15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
Colin Farrell's Penguin is perfect TV for the age of antiheroes like Trump
It may be the defining TV show of our times.
A dark fairytale with a performance for the ages from our own Colin Farrell, that this week earned him an Emmy nomination to add to an earlier Golden Globe win.
HBO hit 'The Penguin' reeks of the decay, collapse and corruption of the Roaring 2020s.
After a global pandemic it was supposed to be a decade of renewal and rebirth.
But at its midpoint, it's becoming clear that was a bad joke.
The roars instead have become screams of anxiety across the world. Cries for help as societies have moved on from me too to me first.
On screen that has taken shape as the century of the antihero. From Tony Soprano to Logan Roy, Walter White to the Wicked Witch of the West.
And Oswald Cobb. Farrell has earned critical acclaim for his performance as Oswald Cobb in The Penguin (Image: © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. THE PENGUIN and all related characters and elements are copyrights and trademarks of DC. All Rights Reserved.)
In a world that is increasingly shaped in the image of kleptocrats like Putin and narcissists like Trump, citizens are giving up on holding out for an old-fashioned hero.
It is the world of Donald Trump the ultimate American Antihero.
As president, Trump has taken a flamethrower to America's democratic and public institutions as well as the international order.
He put a target on anyone who didn't pledge him loyalty, replaced justice with revenge, and truth with fantasy.
His favourite Irishman is our own offering to this new cult of the antihero.
Conor McGregor is a narcissistic bully who has lost a civil action in which he was accused of a savage rape.
But millions still slavishly worship him because he rose from the streets and used violence to claim his share of the good life.
He is an icon of the new road warrior dystopia that echoes in the darker alleys of social media. Where an army of the dispossessed and disaffected plot to 'take back their freedom'. Conor McGregor
That always seems to mean taking it from others who are weaker. And by any means necessary.
The Penguin chimes with these times, where hopelessness and history seem to rhyme more with each passing crisis.
Where decline seems to have set into a civilisation that can't stop the rot eating away at respect for things like truth, decency and the institutions of law and democracy
The streets of this dark comic fantasy carry a whisper of foreboding: the world looks to be all out of heroes.
The Penguin recognises that by writing the caped crusader out of the picture entirely.
There is no Batman in this hellish version of Gotham. On the streets only chaos and bad men reign.
Only after eight relentlessly brilliant but dark chapters, is there a faint hopeful flicker of the Bat Signal dancing across the skyline in the final scene.
But it's an illusion. There is no caped saviour coming to the rescue. The citizens of the world's Gothams are on their own.
Which means they themselves will have to become the heroes they've been holding out for.
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