I’ve had a few friends ask me what I thought The penguinHBO’s spin-off miniseries based on Matt Reeves’ setting The Batmanand to all of them I said, ‘I mean, it’s a good crime show, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but, like… what am I? I do here?”
That is, “What am Ia connoisseur of Batman in all forms, should come out of this? It’s not that I don’t like hard crime in my Batman stories (quite the opposite). But decent crime shows are a dime a dozen. A decent Batman show is rare. Peanut butter is great, there is a big audience for peanut butter, but what I Real like when you mix it with chocolate.
But with this week’s episode of The penguinintently focused on Sofia Falcone, heir to the Falcone crime family, The penguin finally gave me a Reese’s Cup.
(Ed. remark: This piece contains spoilers for The penguin‘s fourth episode, “Cent’Anni.”)
The penguin has spent the first three episodes teasing Sofia’s escapades as the infamous serial killer Hangman, an adaptation of the comic canon “code name” she earned in the films of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale Batman: Dark Victory by committing a series of calling card murders.
But it turns out inside The penguin that the Hangman murders were not the work of an out-of-control serial killer. It was Sofia’s father, Carmine Falcone, who exerted his power and anger on women he didn’t like. Over the years he had strangled a number of female employees of his ‘gentleman’s club’ with his hands – an idea that ties in with the events of The Batman – as well as his own wife, who Sofia had always been told had committed suicide. When it seemed like the press and police were about to uncover the pattern of Carmine’s murders, he accused Sofia of his crimes by having her family confirm that she was mentally unstable, and by massaging a corrupt and biased justice system to commit her to murder indefinitely. the women’s wing of Arkham Asylum.
And this isn’t some “realistic” depiction of a contemporary mental institution either – well, certainly, some of it certainly is, and we shouldn’t downplay the terrible abuse inherent in the carceral state. But this Arkham, just like in comics, is a twisted conglomeration of our worst cultural nightmare mythology of mental institutions. I’m talking about a cellmate who introduces himself by a fanciful codename (Magpie, an F-tier Batman supervillain associated with Arkham stories since Dan Slott and Ryan Sook’s Arkham Asylum: Living Hell). I’m talking about a population of prisoners kept quiet with a sci-fi drug that has grown horribly (and real) mushrooms. I’m talking about a bespectacled, paper-thin, capital-E evil psychiatrist, like an unholy union of a cackling mad scientist and the DSM-5.
A common subtext of great Batman comics is that Arkham Asylum not only never rehabilitates anyone, but mostly just makes people worse. That’s not an unusual trope for fictional asylums, but Arkham plays a special role in Gotham as the final level of damnation in a metropolitan hell, a cancerous organ that cannot be excised because the entire body is ruled by the indifference and greed of the powerful . In this way, Arkham is more useful as a metaphor for prisonnot recovery of mental health; the revolving door represents Gotham’s problems in microcosm.
Sofia only appears in a handful of stories, but her comic arc is distinct. In Batman: The Long Halloween And Batman: Dark VictoryLoeb and Sale illustrated a transitional period between the 1970s film realism that Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli used to redefine Gotham. Batman: Year Oneand the flamboyant supervillains of modern Batman stories. These books asked the question: How did we get from a Gotham ruled by Carmine “The Roman” Falcone, who basically walked out of a Scorsese movie, to a Gotham where even ganglords have to have code names and themed henchmen?
The answer, according to those stories, is that Gotham City’s particular madness, which makes killing people with a code name and a calling card the first solution to most life’s problems, swallowed his legacy whole when both of his children became infamous serial killers. And that’s exactly what The penguin gave us this week.
Sofia wasn’t a theatrical mass murderer when she was locked up in Arkham. But she is now, having given an ominous speech and gassed virtually everyone in the Falcone crime syndicate with methane in one night.
All of these rich flavors of supervillainy offset the rest of the episode’s presentation of the misogyny Sofia faces as a rising mafia queen. There’s never the sense that the episode is preaching about how women are assumed to be too irrational to lead, or how mere accusations of a mental break can strip someone of their legal personhood. It’s a complementary flavor of realism that never overwhelms, because of the way it’s mixed with these good, strong, fantastic themes of how Gotham is a machine that turns crime into supercrime.
And anyway, there’s a limit to how much can be loaded on top of that theme before it breaks. Sofia is not flawless; Before this was ever about revenge, it was about her ambition to ruthlessly defend and ultimately exercise her father’s power, which stems from the suffering of ordinary Gotham citizens. It’s the mix of realism and fantasy that keep the whole thing from collapsing under its own weight, a delicious cocktail of Batman bits and bits from real life, and pathos and betrayal.
Too often, when Hollywood wants to make a “realistic” comic book adaptation, you get the feeling that the creators think that real comic books are beneath them, that they wouldn’t touch the real books even three feet. pole, lest they catch Lowbrow Cooties. The most important thing for me is this week’s episode The penguin shows me that the people behind it aren’t turning their noses up at the potential of the deep comic book stuff.
Sofia’s turn tells me that the people are on the back The penguin can see the compelling core of these stories. They didn’t just read some wiki articles about the Falcone family and use comic book names for original characters – they read the damn books! The penguin might call Sofia by her canonical comics code name the Hangman, but this new origin story for her is taken directly from her brother Alberto, who in The long Halloween partywas dismissed as a weak son, unfit to take over his father’s legacy, and turned to serial murder of mafia notables to prove he was capable.
Sofia might not be cackling in a costume or recruiting themed henchmen just yet. But she’s wandering around in a neon yellow evening dress gassing a mansion full of people. Finally some goddamn supervillain bullshit.