Basic Instinct with a Twist: How the Femmes Fatales of Killing Eve Queer the Gendered Politics of Crime Television

Abstract

The femme fatale, one of the most common and renowned female, cinematic tropes across different crime genres, undergoes a queering in the 2018 UK series Killing Eve, in which the female investigator Eve Polastri and the female killer Villanelle engage in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game driven by mutual, queer desires. Killing Eve serves as a critical revisitation of the 1992 US-American classic Basic Instinct, in which one of the most notorious, flamboyant and influential femmes fatales to this day, Catherine Tramell, seduces and threatens a male investigator. By conducting a close, comparative reading of Killing Eve’s Villanelle and Basic Instinct’s Catherine, the relationship between investigator and female murderer in both media respectively, and by reading Killing Eve’s character Eve as an investigator who herself emerges as a femme fatale, this paper demonstrates how Killing Eve subverts the trope of the femme fatale, escalates its queer monstrosity and extends Catherine’s ability to violently disrupt the heteronormative, gendered politics of pop-cultural imagination.