#screenphotography

Disclaimer: Eve is a fictional character. So is Villanelle. If any of them were real people, I would not be diving this deep into their psyche or diagnosing them. Now, i’m doing this rather *extensive* analysis of Eve because I’m very intrested in female psychopathology, but also, because this show has led me to read and investigate about Psychopathy and Cluster B personalities with (mad) interest. Why Eve? That’s for you to figure out. 

Also THANK YOU @screenphotography​ for letting me borrow some of your edits.

Let us adress the “beautiful monster” first. 

When we watch Killing Eve for the first time, Eve is presented to us as a dull woman. Sandra said it herself: Her work is okay. Her marriage is okay. Her life is okay. She seems uninterested in her looks, she appears to have a very reduced social life, her work is repetitive. Niko is fine enough, he is a loving man, but more importantly: he understands her weird interests and doesn’t ask too many questions. We as humans pay a lot of attention to lifestyle. Eve’s lifestyle is mundane, monotonous. A quiet life.

I remember that one of the writers or producers said something along the lines of “Through the changes, she isn’t transformed, she is Revealed”, and I thought about that phrase for weeks. They were saying: “See, Eve’s monster is already there, in Episode One of Season One. There is no transformation through the seasons, only revelations”. But I wanted to understand HOW. How can she possibly be a psycho when she lives like this? 

Eve the Psycho(path)

Now before I started diving into the research literature, I believed -and was taught- that Psychopathy, Sociopathy and ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder) were the same thing. Turns out they are different: the only one that is an actual mental disorder and that can be diagnosed as such is ASPD. However, Psychopathy and Sociopathy aren’t derrogative terms, they aren’t considered slang, and are not “obsolete” concepts. Far from it. They are constructs that have been (and cointinue to be) widely studied in investigative and forensic settings.

Psychopaths are commonly divided into two factors: Factor 1, interpersonal/affective and Factor 2, Social Deviance. Now, psychopathy is a continuum, a spectrum, which means that you can fall anywhere in that spectrum: you might be predominantly factor 1, predominantly factor 2, or have a similar amount of traits from both factors. This also means that a trait may be absent in one person, but turned to the max in another.

Factor 1 includes traits such as: superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying, a lack of remorse and a shallow affect. These people are often callous and lack empathy, are manipulative, and are really shit at accepting responsability. They are also excellent at COGNITIVE empathy, meaning they can’t really feel for you, but probably understand your feelings better that you. They stand out for their blunt practicality and competitive nature. Factor 2 is more disorganized, angry, impulsive, passionate and criminally prone. Both factors seem to have a very messy way of processing information and learning, some have even compared their brains to ADHD brains: they will focus on something and won’t let it go for weeks or until they get what they want.

If you didn’t see these traits in Eve the first time you watched the show, you most certainly will now. This is just one of the many ways in which Killing Eve is an exceptional show: if you want to see how a psychopath operates when they’ve had no restraints and have been encouraged to nurture their most narcissistic and machiavellic impusles, you can certainly focus on Villanelle. Hell, season 3 Irina is also a fine example.

But Eve is very different.

As a child, her psychopatic tendencies were probably not recognized, nor nurtured. Her current self leads us to believe that she had a warm and caring family (even though she was probably callous and unemotional from early childhood). But right from the beginning, we can see that her relationships are kind of superficial, she doesn’t squirm at bloody scenes (she even blurts “oh, cool!” when she sees Villanelle’s kill in ep 1) she is competitive, practical, a prolific liar for no real reason, she uses others as means to an end (sorry Dom, Kenny, Hugo), has relatively poor impulse control, and keeps herself amused with research on killers and female psychopaths and murders (just like yours truly) to manage her low boredom threshold.

Her lack of empathy is baffling. Witnesses and victims are instrumental to her. They are nothing more than clues. She actually tells Caroline that “it isnt her job to care anymore”. Those that know her find her kind of weird but also kind of brilliant (lol Bear), she will go into tunnel focus and solve anything. Her mind seems to toggle rapidly through toughts, and she seems to lose focus on her inmediate life, constantly missing emotional and social cues that are obvious to others (sorry, Nico). We are also shown that she’s quite irresponsible with her personal belongings and -evidently- with her job. If a rule isn’t explicit, it doesnt exist (sorry, Bill. Sorry, Frank).

The thing is, Eve studied criminal psychology. She probably knows about the Psychopathy Scale, and she knows that she falls somewhere in the spectrum. She also probably knows that she leans heavily towards the factor 1 side. More likely than not, she struggled with this as a Young woman (look out for my next post) and resorted to using her chamaleonic traits to blend. She mimics other people’s way of interacting not to trick them or kill them, but to hide among them. She has been softening her edges for years. She is the one who does the looking, so that nobody looks at her. She convinced herself that she could live her deepest impulses vicariously through the study of other psychopathic women. After all, what were the chances of her meeting one?