The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 2: Desire as Power
Killing Eve is rebellious, seductive, and shrewdly on-trend. Seasons 1–3 also retell an ancient myth about wild feminine power and subversion.
Pop Archetype is a series that explores the way timeless myths and archetypes bubble up through the cracks in popular culture. While the plot of the myth might take new twists, and the heroines might play under different masks and guises, the essence of the story remains the same. We look at what gets lost, what’s restored and given new energy, and how the medium changes the message.
Part 2
The Descent of Inanna was excavated in 1900 in fragments of broken clay tablets, and survived not only an aeon, but a Solomon-like split between competing museums before it was soldered together into one narrative. We can only guess at the wisdom the original story was attempting to alloy and press like a branding iron into the culture from which it was mined.
The myth, however, has remained alive. The terse, shocking progression of the Descent and its cutting, emotive language have resonated with women through time. It has been interpreted by feminist depth psychologists, in trauma studies, and used as a tool to reframe feminine initiations like pregnancy and menopause, as well as “stripping” events like divorce, job loss, illness, radical physical change, and depression.
With its emphasis on return and rebirth, the Descent can be viewed as one of our few feminine resurrection myths. Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton-Perera sees it as the emotional blueprint of an initiatory process for the “daughters of the patriarchy” who have lived and achieved in accord with the roles society has deemed acceptable and laudable, but feel cut off from the most primal, free and creative layers of the self.
An errant “daughter” of the father-gods will become, at some point, haunted by the intuitive realisation that if she continues on the expected path, the one that wins her validation and praise, she will remain obedient and unexpressed. She will die as she was made by the culture and not as she wishes to define herself.
One need not have a father to be groomed to act as a compliant daughter to men. We are often imprinted by mothers possessed entirely by the shadow of the masculine and with an impoverished relation to the feminine. Nor does one have to be in the physical body of a cis-woman. The ‘daughter’ represents one’s experience of the presence of the feminine, inside and out.
Goddesses like Inanna, with their all-encompassing and boundary crossing powers, put the feminine in relation to everything: Nature, the cosmos, art, discipline and craft, the collective, the sacred, death, the masculine, and her own erotic imagination.
Inanna does not tell her father or her husband that she is making her descent, she tells another woman. She is not a codependent goddess, but one who can exist, with conviction, in her own “personal core identity, her feminine value and standpoint.”
To enter the death-process of her former, high-test, good-girl self, the praised daughter must turn toward whatever she persistently suppresses or denies. Whatever her experience in the culture has deformed, she must heal or free. The praised daughter must also voluntarily strip away the attachments that will hold her in the boundaries of the known self — before life does it for her.
And this is where we find Eve, as the series begins, in middle age, in a good job and good-enough marriage, in a cozy, cluttered home in London, pouring in her off-hours over images of the bodies slain by another woman.
As devoted hubby Niko, a Poland-born maths teacher, preps their dinner, Eve is pressing a small kitchen knife into her inner thigh. Villanelle has managed in her most recent hit to slice the femoral artery of her target in the same spot without him noticing until he bled out on the pavement — a feat that Eve finds “impressive” and “cool.” Transfixed by the blood bubbling up on her own skin, she conjures the presence of both killer and killed.
Her unconscious preoccupation has taken on a life of its own, and emerges in passive aggressive blurts. Out of the blue, she asks guileless Niko how he would kill her. He shrugs before taking a mollifying stab, “I dunno. Flatter you to death?”
Eve’s riposte whips out of her like a hot poker: “I’d paralyse you with [a nerve toxin] and suffocate you in your sleep. Chop you into the smallest bits I could manage, boil you down, put you in a blender, take you to work in a flask and flush you down a restaurant toilet.”
Eve has been bathing her imagination in Villanelle’s whimsical savagery for some time. Stacked on her desk are the crime novels of Donna Leon and PD James, as well as studies on female murderers, Hysteria, When Women Kill and Psychopathy and Women. She wonders what makes Villanelle and her dark, psychotic sisters tick, but keeps her interest hidden. When Carolyn first confronts Eve about the secret file she has compiled on Villanelle’s kills, Eve can barely articulate her fascination, “I was just interested in what makes a woman able to, uh…I’m just a fan.”
From the outside, Eve might not resemble vigorous, sex-forward Inanna whose erotic energies are the very the fulcrum of her identity, and who “makes of every man her bridegroom.” The first time we see Eve she’s in bed and screaming because her arms have fallen asleep; she’s unconscious and howling for the parts of her that express agency and desire to come back to life.
What Eve does share with Inanna is that she has achieved solely within male-dominant structures and hierarchies, but chafes at their resistance to her emergent ambition. Eve appears independent, but her life up until Villanelle’s entrance has been entirely defined by her relationships to men in their roles as boss, husband, and father. In the second episode of season 1, Eve gives Carolyn a brief bio: raised mostly by her father, she returned to London when he died, joined M-I5, and then, she says, “I basically married my dad!”
