Why, secretly, we all love stories about assassins
Of the many indelible images in the first series of Killing Eve – the second series of which began on BBC One last night – the most telling is also the most simple. In it, Villanelle, the captivatingly unhinged contract killer played by Jodie Comer, sits within an oversized birthday cake of a dress made of pink tulle, her black combat boots peeking out from underneath. Confronted by two of her superiors, she is asked about her most recent hit, of a family man who begged for his life, and she cracks a smile. His pleading had made her impatient.
A thrilling merger of hard and soft and convention and surprise, at which Killing Eve has always excelled, the scene is also the purest distillation of the strange appeal of assassins-for-hire in entertainment. Namely, that individuals who ought to be truly repellent are instead oddly alluring, reflecting back the very things we often wish we had the
gumption to do ourselves. Not their acts of cold-blooded murder (although it was reported last week that more than half of us have fantasised about killing someone), but rather their transgressive naughtiness, and the glamour and ease such fictional lifestyles appear to bring.
Villanelle may be the aspirational hitwoman of our current moment, but she is, in fact, just the latest in a long line of alluring killers, both real and unreal, who have captivated us in ways they really shouldn’t have. Truthfully, Tom Cruise has never been more likeable than in his role as a ruthless hitman in Michael
Mann’s Collateral, his brutal efficiency as a killer captured under the pop-video neon of night-time LA to truly drive home the cool. Similarly, the teenage-boy-fantasy of the 2008 comic book adaptation Wanted fetishised gunplay almost as much as it did Angelina Jolie’s ludicrously slinky anti-hero.
And is there any greater embodiment of the eternal allure of the assassin than James Bond? A man so faithfully associated with expensive drinks, beautiful women and exotic locations that it’s easy to forget that he’s essentially a very well-dressed hitman who can indiscriminately kill whomever he pleases. For decades represented as a debonair gent with an unnervingly casual attitude to death and violence, it’s only been in its Daniel Craig era that the franchise has grounded 007 in any kind of existential pain, making him a figure of tragedy rather than some sort of role model (however ill-advised).
More often than not, we tend to want to humanise our on-screen killers, almost to justify the peculiar spell they have over us. In both Léon and La Femme Nikita, French filmmaker Luc Besson created for-hire murderers with hearts of gold, each of them finding redemption by taking out far worse people than themselves. John Woo’s The Killer, starring the incomparable Chow Yun-Fat, did much the same, with contracted kills depicted as particularly violent means to do good.
We tend to do it outside of fiction, too. The 19th-century exotic dancer and spy Mata Hari has long been appropriated as a feminist icon and taboo-busting villainess, despite the truth of many of her actions remaining a mystery. And in 2017, when the half-brother of Kim Jong-un was assassinated via a deadly nerve agent, we were less captivated by the horrors of his death, and more by his alleged killers: one of which, a bewigged and beautiful young woman, was spotted in blurry CCTV footage wearing a shirt that read “LOL”.
So why this strange hold? Think of assassins as having demonstrated an extreme renunciation of the social contract, and how watching others abandon all of the rules we’ve been conditioned to live by – even if many of them are the right ones – can’t help but generate a hushed, vaguely illicit thrill.
Characters such as Villanelle, Bond girl Xenia Onatopp (she of Golden Eye’s infamously weaponised thighs) or Kill Bill’s lackadaisical killer-cowboy Budd occupy a kind of sideways-world, free of responsibilities or connections, where sex can exist without strings (or pesky diseases) and money is quick to earn. And the self-imposed isolation so many of our favourite fictional assassins share, whether in Bond’s historic unknowability or Léon’s lazy days watching films and watering his houseplant, seems almost blissful.
To admire the blood-soaked but aspirational lifestyles of very bad fictional people may not be right, but it does make a warped kind of sense.
These repellent individuals reflect back the very things we often wish we had the gumption to do ourselves