Killer Cure

A look at crime life and addiction in The Penguin

I finally watched The Penguin, and I can’t stop thinking about it. This essay is riddled with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest you make that a priority over reading on. If you hadn’t planned on watching it, rethink your plans. I haven’t been writing for a while, partly because I thought I didn’t have time, but mostly because I wasn’t feeling it. The Penguin has fixed that. This mini-series spin-off of The Batman delves into the story of Oswald “Oz” Cobb - the Penguin - played by an unrecognizable Colin Farrell. It took two Youtube transformation process videos to convince me it’s really him. The series explores his past and present circumstances, his rise in the ranks of the crime families of Gotham, and the tormented, haunted mind of one of the greatest villains in the Batman universe. We really need more villain backstories. They’re not all born “pure evil” like Michael Myers, and their turn to the dark side is scarily relatable for anyone who’s turned to something not too wholesome as a seeming solution to an otherwise painful existence. 

The eight-episode series focuses mainly on the stories of Oz, Sofia Falcone (the daughter of his former boss and late crime lord, Carmine Falcone), and Victor Aguilar (a kid from Crown Point who falls into Oz’s employment and confidence after a failed theft attempt). Each of these characters becomes deeply involved in a war over ownership of the drug empire in Gotham, and though their roles and motives seem to differ on many levels, they have more in common than they’d like to admit to themselves.  Their involvement in the cycle of crime and violence serves as a fitting representation of our engagement in the cycle of active addiction. Crime becomes for Oz, Sofia and Victor what alcohol can become for us: a seeming solution to whatever circumstances we deem unbearable or unacceptable in our lives. 

One of our first impressions of Oz is his insecurity around fitting in. Early in the first episode, he impulsively shoots Alberto Falcone, the new head of the mob family, when the man mocks his dream of attaining power in the crime world of Gotham. Oz’s desire to be somebody in this hierarchy of power despite his otherness drives his involvement in violence and crime. He views crime as a means to attain control and achieve success in the world in which he operates. Even without his backstory, we can see that Oz has a history of pain. His scarred face and crippled leg tell us that much, and we hear about his upbringing in Crown Point (one of the most crime-infested neighborhoods in the city of Gotham) with a single mother and two brothers who died young. When we receive a more in depth view of his childhood, we may see a kid born bad. Young Oswald has a proclivity for crime life - he idolizes Rex Calabrese, the mobster kingpin for whom his mother works; and he smiles happily when Fred Astaire mimes shooting his fellow dancers in Top Hat. In his eyes, the men who run the drug scene or wield violence are the ones with real power, the ones untouchable by the pain of not being enough, not belonging or not deserving love. They operate above all that, and he longs for that kind of security and validation. In this sense, we can see him as a kid who has been hurt and who mostly wants love and security in a world that seems to refuse him those things. When he finds a door into the hierarchy of crime, he finds a way to belong in a way that he’s failed to access even in the doors of his own home. 

Though we don’t see much more than a few hours of Oz’s dynamic with his brothers, we sense that he feels in competition with them for his mother’s love and approval. Oz goes to any lengths to protect his claim to this love, even abandoning his brothers to die in the tunnels beneath Crown Point when the opportunity presents itself. If we look at that action objectively, Oz letting his brothers die - his first crime - presents him as a monster without any sense of loyalty or capacity to love. But if we look at the motivation behind this beginning of his crime cycle, we see the desperation behind his actions. He’s a kid who wants love and acceptance more than anything. His only source of that love is in jeopardy of being reduced or monopolized by the brothers with claim to that same love and who don’t have the same physical disability that he views as an inferiority. Offing his brothers seems to him the only viable way of being loved because it eliminates his competition.  

Oz’s entrance into the world of crime in many ways reflects how we can enter into addiction. We see an opportunity to feel connection, and we take it, not realizing that the sense of connection and the relief from social anxiety and the not-enoughs is a substance-dependent bandaid. It’s an illusory solution for the unacceptable circumstances we face, both internal and external, and it only exacerbates the intensity of those circumstances when the solution wears off. I used alcohol to cope with pain that I found impossible to sit with, and I found it to be an almost immediate relief from the feelings and thoughts that accompanied that pain. I didn’t realize that my solution didn’t do any healing work and was letting all that chaos worsen beneath its deceptive cure. I thought I was fixing myself and presenting an acceptable version of myself to the outside world, but I was engaging in something that only gave me a shadow of the relief that I’ve found to be possible. Because I didn’t really work on the issues I was using alcohol to fix, they intensified as I became reliant on alcohol to subdue them. Alcohol let me think that depression and anxiety were permanent fixtures of my identity that made me unlovable and unworthy of love, and I believed that alcohol was a way to hide them at least temporarily. Because drinking seemed to erase those issues and gave me a false sense of my reality, it blurred the sharp lines that existed between me and others and gave me a sense of not being alone. I realize now the disconnected nature of that illusion. I was isolating myself through alcohol while believing it was the thing I needed to be able to connect with others. 

