The villain for the modern age
How The Penguin created the perfect villain to our times
Spoilers ahead.
Life is about stories. Stories that we tell to ourselves and to others. Stories that help us frame the world around us and find our place in it. Oz Cobb (played superbly by Colin Farrell) tells a lot of stories. Like with most of us, these are always slightly embellished. But who has never told a little white lie while retelling a memory?
Throughout the first five to six episodes, these stories are almost enough to buy into the character’s redemption. In the first episode, Cobb establishes that the reason he looked up to his local mobsters is because they helped the community. They made small people like him feel like they matter. When he spares Victor Aguilar, the young man trying to steal his wheels, it seems that the Penguin is trying to do for Victor what someone once did for him, give him a chance. And use him in the process.
He also seems to be the only one sympathetic enough to Sofia Falcone, an estranged daughter of the Falcone family, freshly out of Arkham Asylum. When we first meet her, the public presents her as the Hangman, a serial killer responsible for deaths of innocent women around Gotham. While everyone shuns Sofia, Cobb works with her. Sure, let’s not forget that the series opens with him killing her brother in cold blood and spending two episodes trying to frame someone else for it, but he’s not supposed to be the good guy.
Oz’s relationship with his mother takes the longest to unpack. We first meet her early on, unsure of her mental state. She is tucked away in a suburb of Gotham, the world believing her dead. These are the moments where Oz shows the most care and love for his mother. Their relationship is tenuous and her outbursts at his inability to handle his business hint at deeper childhood trauma. Oz rarely talks about his brothers. “The city took them,” he tells Victor when pushed.
Throughout all this, Oz does a lot of really bad things. He lies, he steals and he kills. No one is trying to trick the audience that he’s a good guy. The show does try at moments to convince us that he’s a redeemable one. And then things fall apart. Just like Oz’s stories.
The thing about stories, no matter how much we tell them to ourselves, eventually they have to come up against the truth. So we try to keep the truth and our stories separate for as long as we can.
I don’t think The Penguin intends to draw deep political parallels with the world, but it does touch upon the most evident predicament of today’s worst, yet most successful people. Their ability to shrug off reality and exist entirely in the world built on their self-perception. Until the very end, when even the last veneer of pretense is ripped away from them.
Oz can never be wrong. He is meant to succeed. He has made it this far because he’s exceptional. He took care of his mother because she loved him, not because she silently wanted him dead for what he did to his brothers. He beat the Falcones fair and square, not because Sofia laid the immense groundwork to take the entire family out in one night. He defeated Salvatore Maroni, Maroni did not collapse from a heart attack in the middle of their fight.
When something good happens to Oswalt Cobb it’s because of his exceptional skill, intelligence and perseverance. When something bad happens to him it is the result of external machinations of those who wish him harm. Even Victor’s death, at Cobb’s own hands, is because the world will not let him have a real family. The world makes him kill Vic. He has to.
And that right there is the crux of The Penguin. Even when it is revealed that his mother always knew he left his brothers to die and almost had that same mobster Oz looked up to in his childhood kill him, Oz denies that part of his past. He didn’t bring this onto his mother, he was the one who weathered to consequences and got her through the tough times. He insists on keeping the story because it is what justifies his actions.
How many people do we know who justify the world and their cruelty? How many people take full credit for their success and yet refuse to accept any responsibility for their failures? How many people let stories guide them beyond the truth and how many others buy into those stories? We are not in a post-truth world. Truth is absolute. Something either is or isn’t true. Human perception cannot change it. It can avoid it. It can box it in. It can put up walls that do not allow the truth to come, but once it does, it is clear as day.
Oz Cobb’s greatest skill is building walls between the truth, himself and the rest of the world. He doesn’t have a single redeemable quality. Even his love for his mother is a love for himself dressed in a sense of being deserving of that love. If you rewatch the show, there isn’t an episode in which Oz doesn’t lie or contradict something he said earlier. He uses the remains of the walls torn down by the truth to try and build taller walls. All in the service of self.
He embodies the traits of people we see succeed the most. He’s selfish. He’s brash. He’s a liar. But through it all, he is able to convince himself (and sometimes us) that he’s worked hard to be where he is. That he’s been through hell and back to get here and that his rough side is just the product of his environment. He may even believe it, because the most dangerous stories are the ones we tell to ourselves.
And in that, The Penguin holds a mirror to so many who allow their own stories to supersede the truth. To those who only fail because of others and only succeed because of their exceptionalism. It’s not quite a post-truth world. It’s a story world. You just have to tell the best stories.