The Penguin

I watched ‘The Penguin’ months ago and I liked it.  Not saying I loved the characters in a way that I wanted to be them.  Some of their actions were horrific, but it worked for the story.  In fact, I can’t think of any character that would be considered a hero.  They were all mobsters, drug dealers, manipulators, murderers, and corrupt officials.  Yet, I didn’t find myself shoved out of the story by the lack of a noble hero.  Got me thinking about how an all villain story can work.

First, I know this type of story isn’t for everyone.  Many people need good in a story to balance the evil.  They need that ‘black and white’ or at least no slide into terrible actions like grotesque murders.  Audience members like this will hate such a story because they will be focused on how wrong everything is.  Not that others won’t see that as well, but there will be no justification for any of the actions.  It will be seen entirely as evil with no reason.  I thought I would feel that, but it never happened with ‘The Penguin’.

Right off the bat, you’re shown that this is going to be a morally dark story.  This doesn’t start in a bright, happy place, but in a desolate area and the atmosphere kind of stays that way.  I think that’s an important factor for a story where everyone is a villain.  If you start them in the light, they might be seen as being heroes when they aren’t even close.  So, the story needs to begin dark and brutal to set the tone.  This way, nobody in the audience can be fully surprised by future actions.

There’s also a fascination with people doing evil things.  Through the eyes of a hero, we only see them as bad and nothing else.  A story like this will show them as multi-dimensional.  We get an origin to show how they turned out this way, which touches on how villains aren’t typically born evil.  For some, you end up seeing that they were a bad apple to begin with and nothing was done to turn them away from darkness.  Others are born into the evil and only know that life, so they grow into it.  Then, you have the villains who do start off good and inevitably fall into darkness.  ‘The Penguin’ had a good variety of these types, which made it even more fascinating.

The funny thing for me is that I did find myself rooting for characters, but it wasn’t always for them to win.  Many times, it was for them to get their comeuppance.  There were times I felt that I had to side with Penguin too because the other villains were acting worse than him.  Without wishing for a hero to show up, I think I was simply indulging in the experience and letting the tension take over.  I knew the entire time that every character didn’t deserve to win.  Yet, someone had to and it came down to simply seeing which monster was left standing.

I almost compared this type of story to one where you have monsters fighting each other like ‘Freddy vs Jason’ or the original ‘Godzilla vs King Kong’.  Those stories don’t match with ‘The Penguin’ because they had heroes or at least innocents.  It wasn’t the monsters you were following as the audience, but their victims.  In this series, you’re sitting on the villains’ shoulders and have nowhere else to go.  There are no other points of view to give yourself a flicker of light and hope.  Probably why I couldn’t binge watch more than two episodes at a time before taking a break.  The later ones especially required that I walk away and defrag my brain before going back.

Personally, I enjoyed this type of story, but I can see how it’s very hard to pull it off. An author can fall into the trap of making the villains cartoonishly compete with each other to be the most evil character.  You need to keep them serious and within their abilities and personalities.  A psychopath with a temper will kill at the slightest provocation, but the more tempered villain will be more elaborate and cruel with his actions.  One can be shifted to the other over time, but you need to have that play out.  So, you can’t really rush the story and depend entirely on shock value.  Characterization is essential here.

So, anybody else like stories with all villains?  I mean, real villains and not the Disney origin ones we see all the time.