[COLUMN] The Penguin Is a Modern American Epic | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Penguin, which wrapped up last night. All episodes are currently streaming on Max.

The Penguin wrapped up its first season last night, closing on the image of Oswald “Oz” Cobb (Colin Farrell) wearing a tuxedo, dancing in his lavish penthouse apartment with his companion Eve Karlo (Carmen Ejogo). It’s a fitting closing note for the series, literalizing the character’s ascent through the Gotham underworld and illustrating how high the villain has climbed. It also illustrates the show’s key themes and preoccupations, in particular its preoccupation with class and resentment politics.

In The Batman, Oz is introduced as a goon who works for the city’s organized crime. He is directly answerable to Carmine Falcone (John Turturro, Mark Strong). Early episodes of The Penguin reinforce the sense that the Falcone family looked down on Oz. He began his career as a driver for Carmine’s daughter, Sofia (Cristin Milioti). Underboss Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly) still dismissively refers to Oz using the nickname “Penguin.” The family treat him as an outsider; a freak with a limp.

“You know, after you got locked up, Carmine let him on the ’44, but he never respected him,” Viti warns Sofia. “And I bet you don’t respect him either, do you?” He addresses Oz, “You’re fun at a card game or over drinks, I’ll give you that. But people don’t keep you around because they think you’re smart and they sure as shit don’t trust you. People keep the Penguin around as entertainment. Because everybody knows you’re a goddamn joke.”

The Penguin suggests that Oz is an outsider playing at being a gangster. His accent and his mannerisms are an affection, honed by watching movies like Gilda on TCM. He is sniveling and ingratiating. He lacks real taste or sophistication, instead trying to emulate what he believes wealth must look like. Sofia describes Oz’s apartment as “tacky.” Graciela (Anire Kim Amoda) observes, “This place is bougie.” Oz is, to quote Fran Liebowitz, “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”

Discussing the city’s narcotics trade with Feng Zhao (François Chau), leader of the Triads, Sofia proposes that “most drug use is rooted in psychological need.” Zhao, whose father was a psychologist, replies, “I would agree that everything humans do is rooted in psychological need.” So much of what drives Oz over the course of The Penguin is a psychological need to be validated and recognized, to be accepted. That need festers to resentment, which manifests through violence.

The Penguin neatly juxtaposes Oz with Sofia. In some ways, Sofia is much more of an insider than Oz. She is a member of the Falcone family by blood. She grew up in lavish surroundings. She never wanted for anything. However, she was also marginalized within the family. When she deduced that her father was the serial killer known as the Hangman, he had her convicted of his crimes and condemned to Arkham Asylum. When she returns home, she is just as much of a freak as Oz.

Throughout The Penguin, Oz and Sofia stoke tensions within Gotham’s organized criminal community by appealing to class solidarity. They argue that the city’s wealthy and privileged classes have exploited those less fortunate for generations. “The world wasn’t built for guys like us,” Oz tells his young associate Victor "Vic" Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) in the series premiere. “That’s why we gotta take whatever we decide is ours, because no one’s gonna give it to us.”

When Sofia murders the entire Falcone family, she ensures the loyalty of the family’s soldiers by promising them a fair stake in their work. “My family disposed of my mother when she was nothing,” Sofia explains. “Then they did the same to me. And honestly? None of you are any different. None of you are made men.” She tosses a bag of money on the table. “This was my father’s, but he made it off of your labor. You did the dirty work, and they kept it all for themselves.”

When Oz tries to rally the city’s other gangs against the Falcones, Donny Sullivan (Johnny Hopkins) is reluctant to go along. “They’re right over there, across the Elliot bridge!” Oz protests. “The bridge that was built by your ancestors, Donny boy, but it ain’t named Sullivan! No, it’s named for the rich crooks who took credit for your family’s hard work. They run shit, we eat shit. The sad thing, Donny boy, is they don’t even know your fucking name. They don’t know any of your fucking names.”

The Penguin returns repeatedly to the metaphor of a literal underground. The plot of the show is driven by a revolution in Gotham’s drug trade, a shift from Drops to Bliss. Bliss, it turns out, is harvested from the spores of mushrooms, a product grown in the dirt. To rework an old joke, Sofia treats her crop the same way that the city’s wealthy criminals have always treated the real source of their power. Like the family’s soldiers, the mushrooms are kept in the dark and fed shit.

Later, when Oz goes to war with Sofia, he seeks refuge in the literal tunnels beneath Gotham. The city’s abandoned subway system provides “access to the whole damn city.” This collapsed infrastructure is a reminder of how the civic institutions of Gotham have ceased to function for the city’s citizenry. “Politicians got greedy,” Oz explains to Vic. “Diverted funds. One day the trolls just stopped running.” It’s a portrait of urban decay and decline, with criminality filling the cracks.

In his own way, Oz embraces the philosophy of a fungus. Using these abandoned tunnels, his curriers are able to ferry the drug all over Gotham, and Sofia cannot stop him. Oz literally becomes part of the city’s underground, a vast network spreading beneath the city’s streets. Befitting a comic book character, Oz’s literal “underground empire” serves as an effective metaphor for the show’s central themes. It allows Oz to rise up from beneath those who imagined themselves to be his betters.