We think we have connection when we’re under the influence, but it’s a lie. The relief and connection we find in alcohol or any mind-altering drug depend on its short life in our systems, and their departure from our bodies only intensifies the feelings we tried to escape by consuming it. But we don’t think about that factor when we experience the lifting sensation of those fears, anxieties and pains being lightened or erased for the first time. Oz experiences a similar false reward in the validation he receives from his mother. Though she shows him love and supports his lifestyle, she knows the truth of what he did to her other sons. She hides her hatred for Oz because she realizes he can be a means to an end for her. Oz promises riches and fame, so she remains complicit in his crime despite her true feelings. Oz doesn’t have love, but he thinks he does. Like Oz, we may have turned to alcohol because it promised belonging, security, worth and the sense of connection that we failed to reach with the other means we felt were available to us. Oz turned to crime because he saw it as the ladder to the kind of life in which he could be someone who mattered and would be worthy of his mother’s love. We turn to alcohol because it momentarily quiets the anxieties that tell us we’re not enough in every way for that love that we crave. Alcohol lets us belong not because we suddenly have this stronger sense of self worth or feel truly connected; it lets us be someone who temporarily takes the place of that not-enough, disconnected self. 

Sofia was born into a life of crime. Being a Falcone, she was surrounded by it before becoming involved herself. Initially we don’t know much about her past other than her ties to the family, her recently served time in Arkham State Hospital, and the chilling name “The Hangman” that weighs like a life sentence on her. When we finally get the tragic story behind that name and what her time in Arkham did to her, we begin to understand the reasons for her conversion to the person she is now. Before Arkham, though she is a Falcone, Sophia presents a desire to do good rather than harm. She agrees to meet with Summer Gleason, a reporter investigating the deaths of women who worked in clubs owned by Carmine. Sophia’s efforts end with her father pinning his own murders (which expand to include Gleason) on her, and she winds up with a sentence of six months in Arkham. In this time, she endures violence, humiliation and torture at the hands of other patients and the staff, and is starved of connection with the outside world. She insists on her innocence and holds onto the hope of a trial, but when her brother informs her that her case won’t be heard in court, she completely unravels. We see her give up completely and become the murderer the public already believes her to be when she brutally kills a fellow patient who gets on her last nerve. She chooses violence because the circumstances seem to leave her no other option to survive. Sofia’s turn to violence and embrace of crime is an act of desperation and equally desperate attempt to regain some control in her life after a brutal betrayal and prolonged torture. 

After Arkham, when she takes over the family business, she does so with the intention to do things her way. Unfortunately, it’s the same kind of thinking we have when we believe we can control our drinking. It doesn’t work out. In her attempt to make a name for herself that is not the Hangman and not Falcone, she embodies all the evils that both those names stand for. Her resentment against her family and Oz lead to extreme measures, and her one redeeming act is sparing the life of her niece, Gia, in whom she sees something of herself before all the pain entered her life. She admits to Gia that she has done bad things because she had to. Sophia believes that these bad things - murdering people who have hurt her or stand in her way - have been necessary for her survival. 

Sophia represents the kind of thinking we slip into when we let our resentments run wild and unchecked in our heads. She doesn’t pursue a higher solution or abandon the Falcone operation because these resentments have such a tight hold on her. Her hurt and crime-influenced mind tells her that she needs vengeance for the pain to ease, so she turns to violence. Though she renames herself with her mother’s maiden name - Gigante - and claims she’ll run her operation differently, Sophia falls into the same cycle of crime and violence that has so badly hurt her. Arkham’s effect on Sophia in many ways reflects the trauma we may experience even before entering the cycle of addiction. We can experience or witness loss, betrayal, rejection and other cruelties of the world that shake our sense of connection and weaken our trust in a higher power. When we use alcohol or another substance to escape that trauma, we subject ourselves to an even more harmful form of imprisonment. Alcohol may promise freedom from the pain, but it only worsens our sense of disconnect and in turn exacerbates the very pain for which it seemed to offer a solution. 

