The Penguin and The Joker
Why one gritty 'Batman' villain story works and the other doesn't.
[Spoilers ahead for both Joker movies and the first four episodes of The Penguin]
If you take even a half-step back, Batman and his entire world are very silly. He’s a wealthy guy who dresses up like a rodent to fight crime, and his rogues gallery includes a guy in clown makeup, his sidekick who is also in clown makeup, a lady who controls plants, a guy who loves wordplay, and others. Over the decades, this has somehow become the grittiest superhero world in a universe packed with superheroes.
2022’s The Batman continued this trend, although I’d argue Matt Reeves’ reboot works because it keeps the grittiness based in Batman’s character as a traumatized kid who doesn’t know what to do with all the pain he feels (as opposed to Christopher Nolan’s expository take or Zack Snyder’s violent reactionary who has to return to a sense of decency). As I said at the time, Reeves’ movie works because it’s Batman finding his purpose beyond violence, and I think that’s a rewarding place to take the character.
But franchise machines being what they are, there’s only one Batman (for now; who knows if the planned Batman: Brave and the Bold will ever get off the ground), and to keep churning out product in between Batman movies, we’re getting spinoffs in the Batman universe featuring his villains like Suicide Squad, The Suicide Squad (Different movies with a few shared characters! Questionable title choice on the second one!), two Joker movies (that take place in a world without Batman; more on that later), and for the past few weeks, a series about The Penguin set in the world of The Batman. Got all that? It’s okay if you don’t.
In the past month, we’ve had not only the first four (of eight) episodes of The Penguin but also Joker: Folie à Deux. Both movies aspire to be gritty Batman villain stories, so why does The Penguin work while Joker: Folie à Deux (and I’d argue the first Joker as well) strains for pathos?
Who’s This Clown?
I’m not surprised Warner Bros. made a second Joker movie. That will happen when your first movie makes over a billion dollars worldwide and gets 11 Oscar nominations. But a closer look at Joker reveals it to be a cynical exercise in exploiting the marketplace, not to sneak in something subversive but to give the appearance of depth without saying anything of substance. The film echoes Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but both of those Scorsese movies vividly comment on their contemporary settings and the desperate, deluded men who inhabit them. Joker director and co-writer Todd Phillips makes his Gotham City look like 1970s New York City but has no thoughts on that era, the 2010s, or anything other than a mishmash of vague social critiques dealing with wealth inequality, personality cults, and mental illness. I’ve seen Joker twice now, and despite its gritty setting, I don’t think either the character of the Joker or the world he inhabits is particularly interesting.
And perhaps neither did Phillips because Joker: Folie à Deux seems to actively despise anyone who liked the first movie. There’s a patronizing undertone of, “Don’t you get that the Joker is a bad guy?” as if audiences always approve of anti-hero behavior. To be fair, those people are out there, and they see guys like Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Todd Phillips’ Joker as aspirational. But it’s weird to go out of your way to chastise a segment of your audience that doesn’t recognize the immoral behavior of the protagonist. It’s even weirder to spend almost $200 million to call them out. There’s the argument that Folie à Deux is also subversive in that it’s criticizing and upsetting the biggest fans of the original by giving them a blend of a musical and courtroom drama where the only point is, “Joker bad, actually.” But such irreverent and subversive behavior tends to carry with it a taboo thrill, and Folie à Deux is a chore from start to finish. In both Joker movies, Phillips seems like he’s getting away with something, but to paraphrase another, better Joker, he’s like a dog chasing cars. He doesn’t know what to do once he’s caught it.
That’s why all the grittiness underlying these Joker movies amounts to nothing more than window dressing. It doesn’t tell us about character (despite all of Joaquin Phoenix’s theatrics, it lands on a basic duality where there’s a bullied Arthur Fleck and the violent Joker side, so he’s basically the Hulk—you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry), it doesn’t tell us about this particular Gotham City (which, again, is just 1970s New York City), and it doesn’t tell us about Batman because Batman doesn’t exist in Phillips’ Joker universe (Bruce Wayne is just a kid in the first Joker, and the sequel picks up two years later). Joker fails because through both movies there’s an undercurrent of resentment that Phillips has to make these movies in the first place.
Oz Cobb
The Penguin operates differently as it tries to find grounding in the Batman universe while never resenting its comic book origins. Some fans bristled that The Penguin’s real name had been changed from “Oswald Cobblepot” to “Oz Cobb,” but that’s only an indictment if all the color had been drained from the character, and Colin Farrell’s take on The Penguin is nothing if not colorful. I didn’t think we’d reach a point where The Penguin is much funnier than The Joker, but here we are:
But more importantly, as we’ve seen from the first four episodes of The Penguin, the writers are invested in Oz as a character and want to give him compelling motivations. While the first two episodes hinted that this would be nothing more than The Sopranos: Gotham Edition, showrunner Lauren LeFranc has set up a strong conflict between Oz and Sophia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) as they fight to rule Gotham’s underworld in the aftermath of The Batman. It’s a good conflict because not only do Oz and Sophia have a history, but they’re also cut from a similar cloth. They’re both people who crave respect, are underestimated by those in power, and hold loyalty cheap.