Her bosses at the agency dismiss her instinct and capacity to lead, and the routinised sex in her marriage offers no channel for an untapped erotic hunger that is gradually becoming enmeshed with her fixation on Villanelle. Eve is prized but subordinate, and rebels through acts of spastic aggression and subterfuge.
She is a ‘bratty bottom’ in both roles, the sub who won’t truly submit because the play feels too small. Eve performs mousy subordination to placate the men in her life while dimly sensing her own frustrated internal force, the sheer vehemence of which, if unleashed, would likely bury them all.
As Eve’s obsession with Villanelle foments, she begins to subvert the rules of the security agency and the uxorious attentions of her husband, who tries in vain to keep Eve secure. “We all know you care about me. Sometimes I think it’s all you have,” she spits at Niko after he challenges her insistence on pursuing Villanelle. “I’ll leave the stew out,” he responds. (Needless to say, he made the stew.)
Carolyn poaches Eve because, she says, “you’re intuitive and you make insane suggestions,” and with this blessing Eve experiences a burst of agency and self-trust. She assembles a team that includes former boss Bill, (also sacked for the hospital murders) and anxious, quietly devoted Kenny who handles digital espionage. They’re now all in league with Eve, collapsed into her obsession and willing, as Bill puts it, to “[stare] into the abyss.”
Villanelle soon makes another hit, fatally gassing a Chinese attaché in an S&M kink clinic in Berlin (but not before having a little fun mercilessly “clamping” his balls), and Eve heads to the site with Bill to investigate. Eve scents blood, but even more tantalising is that Villanelle uses her name as an alias during the kill, a move that acts as both signal and lure, and recasts Eve not as hunter, but prey.
Villanelle also steals Eve’s luggage in Berlin. Like Ereshkigal forcing Inanna to disrobe as she passes through each gate on her way down to Hell, Villanelle’s first power-move is to strip Eve of all clothes and possessions. Back in her hotel room, Villanelle pokes sniffily through the bag and dons a hideous scarf Niko gave to Eve. She holds up a box of toothpaste and looks at it pityingly. “Poor baby,” she says, with a distinctly Slavic mix of tenderness and bullish contempt. She can see what Eve is missing and will endeavour to fill the void.
The show is, on the whole, excitable about the transmissive powers of clothes, and Eve’s wardrobe is one of its running gags. Eve rocks a collection of what appear to be vintage Casual Corner also-rans that edge perilously into frump. While Villanelle wears extravagant clothing as an act of aggression to seduce and “devastate” the world, Eve hides beneath shapeless layers in noncommittal hues: oatmeal, greige and navy blue.
Twenty years Eve’s junior, Villanelle has her generation’s flair for curation, able to wade bravely into the stupefying breadth of consumer options and know and declare, with the conviction of Saint Joan, what’s worthy. In another life, Villanelle could have been a successful lifestyle vlogger, feeding her viewers a never-ending scroll of DIY room make-overs, clothing and make-up ‘hauls,’ or beautifully arrayed meals.
If the internet enables a culture of profligacies — of information, stimulation, and consumables — then those who rise in its ranks must have the gift of discrimination. Like baleen whales sucking in vast amounts of ocean water and sieving out the tiniest bits of plankton, the champions of this realm can push through the overwhelm with strength leftover to not only discern, but endorse. Evangelism is key; the lingua franca and currency of such content is not mere liking, but “lov-ing,” being “obsessed with” or “addicted to” a specific lip balm, pillow case, or nut milk. For a certain special mascara one might be willing to “protest” or “die.”
Villanelle makes sure to inquire about the brand of a lovely silk bedspread from a mark before jamming a hairpin into his frontal lobe. Female fans of the show gushed their praise. Villanelle, unburdened of a conscience, is free of the self-curbing emotional gymnastics many women feel beholden to perform in order to sustain relationship or their ‘good-girl’ status. Her one hobby is shopping with blood-money, but it’s ok, because she pays for it, and is therefore ‘empowered.’
Villanelle is irresistible as the ultimate progression of market-friendly feminism: part sociopath, part tastemaker, an apex predator in both life and style who would quite literally kill for the Halpern print blazer she sports in season 3.
Eve has far fewer spikes of immoderate desire or consumption — and they’re often toothless. At the beginning of season 2, after Eve performs an act of climactic violence, she stress-eats an enormous bag of candy, a trope that seems pretty stale for a show this astute and unrepentant in its revelation of sideways feminine catharsis.
It’s not so much that Eve has poor taste, but that she has no taste, no compass of self-defining sensual appetite, at all. She eats whatever her husband puts in front of her, wears clothes as bland and utilitarian as her male bosses, is indifferent to ambiance, shows no preference for art in any form, and has whittled her sexual life down to a restive infatuation with Villanelle.
