With the series now having drawn to a close, Killing Eve has undoubtedly changed the landscape of television for female characters. The show proffers not only one ‘strong female character’, but multiple, including Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), head of the Russia Desk at MI6, Eve (Sandra Oh), a MI5 desk worker turned agent, and Villanelle (Jodie Comer), an assassin working for the international crime syndicate known as The Twelve. All three women unabashedly carry out their jobs in male-dominated fields, forming a triangle in which patriarchal norms are resisted and challenged. But what is particularly interesting about these characters is that they also are all, to varying degrees, unabashedly violent. At one end of the spectrum is Villanelle, an assassin who takes fulsome pleasure in the pain of others, but both Eve and Carolyn also dabble in murder at points during the show’s four seasons.
Whilst violent women have always been a staple of popular crime fiction, those characters generally align with a series of stereotypes relating to the overtly sexualised femme fatale, implying the corruption of an idealised femininity. One of the reasons for Killing Eve’s success is perhaps that it shifts away from these passé male-gaze oriented characters, and moves towards a more refreshing take on complex female characters, where the women can do bad things on screen, just like the men have always done, without leaning on the archetype of ‘seductress’ or ‘enchantress’. In the words of Fiona Shaw: “Why shouldn’t all the terrible emotions that are available to men to play not be available for women to play?”. What Shaw is referencing here is that it truly is rare for women to be portrayed in cinema as ‘terrible’ or ‘violent’ without the femme fatale stereotype. Viewers have welcomed this novelty and praised the writing for refusing to reduce Eve, Villanelle, and Carolyn to docile characters in a ‘man’s world’.
However, in some ways, Killing Eve can present an ambiguous language surrounding its female empowerment. Whilst the show’s portrayal of women carrying out typically masculine roles is a huge step in the right direction, the writing seems to sometimes equate this female power to a sense of abnormality and, all three characters are often associated with notions like abjection and deviance. Of course, some element of this may stem from things like Villanelle brutally murdering an Italian mafia boss with a hairpin (which I don’t endorse) but it isn’t unusual for women in traditionally male roles to be deemed to be somewhat perverse. The criminal woman occupies an anomalous position in society, whereby she transgresses society’s legal codes, but she also transgresses the norms of her gender given that criminality contradicts the conventional feminine passivity. In ‘Women and Violence: Myths and Reality in the 21st Century’, Heidensohn dubs this position as ‘doubly deviant’, where these women are considered to be committing two crimes by twice disturbing the limits of the patriarchy. Sequentially, deviance and chaos are considered to be key traits of women who seek to define the borderlines and I would argue this is the case for our Eve-Villanelle-Carolyn trio. For example, the character Hélène (Camille Cottin) plays into this when she says ‘Do you know why I love you, Villanelle? Because you are an agent of chaos. And I love chaos. It rips apart and starts again. It’s like a forest fire. It burns, it clears. It’s monstrous but it’s beautiful’ (3:7).
The word ‘monstrous’ is particularly interesting. Society doesn’t really have conventions for ‘normal’ uses of force and violence by women, which greatly contrasts the ways in which we deal with male behaviours such as play fighting and even joining the military. In fact, most women convicted of serious violent crime are sensationalised in the media as something out of the ordinary, and are criticised far more harshly than their male counterparts. Furthermore, their violence is usually explained by the media through either deeply-rooted evil or mental instability. This motif can be seen in Villanelle where, throughout the series, she fixates on trying to understand why she is the way she is and seeks explanations for her murderous nature in her abandonded family, Konstantin, and even religion. Eventually, she seems unable to escape her monstrosity and even confesses to Eve that ‘I think my monster encourages your monster’ (3:8). The idea of female violence as ‘monstrous’ is perhaps due to our default image of the criminal as a man, which is backed up by the statistic that men represented 89.5% of homicide offenders between 1980 and 2008 (The US Department of Justice). Whilst the rarity of female violence creates a kind of shock value, male violence is normalised. In turn, male criminals in pop culture such as Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders or Nate Jacobs from Euphoria are, instead of being considered abnormal, glamorised as cool and alluring. Here we have the antithesis of Tommy Shelby, the charming and intelligent gangster vs. Villanelle, the monstrous ‘agent of chaos’.I would, of course, rather no forms of violence were normalised but even a brief comparison of the perception of male vs. female violence in the media exemplifies how women are villanised for breaking away from the patriarchal expectations placed upon them. A similar analysis of ‘deviance’ could just as easily be applied to a woman at the top of any male dominated field of work who has to fight to not be seen as an exception or an outsider. Given such deeply-rooted gender stereotypes, in some respects, it is not entirely unsurprising that there has been so much shock value surrounding Killing Eve’s manipulative and dangerous women. In order to combat this feeling of abnormality, we are going to need more stories like Killing Eve which so loudly reject all forms of traditional female archetypes that continue to linger in Hollywood.