'The Penguin' Still Lives in the Shadows of Bigger Gangsters
Despite a few interesting tweaks, perhaps we're due for a break on anti-hero crime thrillers.
[Spoilers ahead for The Penguin]
A month ago, I was pretty up on The Penguin and certainly felt high on the Batman villain story compared to Joker: Folie à Deux. Yet by the end of the eight-episode series, I couldn’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed. There was nothing glaringly wrong with the series. The performances across the board were terrific. There was great care in the craftsmanship of balancing a gritty Gotham with a comic book sensibility that still made the world feel larger-than-life. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc pursued big themes of ambition, betrayal, and resentment in a show that never veered from the trappings of a tragedy. And yet, despite all this, by the end, The Penguin felt largely familiar. It was made in the mold of anti-hero television, which has dominated non-broadcast TV crime dramas since The Sopranos came on the scene in 1999. A protagonist archetype that once played as groundbreaking now has a routine character arc, and giving that to a Batman villain isn’t enough of a change to make the story feel fresh.
Looking at Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell), it’s easy to see how closely he resembles guys like Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey (The Shield), and Walter White (Breaking Bad). These are all violent narcissists who lie to everyone, including and especially themselves, to achieve power. The shading may be different with the confines of each story, but the narrative tends to follow the same beats. For audiences, we’re excited to see how these guys will get away with it but also appalled at their amoral behavior. And to give The Penguin some credit, while this character is now a mainstay of TV dramas, he at least stands out among the wackos Batman usually has to fight.
But because The Penguin was on this well-worn trajectory, LeFranc and her writers could only make the story darker and not as twisted as they hoped. There aren’t any good guys (the best would be Rhenzy Feliz’s Victor Aguilar, but even he’s a murderer and gangster), and everyone operates on a sliding scale of abhorrent behavior. But again, we’ve seen that show before, and we’ve seen it a lot. Understandably, the creative minds behind The Penguin didn’t want to make the character a grotesque sewer monster who rides around in a giant rubber duck (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But in place of that, they followed an exhausted template that makes the world of Matt Reeves’ The Batman seem less distinctive.
Feminine Rage and Resignation
The show’s best elements ended up having little to do with The Penguin and more to do with Sofia (Cristin Milioti) and Oz’s mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell). There were moments, especially in episodes four and eight, where you felt that LeFranc held more interest in these characters than she did in Oz but that the only way to tell the stories of these women was within the bounds of a familiar Batman villain introduced in a hit movie. However, through Sofia and Frances, we at least had a window into characters who aren’t seen as much and a better way to explore the sacrifices women make.
The contrast between Oz and Sofia/Francis is that Oz, to become a crime kingpin, never has to give anything of himself. Like Sofia, he starts out as overlooked and dismissed, but he’s always given the benefit of being the betrayer rather than the betrayed. He never has to change or give anything of himself in his pursuit of power. Contrast that with Sofia, who is essentially reborn in Arkham Asylum after being framed for murders committed by her father, and with Francis, who must harbor the pain of knowing her surviving son murdered her other two boys but accepts it if she can push Oz to dominate the city. LeFranc correctly observes that women have to make trade-offs that men never do, and while Oz’s story is still a tragedy, it’s one of his making rather than existing as a victim of larger gender dynamics.
I had hoped that LeFranc would throw audiences a massive curveball at the end by killing off The Penguin and letting Sofia rise to the top. It would be an outcome the show earned, and it would pay dividends in future stories by letting us know that a big character name was no protection for anyone other than The Batman (if you kill Batman, he’s just going to come back). Instead, the story tried to turn lemons into lemonade by showing the sad resignation of Sofia and Frances, where, despite all their machinations, they were always going to lose. Sofia goes back to Arkham, which is a fate worse than death (and her receiving a letter from Selina Kyle felt clumsy and tacked on), and Francis is in a persistent, vegetative state after finally confronting her grief and hatred towards Oz. Women who aspire for more will be left with nothing, while Oz will get to dance around a penthouse with a sex worker he’s made up to look like his mother. No one can stop him…except for Batman!
The Batman Problem
As much as I liked Colin Farrell’s performance as Penguin, I was a bit hesitant to give him an entire series when all I really wanted was another Batman movie, which won’t arrive for another two years. The bigger problem with forcing every hit movie to expand into television is that it diminishes characters who go to the big screen by virtue of time spent elsewhere. Even if The Batman Part II is three hours long like its predecessor, that will still mean we’ve spent two hours less with the hero of this world than we did with one of his antagonists. The amount of time and energy spent on various characters matters, and giving Penguin an entire show implies that he is a bigger, more important character than Batman. You’re free to make that argument, but The Penguin didn’t succeed because we know this journey, and we also know that as dark as this take on Gotham may be, Batman will win. His victory may come at a personal cost, but the bad guy always loses in Batman’s Gotham. That’s just the way it goes when the movies need to be crowdpleasers.
