Bruce Wayne isn't the only man in Gotham with family issues
Spoilers for The Penguin throughout. I haven't spoiled everything, but do yourself a favour and watch the show first! I promise it's worth your time.
Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman. The three most popular superheroes of all time all share one notable trait: Dead parents. But whereas Kal-El found himself in the care of Ma and Pa Kent, and Peter Parker was adopted by his loving Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Bruce Wayne was not so lucky.
Look, Alfred did his best, but the trauma of Bruce’s parents’ death is something that the man still struggles with well into adulthood, and in a way that very few other superheroes with dead parents do. Although it’s rarely been depicted in the movies, many of Batman’s best modern-day stories (in the comics) are about family.
Bruce is driven to fill the void left by his parents by adopting Robins left, right, and centre. The extended ‘Bat-Family’ even has it’s own list of members on Wikipedia if you want to check it out—just look at all those characters the movies have been too scared to touch.
So, it is with great pleasure that I report that we finally have a live-action Batman adaptation that confronts the grief and consequences of coming from a broken home. Small caveat: the show is called The Penguin, Bruce Wayne is nowhere to be seen, and it’s central character is a club-footed, beak-nosed gangster called Oswald Cobb.
Now that all eight episodes of The Penguin have been released, I think we can safely say that nobody expected it to be as good as it is. It is one of the best T.V. shows I’ve seen all year. It is a show of tremendous nuance that constantly surprised me with its quality. I mean just Google an image of Penguin from the comics. The last thing you expect from a show dedicated to that guy are thoughtful and complex explorations of corrupted family dynamics, yet here we are.
A number of different families have prominent roles to play in The Penguin. Let’s take a look at them and see how they highlight the deeply personal themes at the heart of the show.
The Maroni Crime Family
When The Penguin begins, the Maronis have fallen—a situation that The Batman (2022) originally elaborated on. Their patriarch, Salvatore—played by the incredible Clancy Brown—is incarcerated in Blackgate prison, where he’s struggling to keep a grip on his crime empire. In fact, the only way he’s able to achieve anything these days is with the help of his wife, Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo).
Sal and Nadia are pretty much the only loving couple depicted in The Penguin. Sure, they’re both savage, ruthless criminals, but they’re also a team. They even have a son, Taj, who, although a bit of a dumbass, is clearly loved by his parents. But wait, isn’t this article supposed to be about broken families of The Penguin?
Sure is. Spoilers ahead.
The Maronis may begin the show as its only somewhat functional family, but The Penguin is not a wholesome story. It is a show about the perils of being a part of a family; even a healthy one.
And, boy, does Oswald take advantage of this. In a bid to remove the Maronis from the board for good, Oz kidnaps Taj, uses him to draw out Nadia, then sets them both on fire, burning them alive. His ploy included an assassination attempt on Sal, which failed, leaving Sal the sole member of his family left alive.
The fallout of this is that Sal becomes so driven to seek revenge on Oz that he’s willing to team up with his nemesis, Sofia Falcone, to take him out—an unexpected union that almost costs Oz everything. The sudden loss of his loved ones puts a dangerous man in a situation where he has nothing to lose. Sal may have been a criminal, but with his family by his side, he acted with civility and poise. Take that away and you unleash a monster.
Functional families do not survive The Penguin. It is no coincidence that Oz is the one to rip apart the only real family of the show. Oz knows better than anybody that family is a weakness to be exploited. Speaking of which...
The Cobb Family
Oswald’s family is a mess. His primary relationship is with his mother, Francis (Deirdre O'Connell), who suffers from dementia, but he also had two brothers who died in a childhood accident. The identity of his father is unknown and unimportant, although the man’s absence clearly has an affect on young Oz, who forms an unhealthy attachment to his mother and wants desperately to be the kind of man who can take of her properly.
Oz has known from the beginning that Francis’ mere existence is a liability for him, especially once he sought to rise the ranks in the Falcone crime family. To that end, he’s hidden her out in the suburbs and spread the lie that she’d died years ago.
Despite this, Francis is still the lynchpin around which Oswald’s entire psyche revolves. He seeks out a life of crime in order to provide her with the riches that he truly believes she deserves. His success in this endeavour has been debatable by the time The Penguin begins, but after the events of The Batman, Oz sees an opening. It is an opportunity he never would’ve tried to seize if it weren’t for the warped influence his mother has over him.