During their stay in Berlin, Bill steps in to show her the way. He tells her to shave her pits for her ‘date’ with a source, asks her pointedly about her shadow-crush on Villanelle, and reveals his own carte-blanche sexuality, “I lived here for 8 years. I said yes to everything for 5 of them. Dark horse aren’t I?”
Bill is arguably the most dynamic character in the show. As Eve’s boss, he played as a jaundiced sixty-something government cog with a wife and baby, but as her report he cocks his fedora Henry Miller-style and offers impromptu lessons on the contracts of kink. Like father-god Enki, who hails Inanna after she has tricked him, stolen his powers, and levelled the ground between them, Bill surrenders to Eve’s mission after she has rebelled and reversed their roles. Eve, in playing outside the bounds, is finally a contender and worthy of respect.
Bill has already made his descent. He “said yes to everything,” lived out his forbidden desires and played via sex with the dynamics of power. For years he maintained a traditional, authoritarian role at the agency, and a secret-but-thriving open marriage. Eve is shocked when Bill discloses that he has loved and fucked “hundreds” of men, that his wife fucks other people, and that he and his wife are not the “perfect couple” Eve imagines, but simply “a good team.”
Owning and expressing his own paradoxical parts allows Bill to sense what is unconscious in Eve, to know when she is lying to him and herself. He doesn’t buy it when Eve claims that her obsession with Villanelle is about serving justice; “She’s killing people!” Eve wails, instead of admitting to the aliveness she saps from the pursuit. He pegs the connection between Eve’s obsession with a female killer and her marital ennui, and senses that her reverent description of Villanelle is mere froth on the lip of a rabid dog.
Bill coaches Eve on what to wear, “A dress like that requires women to go braless,” he says, “a monkey could tell you that.” After removing the bra, she immediately asks if Bill has ever been attracted to her. He says no, bouncing her externalised gaze back and cutting her loose.
Bill doesn’t mean to groom her to reflect his taste, but to orient her within. It’s an invitation from an “old tart” to play with her disowned femininity through moments of carnal presence, to land in her primal senses — affects that are “messy” and “preverbal” (smell touch taste) — in order to locate her own pleasure, and to simultaneously see what is objective and real. It’s pleasure as discipline and ritual; instead of wheat-pasting a layer of ‘feminine’ artifice over the body, there’s painterly experimentation, a noticing of what emerges on all sensory levels and guiding this awareness toward gratifying self-creation.
But Eve is too antsy to plant herself so unflinchingly in the body, or to hand over her heady obsessions to its organs of sense. Her fantasies and projections, vindicated by gut-level ‘insights’ into Villanelle’s moves and motives, are too addictive to let go.
This restless, disembodied aspect of the feminine is given dramatic voice in one of the more plaintive ancient hymns to Inanna. It occurs after Gilgamesh, intent on seizing the goddess’ powers and domain, ousts her from her native home after aeons of reign. Inanna sings:
“I, the woman who circles the land — tell me where is my house
Tell me where is the city in which I may live…
I, who am your daughter…the hierodule, who am your bridesmaid — tell me where is my house…
The bird has its nesting place, but I — my young are dispersed,
The fish lies in calm waters, but I — my resting place exists not,
The dog kneels at the threshold, bu I — I have no threshold…”
The passage is heart-rending in its expression of exile, of being pushed so brutally outside spaces of belonging that one loses not only the ratifying gaze of a community, but the capacity for loving self-definition.
To have no ‘threshold’ is to have no boundary, no safe container, or “house” for the exploration of one’s full feminine powers, and no “city” in which to offer them as cultivated gifts.
The feminine, dispossessed and “circling the land” (body), and punished and humiliated for the perplexing range of her potencies, can now only conceive of herself in subservient relation to the masculine who has stolen them, “daughter, hierodule, bridesmaid,” and yearn for his presence to provide the solid ground or “resting place” and “calm waters” she can no longer create for herself.
Prior to this, Inanna exemplified a rich and direct communion with body, emotion, and landscape. This affinity is the very medium in which the story and its characters play. The tactile warmth of the poetry describing the courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi draws the reader (or listener, as much of the poetry was likely sung) into cellular rapport with the entwined bodies of the two lovers, “He put his hand in her hand./ He put his hand to her heart./ Sweet is the sleep of hand to hand./ Sweeter still is the sleep of heart to heart.”
Inanna revels in her preparations for lovemaking with Dumuzi: “I bathed for the shepherd Dumuzi, I perfumed my sides with ointment, I coated my mouth with sweet-smelling amber, I painted my eyes with coal.”