Our thinking can become very selfish in addiction - not necessarily a greedy, I-refuse-to-share kind of selfish, but the everything-is-about-me kind of selfish that builds deep resentments that keep us from attaining peace even in sobriety. Sophia is drowning in resentments, and we can’t blame her. When we’re hurt by the actions of the people we love, it can feel intensely personal and unforgivable, especially when they’re not making apologies or seeking to amend actions we see as so glaringly wrong. We experience intense hurt because we take these things personally. The work of recovery helps us to look at those resentments and find our part in them or at least understand that the ones who hurt us more often than not are hurting themselves. Sophia’s family is not out to get her for sheer love of cruelty; they’re all suffering in their own ways from the effects of living in the hierarchy of crime, and hurting her seems necessary for their own survival. Like Sophia, they did bad things because they had to. They thought so at least. We can see that from a distance, but she fails to comprehend it because she’s still in that same cycle of harm.

Whereas Sophia’s life is ruled by resentment, Victor acts mainly out of fear. For him, the choice to participate in crime is an effort to survive. We get a look into Victor’s past in the third episode, which takes place the evening Victor loses his family and home in the aftermath of an explosion caused by the Riddler. Though he doesn’t have much in the way of wealth, he likes his life in Crown Point. His whole world is there, but we see it destroyed in minutes when the explosions rip through the city. We get this in a flashback from Victor’s current life as Oz’s right hand man. When Oz finds him, Victor has nothing.  Oz chooses to spare his life rather than shoot him because Victor demands a chance to prove himself useful to him. Victor sells himself into crime because he views it as the only way to save his life. He finds himself in a desperate situation, and siding with the ones inflicting violence is his solution to escaping the same tragedy he saw take his family. With Oz, Victor achieves the financial security and sense of belonging and purpose he lacked in the wake of losing his home.

But he doesn’t escape the pain. The flashing lights and blaring noise in the club where Victor is distributing Sophia’s new drug, Bliss, triggers a flashback that reveals the crippling weight of the pain he carries with him. He experiences an intense response as images from his past tragedy flood his mind, and for a moment as the noise cuts out he seems completely alone in the crowded club. The scene captures a strange mix of chaos and desolation, illustrating so well the experience of being under the influence. We’re engulfed in pain, and the substance we’ve consumed to numb it has made our lives small while also blowing the order of it to bits. The scene cuts to Sophia pitching Bliss to the Dai Lo. “People need to escape,” she says. Bliss, she recalls, took the pain away when she and other patients took it in Arkham. It lets whoever takes it float away and forget where they are and what they’re feeling. This cut deliberately draws attention to what Victor wants most: to escape the pain of seeing his family killed by the senseless violence of the crime world. To escape the fact that he’s lost his people and himself. 

Bliss offers one of those avenues out of pain; it’s an easy one, but one that takes away control. Aligning himself with the people who own Bliss and the drug world of Gotham offers a more attractive solution because it gives him some control and security, something Victor’s destroyed circumstances lack. Victor has the option to leave Oz and the world of crime behind when his girlfriend, Graciela, invites him to join her in leaving Gotham, and he wants to leave. Oz even tells him to go when he discovers the plan, and Victor goes so far as driving to the bus station before turning back. His reasons for returning to Oz may be that he wants the financial security that he can’t be sure of elsewhere or that he craves the approval and validation that Oz gives him, but I think they’re rooted in something deeper. 

Victor feels that he doesn’t deserve the kind of good life that Graciela seeks in a new city. He has this innate sense of not being enough or worthy of a truly good solution to the pain he feels; furthermore, he doesn’t trust in something greater than himself to manage his life. He doesn’t trust that he’ll be able to handle either the fulfillment or failure of what he hopes for. He has seen results in his time with Oz, and though he knows the work goes against the values with which he was raised, he doesn’t believe he deserves or can achieve success if he leaves. He may have had hope for a good life when he experienced the love of his family, but when they died, that hope was destroyed. He doesn’t follow Graciela because love is no longer the solution he sees working in his life - not because he doesn’t love her, but because he’s found a way out of his desperation, albeit an effective rather than good way. 