Furthermore, despite all the effort towards showing what makes The Penguin a unique villain, which is his ability to lie and manipulate others, that doesn’t necessarily make him a formidable foe for this Batman. Perhaps The Batman Part II is setting us up for another battle of wits like we had in the first movie, but The Penguin lives in public. He doesn’t need to be found and captured like The Riddler, and The Penguin can’t appeal to anything personal with Batman because Batman is an idea, not a person. Everything Oz does to survive and thrive in The Penguin doesn’t apply to the Caped Crusader. That doesn’t mean you’ll have a bad movie if you set the two against each other, but I didn’t come away from the show with an understanding of how Oz’s rise to power challenges or changes the Batman we saw at the end of Matt Reeves’ movie.
If anything, our Batman now seems slightly weaker because the show held him off-screen. I’m sure there will be some explanation of what Batman was up to during the events of the show (the story implies that Batman must be busy cleaning up the mess Riddler made at the end of the movie), but that doesn’t change the fact that there was an entire gang war happening and Batman was nowhere to be found. I get that Batman is just one guy, but eventually, his removal from the narrative raises questions about the character’s competence. If the best-case scenario is Batman was waiting for these crime families to eat each other and then take out the winner, that’s still allowing for a lot of death and destruction in Gotham!
Batman will return, and perhaps it’s fortunate that there are no other stories set in this world headed our way until The Batman Part II. And I’m willing to give writer-director Matt Reeves the benefit of the doubt that he can weave these two stories together in a way that does justice to them both. But for the time being, the final shot of The Penguin, where the Bat-Signal lights up the sky, served not as a teaser for what’s to come but an exclamation point on the absurdity of trying to tell this kind of anti-hero story in the world of The Dark Knight.
What I’m Watching
I went to see Red One last night since I planned to write something about it later in the week. What I didn’t know going in was that they had booked the screening 4DX. For those who don’t know, 4DX is meant to be a more “immersive” experience in that the seats move, you’re misted with water, there’s flashing lights, and an overall attempt to turn the movie you’re watching into a theme park ride. People seemed to enjoy this when they saw Twisters.
For me, I had to walk out of the screening after twenty minutes from motion sickness. It’s not simply that the seats shake; they’re on gimbals, so you’re constantly leaning and rotating. Furthermore, the effects don’t seem to have a lot of reasoning beyond “something is happening on screen,” so my seat was just as likely to move when Chris Evans set a pagoda on fire as when Dwayne Johnson fed a carrot to a reindeer. I didn’t feel like the 4DX was complimenting the movie, but rather, it was competing with it, seeking to embellish every little moment because what was on screen was deemed not good enough to hold my attention. I understand the impulse to turn movies into theme park rides, but people should remember that theme park rides typically aren’t two hours long.
Anyway, I’m seeing Red One on Thursday afternoon, and I’ll write something about the movie rather than the experience of being jostled for 120 minutes.
What I’m Reading
Here are a few recent articles that caught my attention.
It’s All A Giant Plate Of Shrimp by Mike Drucker [At the Mountains of Sadness] - I’m not going to write too much about the election or politics in general for at least the near future. I think everyone is free to cope with the election in their own way, and if writing about the outcome, what it means, what comes next, etc., helps you manage, then you should do it. But I feel like Drucker’s comments here basically sum up my feelings on American politics at the moment.
X Is a White Supremacist Site by Charlie Warzel [The Atlantic] - I understand why people stay on Twitter (or X or whatever), but I think the site is fundamentally broken. Nazis were lurking around like before Musk bought the site, but now they’re the stars of the show because the algorithm is built around them. I understand people have friends on Twitter. They’ve built a following, and it may even feel essential for breaking news. But I’ve been off the platform for over a year now, and I don’t miss it.
Trump’s Followers Are Living in a Dark Fantasy by Adam Serwer [The Atlantic] - We can argue about how many Trump voters are ideologically aligned with his closest supporters, but I think Serwer does a great job of breaking down the various circles of Trumpism. While I think Trump’s election is going to be bad for America (I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit a great recession similar to the end of George W. Bush’s second term), I am curious to see who among his followers will be happy with his choices and who will later try to claim that this isn’t what they voted for.
What I’m Playing
I started playing Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered and I think I have a handle on the game’s pacing. While it’s set in a big open world, you can’t come at it like an Ubisoft game where you’re checking off errands and trying to uncover as much of the map as possible. Instead, Horizon always wants you to slow down and take your time (it reminds me a bit of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in that way). You can’t simply charge at enemies, and while stealth is an element of the gameplay, stealth feels in service to having patience rather than outwitting opponents. Honestly, after the stress of the last few months, a game that isn’t propelling me forward is quite welcome.