She is gathering up her body, awakening each sense, and making her own experience of them whole before opening to another. When she and Dumuzi do make love, there’s no language of heady sensing, no sight, sound or memory-triggering scent, only the language of touch, “He shaped my loins with his fair hands,/ He stroked my pubic hair,/ He watered my womb, / He laid his hands on my holy vulva,/ He smoothed my black boat with cream, / He caressed me on the bed.”
The later poetry of Inanna’s painful exile presents an anguishing schism of self from body, an inability to touch ground, the shadow of being “ravished out” of one’s skin by trauma and left to circle the wound. Like Odysseus being “swept back along the path,” the survivor of trauma often finds herself in a loop, reliving in the present the fragmenting story of the past.
In the third season of the show, Villanelle returns to Gryzmet, her abysmal home town in Russia, to seek out the narcissistic mother who abandoned and traumatised her into heartless sociopathy. In a generous, four-episode arc we see how a mother’s madness grows through a daughter into full, poisonous bloom.
In contrast, we get only a sketch of Eve’s past, one that reveals an absence of a mother figure, but no exceptional trauma. We do know that a considerable chunk of her identity is that of a good, benign, girl. Maybe I’m not kind, she hisses at Nico when he tries to restore the bond between them. “You’re the best person I know,” he says — to her displeasure, “Always have been.”
Sandra Oh imbues Eve with a comic obliviousness that helps account for her irrational risks and the lack of empathy and protective care she shows for those around her. Laid alongside Villanelle’s extremes, Eve’s dislocation and self-absorption seem within the range of ‘normal.’ They play not as disorder but quirk.
One might say her physical and relational gaps are ‘hidden in plain sight,’ naturalised within a pathologically disembodied Anglo culture, and therefore require no explanation. In the absence of self-orienting ‘taste,’ introspection, real intimacy, or bodily ‘sense,’ no vertical lines or grounding forces exist for Eve. She, like Inanna, is homeless.
As Eve tries to charm their source, Bill chases Villanelle from the subway to a subterranean night club. Through a thicket of Berliners twitching to Aggrotech, he wades toward Villanelle until she stops and pivots with a beatific smile, brandishing a tiny blade. Bill tries to flee back through the crowd, but Villanelle seizes him, draws him close in the crush of bodies, stabbing ecstatically at his heart.
Bill dies in the strobing blue light of a liminal world, one akin to the watery realm of Inanna’s father-god Enki, who lives “deep in the abyss.” A wily and intuitive masculine, he, like Bill, cultivates states of flow through sex, pleasure, and transgressive play.
He is also the only father-god moved by Ninshubur’s cries for help on behalf of Inanna. Enki doesn’t aggress in order to help his daughter, but moves on a surge of grief, descending imaginatively to her, willing to merge with the utter emptiness of her death-state. He responds in kind, resourcing the ‘leftovers’ of his own body, the river silt and clay scraped from under his fingernails, to fashion two small, empathic creatures. They are the sexless and unwanted ‘residue,’ of creation, the shit-eating, death-eating “flies,” humble enough to penetrate hell and meet Inanna without judgment in her most degraded and vulnerable state. They can go without fear to the ground level of being, without fanfare to Ereshkigal performing her “birth-pains,” and offer a witnessing presence.
“It hurts, it hurts,” they chant to her, as she pantomimes the labour of a phantom pregnancy, twisting and groaning on the very floor of Hell. Enki’s compassion and receptivity provide both sisters with what they truly require.
The little dirt-beings represent what Brinton-Perera calls the “despised slag” of our most modest and earthy processes, the real-ness exposed in unconscious displays of emotion, involuntary contractions and triggers. They affirm that god’s body — the sacred — also comes with dregs and remainders, seemingly useless elements that, if acknowledged and used creatively, have transformative gifts. They are the shame-bits, the ugly-bits, the too-much-bits, the ‘former self’ bits, but they’re also the tiny, specific expressions of taste and preference that dare to take up space. It’s this in-the-moment “embodied stuff” that Eve has abdicated in favour of fantasy and projection, the evidence of her unique or ‘terribly’ ordinary human-ness.
Humble “earth” — the Sumerian word for Hell — is also what triggers the goddess’ descent. Inanna “comes from on high” and treats as parade what should be pilgrimage. Ereshkigal senses Inanna’s pride and flays her rudely, nailing her to the wall like so much meat.
The feminine-encoded myth propels the heroine toward chaos; she’s dismembered and reconstituted over and over again and thus imbued with an unshakeable power. But she must be earthed and fleshed first.
What makes for a good myth, however, doesn’t make for good TV. Enki’s “bisexual breadth” and capacity to “penetrate […] the underworld,” allow him to fathom Inanna’s deep play and intervene. Likewise, Bill’s dynamism and discernment in this medium necessitate his death. To kill Bill is to cut away the net, ensuring that Eve will remain homeless, a restless ghost fascinated with a darkness bigger than her own.