Although he was being raised by a single mother, Oz’s childhood family life could not be described as broken. Not at first, anyway. As we see in flashbacks, his mother had real love for all of her children, despite their external financial pressures. The only problem was Oz himself, who was possessive of his mother, and jealous of her love for his brothers.
Where this symptom came from originally is anyone’s guess. Was it nature, or nurture? An expression of his true self, or his twisted adaptation to a hard life with a disability and an absent father? All we know is that there’s been something wrong with Oswald's perception of family since the very beginning, and the ramifications of this psychosis result in tragedy after tragedy.
Yes, love for his mother is what drives Oswald’s ambition, but that same love, which is all kinds of unhealthy, is what pushes him to engage in all sorts of dehumanising acts, and offers no satisfaction in and of itself. It also makes him vulnerable to manipulation…
The Falcone/Gigante Crime Family
Enter the Falcone/Gigante Crime Family. This Gotham institution is lead by various individuals over the course of the show—a direct expression of its severe dysfunction—but its most notable member is Sofia Falcone, played by Cristin Milioti, who is essentially the show’s second main character.
Sofia is the primary subject of the show’s best episode (episode four: Cent'Anni) in which we get to dive deep into the history of the Falcone crime family, especially her father’s more diabolical inclinations.
Once again, spoilers ahead.
Sofia’s father, Carmine (played here by Mark Strong, replacing John Turturro from The Batman), killed Sofia’s mother before she could leave him, and that’s only the beginning of Sofia’s longstanding conflicts with her own family.
Someone could write a book on the complexities and shifting loyalties of the Falcone crime family as it’s presented in The Penguin, but perhaps one of their most egregious actions was locking up an innocent Sofia Falcone in Arkham Asylum for a decade to cover for her father’s crimes.
Sofia is, for the most part, an innocent victim of her broken family’s lies and ambitions. It’s what gets the viewer on her side. Nothing gets you rooting for a character quite like watching them suffer an injustice, and in the case of Sofia, it’s an injustice so great, even Oz feels bad for her.
From there, Sofia’s initial steps are defined in either opposition or support for her family, but eventually sees that there can be no catharsis in a life lived under the shadow of the Falcone name and adopts her mother’s maiden name of Gigante. It is merely a symbolic gesture, though. The damage done to Sofia Falcone by her family cannot be undone. They turned an innocent woman into a murderous crime lord with their actions.
Oz helped, of course (see: the opening scene of the series). The man is nothing if not consistent in his ability to destroy a family. All of this pushes Sofia to commit an act of familicide that forever changes the face of crime in Gotham. Sofia is somewhat the inverse of Oz and Sal. Her family offered her no strength. They drained her energy, inhibited her goals, and the one person she loved was murdered—the final key in unlocking her true rage.
The Aguilar Family
Grim stuff. The writers clearly knew that all of this venom would come across as pretty one-note if they didn’t at least attempt to concoct an antidote for it.
And so they gave us Victor Aguilar, played by Rhenzy Feliz. Vic is the show’s only shining light. At the beginning of the show, he’s resorted to a life of crime, but only because he didn’t have any other options left. His home was destroyed, and his family were killed by the flood that Ridder caused in The Batman.
But that family… We only meet them briefly during a flashback, but there’s enough there for us to know that Vic and his family were happy. Not rich, but happy. Vic wasn’t a criminal. He was a good kid who was orphaned. It was just his bad luck that the father figure that came along to fill that vacuum happened to Oswald Cobb.
Over the course of the show, Oz and his world pushes Vic to become a criminal, but despite this, the lad retains a sense of justice. He follows Oz not because of the money he provides, but because Oz is, in his own way, trying to grab some power for the poor and disenfranchised of Gotham. He might be working for a crime lord, but he never loses the basic decency that his family instilled in him.
Vic is a tragic character because we’re forced to watch a basically good person live a life of crime, partly because of how willing he is to just go along with Oz’s schemes. Following the death of his family, Vic just wanted to belong.
“You’re family to me,’ says Victor to Oz in the closing minutes of the show.
And how does Oz respond?
“That’s the thing about family. It’s your strength. It drives you. But, fuck, if don’t make you weak, too.”
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