This also makes the show a nice break in that neither Oz nor Sophia are crazy. They’re dangerous, ruthless, vengeful, and vindictive, but they’re not agents of chaos like Joker. The gritty confines of the show mirror the reality of the motivations of the characters. However, LeFranc doesn’t want to ditch the comic book reality either. Part of that is simply operating within the Gotham that Matt Reeves established in The Batman, but there are also big comic book swings like Sophia’s trip through Arkham or how she murders almost her entire family with carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk between comic book vibes and a believable reality, but so far, The Penguin manages it quite well.
That’s because The Penguin isn’t ashamed of what it is and has the confidence to embrace both its comic book origins while also serving as a gangster noir about the desperate need for respect. Oz’s opening monologue about Rex Calabrese and then killing Alberto Falcone because Alberto disrespects that aspiration sets the tone for the entire series:
The Joker movies may have had clear inspirations behind them, but there was never any clarity in what those movies wanted to say beyond thumbing their nose at anyone who might want to see them. The Penguin, by comparison, treats its characters and world as worth caring about. There’s no ironic distance here or pretending the series is something it isn’t. If you’ve bought the more serious direction Batman has gone over the past several decades, then The Penguin fits in nicely, not as a rebuke of that direction but an embrace of what the comics are doing while integrating influences from the gangster genre.
Joker may look like it takes the character seriously, but it’s an overreach by people who don’t like or appreciate who he is, where he comes from, or why anyone would be interested in his story. The Penguin takes The Penguin seriously, and that doesn’t mean being humorless or dry, but rather saying that we love this character even though he’s a monster. You can’t tell a good story if we fail to understand or care about the protagonist. Joker may draw inspiration from anti-hero stories, but The Penguin understands the lesson.
Recommendations
If you want to scare the bejeezus out of yourself this spooky season, then you should probably pick up one of the scariest movies of last year, Talk to Me. The Blu-ray is only $8.99 (36% off) at Amazon. And remember, kids: if your friends ask you to serve as a conduit for the spirit world, they’re not really your friends.
What I’m Watching
As someone in an interfaith marriage, I decided to give the new Netflix series Nobody Wants This a shot since it’s about an interfaith relationship between an agnostic podcaster, Joanne (Kristen Bell), and a rabbi, Noah (Adam Brody). After watching the first three episodes, I’m peacing out for three reasons:
The show is particularly venomous towards Jewish women. These are the harshest stereotypes of Jewish women as domineering, manipulative, and venal. It’s one thing to render a caricature with love, but showrunner and creator Erin Foster drew from her own experiences, and she’s using that for Joanne. Maybe the show turns around and provides more texture to these characters, but for now, it feels mean-spirited.
This would probably be a solid 100-minute romantic comedy, but streaming requires everything to be much longer because they measure success by time spent on the platform and hours viewed. From a streamer’s perspective, it’s better to have you watch 5 hours of kind of okay television than a good 100-minute movie. That’s how you get the third episode of Nobody Wants This, where Joanne spends the whole episode overanalyzing why Noah hasn’t texted her back immediately.
I like Bell and Brody as actors, and they have chemistry, charm, and charisma, so casting them makes sense. However, the show seems to ignore what it means to date in your 40s, which is what Bell and Brody are—actors in their 40s. They’ve been around since Veronica Mars and The O.C., respectively, and yet their characters in Nobody Wants This seem to approach dating as a person in their late 20s or early 30s would. The show is youthful in the way that Los Angeles forces youthfulness regardless of age.
I was hoping that this show would get into why interfaith relationships can be fraught, and while the first episode was promising, the next two indicate that Nobody Wants This is going to be too broad for me.
What I’m Reading
I finished up reading Bart D. Ehrman’s Armageddon, and it was illuminating, not only for how it clarifies what the author of Revelations was writing about in context (basically a screed against Nero and the Roman Empire) but also how the book, ironically, Romanizes Christianity, taking it from a doctrine of service to one of dominance.
I’m now re-reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The 1818 Text. This was one of the best books I read in high school, and since it’s spooky season and Guillermo del Toro has a new adaptation on the way, I figured now was the time to read it again.
What I’m Hearing
Writing this article about Batman stuff, I popped on Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score for The Dark Knight, which still goes extremely hard.
What I’m Playing
I booted up Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture, and it didn’t hook me. I don’t necessarily mind the concept of walking around an English village and trying to find out what happened, but the way the story unfolds is confounding to the point of frustration, and while I get the choice to force the player to take in the surroundings by only allowing them a walking speed, I need a run button, folks. Let me get around a little faster.
Then I moved on to the platformer Owlboy, which is cute, but at the beginning of the game, everyone is so mean to Owlboy! He’s doing his best! Anyway, it’s not too bad, but it's also not necessarily a game that I felt compelled to continue immediately.
What has hooked me is an iPhone game, Balatro. It’s a roguelike using poker rules with some other twists in scoring, and I’ve found it as addictive as advertised. But it’s also just an easy thing to pick up and put down, which makes it ideal for a mobile game. Plus, you pay $10, and that’s it. That’s the game. No microtransactions. I’m loving it.