked to her advantage, since no one assumed that a girl who seemed so messy, silly, and babyish could be capable of such deviousness.Delvey pulled off a breathtaking grift—she’s currently incarcerated at Rikers Island, awaiting trial for grand larceny and theft—and, as Jessica Pressler writes in New York Magazine, the friends she duped keep marveling to themselves that “she wasn’t superhot…or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice.” Charm in Delvey’s story is beside the point, since all she needed to manipulate people was the promise of access, of adventure, of importance, all of which she could provide with her fictional sixty million euro net worth. In fact, it seems like her charmlessness has worked to her advantage, since no one assumed that a girl who seemed so messy, silly, and babyish could be capable of such deviousness. She flew under the radar, just as so many women have before her.
Villanelle in Killing Eve embodies the cliche of the charming sociopath. She is brilliant, funny, beautiful, and buzzing with childlike energy. This is a trope I have problems with, not least because I don’t think we should make icons of manipulative monsters. But her charm also wears thin when her life is no longer appealing: at first she is jet setting, murdering a corrupt Russian politician in Vienna and then returning to her beautiful Paris apartment to have love affairs, drink champagne, and wear an enviable pink organza dress. As the season progresses, her crimes become more desperate and brutal and her look is more masculine and drab. Only then do we see through her glamour to the sickness underneath. Her cruelty is no longer charming when we aren’t jealous of her life. And anyway, Villanelle’s charm is not really an asset: she is not able to successfully beguile her mysterious bosses or Eve, and she cannot resist whimsical and diabolical touches (e.g. giving her name as “Eve Polastri” at the site of one of her murders) that lead, inevitably, to Eve finding her. In all of these stories, the charming sociopath is not the one we have to worry about.
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Eve claims that she is interested in why women kill, and at first she—and we—believes that there may be some trauma with men in Villanelle’s past, some rapist or trafficker or abuser who has created this monster. She was put in a Russian prison for killing a man and cutting off his genitals. “What did he do to you?” Eve asks, but later we find out that Villanelle did it because she was obsessed with the man’s wife, her teacher. Her cruelty begs the question, taking us right back where we started. At one point one of her victims asks her why she is targeting him. “I have no fucking idea,” she answers, and then shoots him.
The nature of the criminal profiler is that of a professional obsessive, probing the minds and motivations of criminals with such deep attention and understanding that it could be confused for love.Eve wants to believe Villanelle is a victim because it lends logic and compassion to her interest in the case, though the reason for it is actually much simpler: compulsion. The nature of the criminal profiler is that of a professional obsessive, probing the minds and motivations of criminals with such deep attention and understanding that it could be confused for love. “I think about you all the time…” Eve tells Villanelle in the season finale. “I think about what friends you have, what you eat before you work, what shampoo you use, what happened in your family. I think about your eyes and your mouth and what you feel when you kill someone.” At one point, when an MI6 boss discovers Eve’s expertise in female assassins, she says sheepishly that she’s “just a fan.” We are meant to identify with Eve, who is as driven to uncover the truth about Villanelle as we are, at home binge watching. “The most important thing is that I was right,” Eve says at the end of the first episode. “No,” her boss tells her, “the most important thing is that four people are dead, and it’s all your fault.”
Jia Tolentino describes Delvey as “a perversely relatable striver: she was us, just with more energy.” In the Killing Eve finale, Villanelle says something oddly similar, that the only difference between her and Eve is that Eve would never actually be able to kill someone, not even someone as awful as Villanelle herself. The only distinction, then, between normal people and sociopaths is not higher morality but a kind of merciful cowardice. But there is a subtler meaning to Villanelle’s words too. Eve never directly kills anyone, but her obsession with Villanelle puts people she cares about in harm’s way almost immediately. In the third episode, Eve convinces her sweet colleague Bill, who we see playing with his infant, to come with her to track Villanelle to Berlin, where Villanelle promptly murders him. In Social Creature, Louise is a relatable striver too, sympathetic in her temptation to take all that the obnoxious Lavinia has and does not deserve, and she is capable of incredible coldness and cruelty. Eve and Louise are cowardly, but they are nevertheless destructive.
Waller-Bridge’s greatest subjects are like the protagonist of her brilliant series Fleabag, who allows the pain of her personal grief to leak all over everyone in her life, leaving a trail of relationships in chaos. Like Eve, she fucks up constantly but is still convinced she is trying her best—an emotional situation also known as “the human condition.” But the narrator of Fleabag is charming and she is wounded. In Killing Eve, Waller-Bridge has given us fewer easy answers, even more difficult heroes. Her subject here is the nature of evil, and whether it is the result of violence or negligence, cruelty or selfishness, love or pain. It’s a question with no answer, or an answer with no question. What is evil? We only know what it isn’t. Not us. Never us.