He may want to view staying in crime as an opportunity to be someone, but he chooses this solution because it involves less fear and uncertainty than hoping for something greater. Graciela offers hope, and hope is always accompanied by fear. Victor knows the intense pain of having love and losing it, and he at least subconsciously knows that remaining in the world of crime won’t force him to risk losing something good again. In his choice to avoid the fears of loss, failure and despair, he denies himself the chance for freedom and love and chooses a life of enslavement to crime that he calls opportunity.  He wants the life that Graciela invites him to pursue with her, but he fears that his recent actions have made him unworthy of the kind of love and happiness he previously viewed as fundamental to a good life. 

This feeling of being not enough or not worthy can devour our sense of self when we’re in active addiction, and it can continue to infiltrate our thinking even in recovery. When Victor leaves Oz to meet Graciela, he makes the decision to leave crime, but his fear follows him and prevents him from getting out of the car to go with Graciela. He returns to Oz, to crime, and to an ultimately fatal lifestyle because he couldn’t believe himself worthy of anything more than the results his past actions had brought him. Like crime involvement, drinking causes a lot of damage and brings with it a lot of shame. That shame mixes with pain into a deadly cocktail that leads to the thinking that we don’t deserve true freedom from that way of feeling. 

By this point we may have come to see alcohol as the kind of fix that does more harm than good, but we may not trust that we deserve anything better because of that shame. And if we don’t deserve true happiness or love, then there’s no sense in leaving alcohol since that gives us the closest thing we’ll ever get to it. That’s the kind of thinking that can cripple our attempts to get sober and hinder our growth in recovery. It can seem safer to let fear run our lives since we mainly act in ways that we think avoid what we fear. We may fear failure, rejection or not being enough, so we hesitate to take risks, be vulnerable, seek connection, or insist on our worth. Victor’s choice to remain with Oz lets him avoid walking through the fear of losing love again, failing to succeed through honest hard work, or just being nothing as Oz has said he will be if he goes. 

The final episode of The Penguin demonstrates the harsh tragedies of our characters’ addiction to crime. Sophia’s resentments lead her back to the confines of Arkham, a hell worse than death for her. Victor’s fears lead him into the trust of a man who kills him for having seen him at his lowest.  And Oz, though he remains in power and has achieved the success and money he has always been after, is alone in the worst way. He knows that the love and approval he has sought are a lie, and he chooses to live that lie because he has made it his only option. It may seem that the worst character has won and proven the cycle of crime and violence to be the way to go since he’s the one dancing and free from the law at the end, but it’s so clearly not a victory. Victor’s death is a tragedy, but it’s also an indicator that he couldn’t have made it in the world of crime. Try as he may to separate himself from hope and love, Victor represents the humanity in addiction. He cannot become a monster on Oz’s level, because though he stays in crime out of fear, his decision is also driven by loyalty and trust in Oz’s faith in him. Oz and Victor are two broken men in a broken world who find some comfort in each other’s company. Oz kills him as a warped sort of self preservation; Victor has seen the truth of his mother’s feelings for Oz, and so Oz needs to eliminate him before Victor can choose to reject him. It’s awful and criminal, but it’s also just sad. 

I don’t think this next tangent was intended by the creators behind The Penguin, but I have to say something about the bird names. Victor’s name - Aquilar - derives from the Latin for eagle, aquila; Falcone is pretty much falcon; and the Penguin doesn’t need an explanation. It’s cool because the hierarchy suggested by their names in the realm of predatory birds is the reverse of their power hierarchy by the end of the show. The top bird - the eagle/Aguilar - has died; the falcon - a lesser but still powerful hunter, is imprisoned; and the Penguin, the bird more known for being preyed upon than being anything intimidating, is the one in control. In this regard, the outcome shows us the way in which the cycle of addiction can warp our sense of purpose and identity. 

We can also look at the significance of the symbolism of these birds. Victor is clearly not a top predator, but his eagle bears the traditional representation of freedom and power. Victor is the only character whom we see with true freedom from the cycle of crime - in the time with his family before tragedy strikes; and even though he loses his ability to access that the connection and freedom he has with them, it’s never truly lost to him. His fear keeps him from pursuing true freedom, but he holds onto his sense of loyalty and capacity for love. Victor’s fate may not demonstrate his triumphant break from the cycle, but his character gives us hope even with his tragic end. The eagle represents our capacity for freedom even when we think we’re at our lowest. It’s at our lowest we often find freedom by surrendering to a power greater than ourselves. 

