Who Spies on the Spies?

Gazing at the gaze in the first season of Killing Eve

Everyone loves spies because spies can be anyone. The British intelligence agent might actually be a Russian intelligence agent; the waiter or plumber might be an assassin. One subgenre of spy story even suggests that anyone might be a spy without knowing it. Jason Bourne is in such deep cover he doesn't even know his own name anymore; Geena Davis, suburban mom, suddenly discovers she's an amoral assassin in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Even you, sitting there reading this, might actually have the deadly ability to kill with a wad of gum and a fidget spinner. Who knows? Spies are so sneaky they might even be in your head.

The first season of the wonderful BBC series Killing Eve is well aware that the joy of the spy genre is watching someone be a string of someone else's. Much of the show focuses on the Russian assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) as she slips into disguise after disguise to perform her nefarious deeds. Here she's an eager young businesswoman trying to market her perfume; here she's a dominatrix in a fetish nurse outfit; there she's a innocent young Parisian in the first blush of love, and over to the side she's a heartbroken exploited abuse victim, forced into a life of crime. Comer's facial expressions are disturbingly, seductively plastic, shifting from earnestness to contrite innocence to delighted homicidal joy in a single scene. The virtuosity of the performance highlights the fact that the assassin must be a virtuoso actor. To be a spy is to inhabit every role. Villanelle gets to be anyone she wants.

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In the series, Villanelle's most appreciative audience, and truest fan, is Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh.) Eve is an MI5 bureaucrat with a stable boring marriage and a stable boring job. She's fascinated by female assassins, though, and she finds Villanelle particularly exciting. She embarrasses herself in a meeting by spontaneously and inappropriately expressing appreciation for a precise kill in which Villanelle slit a man's artery without him noticing it.

Eve wants to be Villanelle—and over the course of the series she gets her wish, for better or worse. She is pulled out of MI 5 into a secret project, focused on tracking down the assassin. Friends are killed; she's almost killed herself. She starts to lie to her husband; she starts to lie to her boss. Her life becomes hair raising, exciting, and duplicitous.

In one of the series' best scenes, Villanelle corners Eve in her own kitchen, and threatens her at knife point. Eve's husband comes in, and Villanelle switches instantly to a cheery British accent, breezing out of the house with a friendly goodbye. Eve, rather helplessly, follows the assassin's lead, putting on a cheery smile to placate and fool her husband. Villanelle's essence is being something other than who she is. And Eve becomes more like Villanelle by becoming other than who she is, too.

Villanelle leaves Eve's kitchen without killing her because she's fascinated with Eve just as Eve is fascinate with her. Eve may want to become a spy like Villanelle, but Villanelle also wants to become a spy like Eve. She steals Eve's suitcase and wears her clothes; she uses Eve's name as an alias. Villanelle likes trying on identities, but the identity she most wants to try on is that of Eve, who is trying on the identity of Villanelle.

Villanelle's doesn't primarily want to be Eve, admittedly. She wants to be with Eve. Villanelle is bisexual, and she finds Eve very attractive; for her, the cat and mouse chase is a kind of courtship. She wears Eve's clothes from that suitcase, but she also seduces a middle-aged women with frizzy hair in order to get her to wear Eve's clothes while they have sex. She sends Eve fabulous designer outfits, as well as the expensive perfume Villanelle. In that kitchen scene, Villanelle leans in to sniff Eve's neck. "You're wearing it," she says appreciatively. Villanelle smells Villanelle on Eve; the two rub off on each other.

In the famous essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey argues that pleasure in cinema is designed around the male gaze. In Hollywood films, Mulvey says, men are placed in the narrative position of the male protagonist, who gets to have exciting adventures and look at (and have sex with) beautiful women. For Mulvey, there's a firm division for male viewers between the pleasure of identifying with the man and the pleasure of lusting after or possessing the women. Movies in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" are engines for separating identity and desire.

Killing Eve, though, suggests that the pleasure of watching doesn't come from separating identity and desire but from polymorphously conflating them. Viewers identify with Villanelle as she shifts from disguise to disguise, gleefully murdering people and (on one occasion) knocking ice cream out of the hands of children just for the fun of it. They also identify with Eve in her dumpy sweatshirts as she tracks Villanelle down. And part of identifying with Villanelle is desiring Eve, and part of identifying with Eve is desiring Villanelle—and not just desiring to capture her either. Eve says she's not bisexual, but the series makes it clear that she isn't completely aware of her full potential.

When Eve watches Villanelle, she finds identities and desires in herself that she both feared and longed for. In the spy genre, everyone watches and everyone performs. Spies take on everyone's perspective and everyone's identity. they get to try on and enter the thing they aren't. Eve and Villanelle circle each other, but they aren't nearly as sneaky as the secret watchers in front of the set spying from everywhere and nowhere, who get to be and desire everybody.

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This first ran on my Patreon some years back. I still like it though, so here it is!