Ultimately, Oz prevails over Sofia because he is more effective at weaponizing the resentment of the city’s criminal underclass. Through Vic, he is able to convince Zhao’s lieutenant, Link Tsai (Robert Lee Leng) to turn against his employer. “You have no idea what it feels like, born into nothing, having to smile at the person whose boot’s on your neck,” Oz explains to Sofia. “You know what people will do to push that down? They’ll do fucking anything – anything - to push down that feeling.”

Over the course of The Penguin, it becomes clear that Oz is a very smooth talker who will lie to anybody about anything – perhaps even himself. Oz repeatedly frames himself as a champion of the city’s disenfranchised. Who else have those people got to turn to? The city has failed them. There is a rot at the heart of the city, and terrible things grow in such a place. Hiding in Crown Point, he finds himself and his mother Frances (Deirdre O'Connell) affected by the power cuts. So he takes it on himself to apply the necessary pressure to get the power turned back on.

“I want you to do your fucking job,” Oz threatens Councilman Hady (Rhys Coiro). “That’s what I fucking want. City’s diverting power from Crown Point. Families are freezing.  Meanwhile, you go home to your warm fuckpad mansion. It ain’t right.” He demands, “You think you can just rawdog the people of Gotham with an invisible dick?” He gets the power turned back on. Vic even buys into this fantasy. “You gave people jobs in Crown Point,” Vic tries to rally Oz in the finale. “You got the power back on. Nobody did that. Nobody else did that. Nobody else even tried. You gave people dignity.”

This is the mythology that Oz crafts around himself as – in his own words – “Oswald Cobb, man of the people.” Sofia isn’t convinced. “That’s what you need to believe, yeah?” To her credit, Sofia ultimately has a greater sense of self-awareness about herself. “I thought I was doing something different and I thought that I was different,” she admits towards the end of the season. “But I’m still playing my father’s game. I’m abiding by his rules.” Oz would never admit as much.

Ultimately, Oz is not really a “man of the people.” As The Penguin demonstrates, Oz doesn’t care about solidarity. He only cares about himself. He betrays Sofia at the first opportunity. He ultimately murders Vic in the season finale with his own hands. He exploits the chaos and uncertainty of Gotham’s gangland scene to ensure his own ascent. Oz has a particular destination in mind, and there’s only a single vacancy: “Top floor, penthouse; no one above you, beside you.”

This provides a solid thematic framework that ties Lauren LeFranc’s The Penguin into Matt Reeves’ The Batman. In The Batman, the Riddler (Paul Dano) stokes an uprising of Gotham’s disenfranchised against the city’s corrupt ruling classes, but is ultimately more motivated by his own anger and resentment than any meaningful desire to improve the city. Even more than cameos from characters like Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson), this cements The Penguin as a story set in the world of The Batman.

This theme of righteous working class anger curdling into vicious resentment that manifests through terrorism and crime is also woven into other recent Batman adaptations. It is part of the context of Todd Phillips’ Joker and Joker: Folie á Deux. Indeed, the prominence of this theme in live action theatrical Batman movies suggests that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises might secretly have become one of the most influential takes on the Caped Crusader.

Of course, The Dark Knight Rises emerged in the midst of the Great Recession. More than any other superhero, Batman is a character who lends himself to an era defined by ever-increasing economic inequality. After all, as Garth Ennis has pointed out, it’s very easy to see Batman as “a billionaire aristocrat who beats up poor people.” It makes sense that the character’s cinematic adaptations would have to grapple with questions of wealth, privilege and class.

The Batman was about the young men radicalized by evaporating opportunities, who publish manifestos before inflicting violence upon people facing the same challenges that they do. It was, as Olivia Rutigliano noted, “a carnival of white male loner entitlement and rage.” In The Penguin, that same justifiable anger curdles into politics of resentment, to be exploited by a criminal just craven and shameless enough. It’s no wonder the show has been described as “a Trumpian allegory.”

While that comparison certainly fits, it might also be a little bit too specific. Drawing from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween, The Penguin consistently invites comparisons to The Godfather. The show’s fourth episode is titled “Cent’Anni.” Oz’s final conversation with Sofia and his murder of Vic both take place on the waterfront, recalling the death of Paulie (John Martino). Like The Godfather, The Penguin is perhaps best understood as a broader portrait of American capitalism.

As such, The Penguin solidifies The Batman as a worthy successor to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Nolan used the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) to place “a thermometer to the fevered brow of post-9/11 America.” In The Batman and The Penguin, Reeves and LeFranc do something similar for the current moment, capturing how the structures of American capitalism are singularly ill-suited to deal with the decay of the social fabric and only serve to make the problems worse.

In some ways, The Penguin makes a valid argument for its protagonist as the true foil to the Dark Knight. While Batman (Robert Pattinson) provides an ideal towards which Gotham might strive, Oz appeals to the city’s baser impulses: greed, corruption, resentment, anger, entitlement. The Penguin is a study of just how far a canny operator can ride those base sentiments: all the way to the top.