Photo: Macall Polay/HBO
The Penguin’s penultimate episode asks: What’s inside a monster? Whether it’s in the campy Pop Art satire disguised as normie children’s entertainment or Christopher Nolan’s Michael Mann–larping Dark Knight trilogy, the most resonant tales of Gotham City are the ones that tap into the triangulation of noir films, B movies, and EC horror comics that, midway through the 20th century, reflected America’s broken postwar soul. “For those unlucky enough to be living and sane, society was a noir film running in an…
