Oswald Cobblepot (El Pingüino): They treated him like a monster until he became one

Oswald Cobblepot was born with a body that Gotham decided was monstrous: short, stout, with a hooked nose and strange hands, a boy whom his own aristocratic parents, ashamed, hid away and cast aside. Rejected from the cradle for his appearance, mocked, treated as an aberration wherever he went, Oswald turned over the years into the Penguin: one of the city's great criminals. At first glance he is the living proof of criminology's most sinister theory —the criminal is recognizable by his body—. Looked at closely, he is its most bitter refutation: the Penguin was not born a monster. He was manufactured, day by day, by those who believed he already was one.

// The theoryThe face of crime, once again

We already met this idea with Mr. Hyde: in 1876, Cesare Lombroso launched with L'uomo delinquente the theory of the born criminal, according to which the offender is an atavism —an evolutionary throwback— that gives itself away in the body through «stigmata»: a receding forehead, a large jaw, protruding ears, «primitive» or deformed features. The promise was as tempting as it was false: that evil has a face, and that a mere look is enough to point it out. The Penguin seems to have stepped straight out of Lombroso's catalogue —he is, literally, the villain defined by his anomalous physiognomy—. Had the Italian been able to design a born criminal in a laboratory, it would have looked a great deal like Oswald Cobblepot: the man whose body «announces» his wickedness.

But Lombroso's theory, let us recall, turned out to be false. In 1913, Charles Goring measured thousands of prisoners against students and soldiers and found no anatomical «criminal type»: the stigmata did not tell a thief apart from a professor. There is no face of crime. And this is where the Penguin becomes fascinating, because his story does not illustrate Lombroso's theory —it dismantles it from within—. Oswald does not turn to crime because his body harbors an atavistic criminal impulse. He turns to crime because he lives in a society that believes in Lombroso: one that reads his deformity as wickedness, rejects him for it and shuts every decent door on him, until the only identity it leaves available to him is, precisely, that of the monster.

// The subjectThe boy nobody wanted

What makes the Penguin a moving case —and not just a grotesque villain— is the origin of his resentment. His wickedness is not a biological fact: it is a biography of rejection. Abandoned by parents who were ashamed of his appearance, ridiculed by a city that treated him as a sideshow attraction, Oswald builds his criminal identity as a revenge and, at the same time, as the one place where he is finally somebody: if the world insists on seeing him as a monster, he will become the most fearsome and elegant monster of all. He reclaims his ugliness with pride —«I'm a genuine freak»— because it is the one thing they could never take from him. His grandiloquence, his taste for the aristocratic, his court of henchmen: all of it is the construction of a man who manufactures the respect he was denied, much like a subculture does —only here the exclusion was not of class, but of face—. The Penguin did not choose his face. He chose what to do with the contempt it brought him.

// The crackLombroso with a camera, a jury and an algorithm

It would be comforting to think that Lombroso's error died in 1913 with Goring. It did not die: it mutated. Appearance bias is still very much alive in real justice, and there is uncomfortable data to prove it. Studies of trials show that a defendant's physical attractiveness influences verdicts and sentences —given equal evidence, someone who «looks» more trustworthy or likeable tends to receive better treatment, and someone with features we associate with threat, worse—. It is Lombroso disguised as everyday intuition: we go on reading criminality in faces, only without admitting it. And the old temptation resurfaces even with technology: every so often some study emerges promising to «detect criminals» from photographs using artificial intelligence —atavism with a camera and a neural network, repeating the same underlying error: mistaking the prejudice of the observer for a property of the observed—.

The Penguin warns against both faces of that bias. Against the obvious one —fearing and punishing those who «have the face of a villain»—, which fills courtrooms and streets with injustice. And against the subtler one: the prophecy that closes in, when treating someone as a criminal because of his appearance, his origin or his label ends up pushing him into crime and «confirming» the prejudice. It is not that the deformed man is dangerous; it is that turning the deformed man into an outcast can make him dangerous, and then people will say «see? I told you so». Breaking that trap —ceasing to read crime in bodies and in labels— is not naïve do-goodery: it is the only way to stop manufacturing the monsters we later claim to have discovered.

That is why the Penguin, beneath his aesthetic of parasol and monocle, is one of Gotham's saddest villains: his monstrosity is not an origin, it is a destiny imposed on him. We laugh at his grotesque figure without realizing that this laughter is exactly what made him what he is. Lombroso dreamed of reading crime in bodies; the Penguin proves that doing so does not reveal monsters —it creates them, condemning in advance those born with the wrong face—. The face of crime does not exist. But contempt for those who «have a bad face» does, and it is terribly efficient: it manufactures, one by one, the villains we later use to justify the contempt.