Elle Driver is, by any external measure, at the top of her profession. She is a member of an elite unit, trusted with independent operations, personally trained by the same master as her rival and personally involved with the same man. She is also consumed, across years and continents, by a woman who left. There is no material grievance anywhere in her arc: nobody took her money, her position or her work. What she is missing is a comparison she cannot win, and a theory published in 1966 explains with unusual precision why that is worse than losing something real.
// The theoryFour conditions, and lack is not one of them
Walter Runciman's contribution was to stop treating relative deprivation as a mood and start treating it as a structure with entry requirements. A person feels relatively deprived of something when four conditions hold together: they do not have it; they see someone else having it; they want it; and they believe it is feasible for them to have it. The fourth is the one that surprises people, and it is the engine. Someone who regards a thing as permanently out of reach does not feel deprived of it — they feel it is not for them, which is uncomfortable and stable. Grievance requires the belief that the gap could close, which is why, as Runciman and later Gurr both noted, grievance rises as barriers fall. He then drew a second distinction the literature uses constantly: egoistic deprivation, where the comparison is between the individual and others in their own group, and fraternal deprivation, where it is between the person's group and another — the form that drives collective action.
Proximity is the accelerant
The counter-intuitive part of this family of theories is that grievance is not driven by the size of a gap but by its visibility and plausibility, and both of those are maximized by closeness. Nobody envies a stranger in another profession; people envy the colleague one desk over, because that comparison satisfies Runciman's four conditions effortlessly — same work, same standards, same ladder, therefore obviously feasible. Elle's position is the extreme case of that geometry. She and her rival share an employer, a training, a discipline and a lover, which means every dimension of comparison is available and none of them can be dismissed as irrelevant. The distance is tiny, and the tininess is the problem: a small gap between near-identical people is intolerable in a way that a vast gap between different ones is not.
// The subjectThe actions that make no sense until you find the reference
Read her decisions as instrumental and most of them are irrational. Killing a woman in a coma yields nothing: no payment, no removal of a live threat, no instruction from above — and she is willing to defy her employer to do it. Murdering the master who cost her an eye is a catastrophic professional decision with no upside. Eliminating a colleague to claim a payment she does not need is disproportionate to the money. Read them instead as moves against a reference, and they line up exactly: each one closes the gap either by removing the person she is measured against or by eliminating someone who ranks between them. And the eye is the detail that makes the file legible. A mutilation that marks her permanently as the one who was damaged, in a profession where the rival is unmarked, converts an internal comparison into a physical fact she carries on her face.
Elle Driver
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// The crackThe same objections as always, plus one
Relative deprivation carries two chronic problems that this archive has flagged before, and they apply here. It is hard to falsify, because expectations are almost always reconstructed from the grievance rather than measured before it; and it over-predicts, since comparisons of this kind are universal and violence is not. There is a third problem specific to the egoistic form. Individual envy of a near peer is so common — in workplaces, families, professions — that pointing at it explains almost nothing about who acts on it. Most people with Elle's exact comparison do not poison anybody; they are unpleasant at meetings. The theory identifies the motive structure and says nothing at all about the step from resentment to action, which in her case is supplied by something else entirely: an occupation in which killing is the ordinary tool for every problem, and a group that has removed all the usual costs of using it.
Envy mitigates nothing
Elle kills people who are not in her way, including one who could not defend herself and one who had done nothing to her that year. Understanding that she is measuring against a person rather than a standard explains the target selection and the disproportion, and it excuses none of it — envy is not a mitigating circumstance in any system of law on earth, and a professional killer acting on it is simply a professional killer with a private reason. The value of the lens is that it stops the analysis at the right place: not “she was jealous”, which is a judgment, but “her reference group was a single person, and every action she took was an attempt to change her position relative to that one comparison”, which is a description, and which predicts what she does next.
Three key ideas
- Runciman (1966) set four conditions for relative deprivation: not having it, seeing another have it, wanting it, and believing it feasible. The fourth is the engine — grievance requires the belief the gap could close, which is why it rises as barriers fall.
- Proximity is the accelerant. A small gap between near-identical people is intolerable in a way a vast gap between different ones is not, because closeness satisfies all four conditions effortlessly.
- The egoistic form explains motive structure and nothing about the step to action: most people with the same comparison are merely unpleasant. What supplies that step here is an occupation where killing is the ordinary tool and a group that removed its costs.
Sources · to keep reading
- Runciman, W. G. (1966). Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Gurr, T. R. (1970). Why Men Rebel. Princeton University Press.
- Stouffer, S. A. et al. (1949). The American Soldier. Princeton University Press.
- Smith, H. J. et al. (2012). “Relative deprivation: a theoretical and meta-analytic review”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(3).
- Agnew, R. (1992). “Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency”, Criminology, 30(1).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Elle Driver?
Elle Driver (“Mamba de California”) is a villain from Kill Bill, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. She poisons a woman in a coma.
Why does Elle Driver (California Mountain Snake) become a villain?
Elle Driver and relative deprivation in its purest form: she lacks nothing, and spends her life comparing herself to the one woman who held the position she wanted. Runciman's four conditions, met one by one.
Which criminological theory explains Elle Driver?
Elle Driver's case is analysed through Relative deprivation. In 1966 Walter Runciman specified what it takes for someone to feel deprived without being so: they must want something, see another person having it, believe themselves entitled to it, and believe obtaining it is feasible. With all four met, objective lack stops mattering — what hurts is the comparison. Runciman also separated egoistic deprivation, the individual against their own group, from fraternal, the whole group against another. Elle Driver is the egoistic case at its limit: an elite assassin with the same employer, the same master and the same lover as her rival, whose entire life is organized by the small distance between them.