Sophia’s falcon is fitting in the sense that she’s a predator who is also preyed upon. Like the eagle, falcons represent freedom, which she ultimately grasps at, and they embody insight and focus. She represents the turmoil of being part of the cycle of addiction, both contributing to and suffering from the predatory nature of it in our lives. She also reflects our capacity to truly look at ourselves and be honest about our lives and where we’re at. We struggle to achieve this insight when we’re caught in the throes of addiction, but with guidance and self-honesty we can get there. I’d argue that she does achieve a kind of freedom when she waits for Oz to shoot her; she accepts death rather than fighting it, as if she’s finally freed herself from the need to control the pain. She can’t see the outcome, but she accepts it and embraces death as her way out of the cycle she’s finally tried to leave behind. 

Oz’s penguin is my favorite. It may seem wrong to have a bird who mates for life and represents love and community function as the pseudonym for a villain who kills his own family, lies to the ones closest to him and uses everyone in his circles to achieve his selfish mission. But it works. Oz’s name may have started as a kind of insult, reminding him of his rank or his slow gait and beak-like nose, but on a symbolic level (and one that I’m tailoring to fit a recovery translation), the name also gives us the true tragedy of his character. He’s someone who was born for love and has failed to access that love. His attempts to be anyone but the Penguin highlight the misery we experience when we let our addiction usurp our true selves. Oz gives up on connection and loyalty at a young age, and he fights the other connotations of the name in his effort to be someone of worth. His failure to love and receive love when he was born for that kind of connection results in existential torture, as does his inability to accept himself as he is. He represents the pain of that disconnect that we experience when we abandon our birthright to connection and consider ourselves less than. Like the Penguin, we’re meant to be in community, to be individuals as part of a greater whole and to be enough for being part of that whole. Addiction takes away our penguin nature. It isolates us, and the disconnect we experience in that isolation spawns a whole storm of harmful thinking. We don’t do well alone, neither do the penguins. 

The gangster world is about seizing on opportunity in a broken world, but it’s not an opportunity to separate from this brokenness. It thrives on brokenness. The drug operation hierarchy in Gotham relies on pain to remain powerful. People need an escape from their pain; Bliss and other drugs are provided as the solution, and the ones in control of the drug in turn think they have some control over the pain. But as Oz, Sophia and Victor make so clear, they’re not exempt from pain. These characters see an opportunity to be the agents rather than the ones affected by violence, and they see a solution of sorts in that. They don’t realize that in taking that opportunity, they don’t free themselves from the hold their pain has on them; they become enslaved by the desire for more - more power, more violence, more money, etc. They feed that desire and contribute to the cycle of brokenness in which this pain thrives. The power they wield gives them the illusion of being in control of the pain they found unbearable, but it’s another lie. They’re feeding something that becomes progressively stronger and believe they can save themselves at the expense of others, but their sense of power is illusory and transitory.  They are in debt to the chaos they exacerbate, and they pay the price on a spiritual, mental and even physical level. 

The cycle of addiction functions in this same way. We see a solution in something that ultimately destroys us on all these same levels, though we don’t always see it happening. Whether we seek to numb pain, escape trauma, save our social standing, or just have some security in a world we feel slipping from our sense of control, our entrance into the cycle of substance abuse looks like an opportunity to us. It promises power in the sense that it lets us appear to be in control of how we feel. Our spiritual maladies, mental obsession and physical dependency progressively worsen, but we justify it because we’re letting our need for that power run our thinking, and that thinking will use any means necessary to stay alive. 

So we’re a little gangster in that way. But let’s not glamorize it. It may seem thrilling to be the one calling the shots or pulling off a successful heist or escape when we’ve got a killer soundtrack, dramatic eyeliner or a gravelly mobster sounding voice, but we’ve got to keep in mind the scenes when Oz is scrambling to keep it together, when Victor is haunted by loss, and when Sofia unravels in the confines of Arkham. Their stories show us the capacity for freedom and honesty, but they more clearly dramatize the tragedy of thinking we don’t deserve or are not strong enough to live the kind of lives we’re meant to live. Oz may be on top of the drug world by the close of the series, but he’s living a lie. He’s dancing with a pretty woman who tells him she loves him and is proud of him, but even he understands the ephemeral nature of his hard earned success. And we all know that the true version of him, the one we try so hard to see in him, is really Colin Farrell hiding behind a very convincing prosthetic makeup job.