Over the course of the HBO series The Penguin, Sofia Gigante transforms from abused daughter of Gotham City mobster Carmine Falcone to a proper supervillain, the head of her own crime family. Sofia has chosen a new surname for herself. By going from Falcone to Gigante, she signals that she’s different from her father. Sure, Sofia’s still committing crimes (like he did) and killing people (like he did), but she's convinced there’s something righteous in her ascension: Her rise to power represents a rejection of the misogyny that’s always plagued her.
Sofia remains convinced of her righteousness even when holding two people hostage. Draped in a sleek black dress with a scarlet highlight, she strides between her captives: Oz Cobb, aka the Penguin, and his mother, Francis. A single mother of three boys, Francis made mistakes while raising her kids. And when her two older sons died, she almost went mad with grief. Worse, she’s in the throes of dementia in the series’ present, making her all the more vulnerable to Oz’s manipulations.
Spoilers follow.
For Sofia, Francis’ mistreatment at the hands of Oz only adds to the rightness of her cause. She confronts Oz about having murdered his older brothers. The confession overwhelms Francis, and she belts out cathartic screams at her son.
“You deserve to say how angry you are,” Sofia shouts to Francis, acting more like a life coach than a supervillain. But make no mistake. She is a villain.
As the camera pulls out, we see how Francis has been bound by Sofia. We even see that Sofia has a sharp pair of scissors near Francis’ hands, threatening to maim the woman unless Oz admits his guilt.
The contradictions of Sofia’s approach are obvious to everyone but her. To combat misogyny, she’s using the same methods as her misogynistic father.
At its heart, The Penguin wrestles with the self-consuming contradictions that come when we use violence to combat evil. It drives the plot of superhero shows and dominates our real-life news feeds: One day a member of an oppressed group becomes the leader of a corporation that exploits workers, another day a moralizing vigilante with a righteous cause guns down the CEO of an exploitative company.
As the theologian Walter Wink argued in his 1999 book, The Powers That Be, the demonic forces that the ancient Hebrews and the first-century Christians describe in the Bible still exist today — modern believers are just reluctant to see them. While it is tempting to “treat the Powers as actual demonic beings in the air, largely divorced from their manifestations in the physical or political world,” Wink urges Christians to “recognize that the real spiritual force that we are experiencing emanates from actual institutions.” Instead of offloading our work against these forces of evil to some spiritual battle in which we take no active part, Wink argues that Christians must work to recognize and redeem the powers.
One might argue that The Penguin demonstrates the importance of this redemption. Set in the weeks after the Riddler destroyed large sections of Gotham City in The Batman, The Penguin follows Oz, played by Academy-Award nominee Colin Farrell under pounds of makeup and prosthetics, as he makes his move to control the underworld.
Yet it’s Sofia’s parallel story that makes The Penguin so compelling. Cristin Milioti’s performance as Sofia immediately finds the right tone for the show, balancing the archness of a superhero story with genuine pathos. All in all, Sofia’s narrative displays the ways men shore up power by oppressing women.
We first meet Sofia shortly after her release from the infamous Arkham Asylum, where her crime of strangling seven women earns her the nickname “the Hangman.” Though midway through the season, we learn that Carmine Falcone actually killed those women and Sofia’s mother, all for the crime of challenging his authority. When Sofia learns about her father’s work, Carmine frames her for the murders, using the misogyny in the mental health system to his benefit.
The series contrasts Sofia’s revenge plot with Oz’s power grab. Where the latter feels economically oppressed and socially rejected because of his unusual physical appearance, he’s still a man who benefits from the systems in place. He takes advantage of the precarious status of sex worker Eve Karlo (Carmen Ejogo) and demands respect from rival gangs with more ease than Sofia.
Sofia rails against the patriarchy that affects all the women in Gotham, but she does so by working within the very system that ostracized her. She may change her name from Falcone to Gigante to declare herself the head of a new crime family, but it doesn’t matter what she calls herself. She’s still a woman in a system that hates women.
The Penguin illustrates this tension in two scenes from the finale.
One seems to find Sofia at the height of her victory, as she literally burns down her father’s house. The camera follows Sofia as she strides through the room, fully luxuriating in gathering his possessions for a pyre. Set to a gritty version of the folk song “In the Pines,” Sofia tosses a match onto the bed. Through the flames, the camera catches sight of Sofia grinning as all the goods Carmine gained through the abuse of women go up in smoke. With a final backwards glance, Sofia walks from the room and sets the rest of the house ablaze.
In the very next scene, Sofia’s victory crumbles. Just as the heads of all the rival gangs seem ready to turn over Oz and pledge allegiance to her, they die at the hands of their underlings, all of whom are making their own bid for power and none of whom will take orders from a woman.
The contrast brings to mind writer and philosopher Audre Lorde’s observation that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master’s house … They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Illuminated by the pistol flares around her, Sofia’s face drops from confidence to confusion to realization. No matter how much power Sofia thinks she has, no woman can benefit from a system built to destroy her.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus tried to teach the same lessons to his disciples. We see this when Romans come to Gethsemane to arrest Jesus for subversion against the empire. Peter grabs one of the swords and attacks a soldier, using the tools of the empire against it. But Jesus reminds his disciple that his way is not that of Caesar. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword,” he reminds them (Matthew 26:52).
Wink underscores this in naming three truths that must be held together whenever Christians engage with the powers of the world. The powers, such as those made to enforce justice and to protect the weak, “are good by virtue of their creation to serve the humanizing purposes of God. They are all fallen, without exception, because they put their own interests above the interests of the whole. And they can be redeemed, because what fell in time can be redeemed in time. We must view this schema as both temporal and simultaneous, in sequence and all at once.” In other words, powers (institutions, churches, organizations) aren’t inherently bad and often begin to fill a need. They fall when they become focused on consolidating strength in a small group, instead of spreading it out and working toward a common good. But that doesn’t mean those powers will be fallen forever.
Sofia’s downfall comes because she saw her father’s mafia system less as a way to pursue justice and equality and more as a way to get her own power by harming others. In Wink’s terms, she didn’t realize that her father’s mafia apparatus was fallen (just like the larger patriarchal systems it emulates) and needed to be redeemed.
Thus, Sofia’s downfall comes as a shock to her, but for the viewers, it’s inevitable. Sofia couldn’t find a way of seeking justice outside of her father’s brutal methods.
“For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh,” Paul reminds us; “but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
By focusing her attention on flesh-and-blood enemies, Sofia left intact the powers and principalities of the world — the rulers and authorities who hate women, even a woman like Sofia Gigante.
Joe George is a pop-culture writer whose work has appeared at Think Christian, Polygon, The Progressive, and elsewhere. He tweets from @jageorgeiii and collects his work at joewriteswords.com.
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