Batman Returns Controversy Explained: Was Penguin Anti-Semitic?

Now a beloved cult-classic, Batman Returns was met with controversy over Danny DeVito’s portrayal of penguin. Shortly after Tim Burton’s Batman movie opened in the summer of 1992, The New York Times published an article by two Columbia University students who allege that the blockbuster film sustains a number of harmful anti-Semitic tropes. In particular, the two critics identify the Penguin (Danny DeVit0) as a Jewish caricature. Burton’s film, which follows up on his 1989 hit Batman, was a massive commercial success, and broke opening weekend box office records for its era. Here’s a breakdown of Batman Returns and the allegations of anti-Semitism.

With Jack Nicholson’s Joker dispatched, Batman Returns opens with the origin story of Oswald Cobblebot (aka, the Penguin). Repulsed by their newborn son’s deformities, Oswald’s socialite parents set his bassinet adrift into a sewer, where he grows into a short-statured man with flipper-like hands, a beak-like nose, and a tendency to eat raw fish and spit up bile. After a disastrous campaign to become mayor of Gotham, the Penguin withdraws to the sewer, where he vows to kill all firstborn sons of Gotham as vengeance for what happened to him as an infant.

DeVito’s portrayal of the well-known villain does seem exaggerated compared to alternate versions of Penguin. In their Times article, (available now in an archived version from Gainesville Sun), authors Rebecca Roiphe and Daniel Cooper claim that symbolically, the Penguin “is a Jew, down to his hooked nose, pale face and lust for herring.” Further, the character’s hostile ambitions feed into the stereotype of the Jew who is “unathletic and seemingly unthreatening but who, in fact, wants to murder every firstborn child of the gentile community.” Although Roiphe and Cooper stop short of claiming that the film is overtly anti-Semitic, they argue that these tropes and stereotypes are dangerous nonetheless.

The controversy doesn’t end with the Penguin. Roiphe and Cooper point out that the Penguin teams up with corrupt businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), whose “Jewish-sounding name is borrowed from the actor who played the first bat-man of the silver screen, the vampire” from Murnau’s classic Nosferatu. Further, the two critics propose that the film carries troubling references to openly anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner: “The Penguin sails the sewers in a giant wooden duck, a parody of the ‘Schwan der Schelde’ from Wagner’s Lohengrin.” These and other criticisms open up a number of troubling questions for Batman Returns. 

In an extensive 2014 article, Southern California Public Radio breaks down the movie brick by brick, identifying the Penguin as a “warped Moses” who ruins multiple Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, thus establishing a thematic “war on Christmas” as well as a more fundamental Christian vs. Jew opposition. The article points out that like Die Hard, Batman Returns qualifies as a quasi-Christmas movie, but in its case, Christmas must be saved from a pernicious Jewish stereotype rather than a German terrorist. Although the SCPR article locates some validity in Roiphe and Cooper’s claims, it also points out that the Anti-Defamation League investigated their analysis and dismissed it as “nonsense.” The Times later published a response from Wesley Strick, the Batman Returns script doctor who dreamed up the Penguin’s scheme to eliminate Gotham’s firstborn. Strick, who is Jewish himself, expresses dismay in regard to Roiphe and Cooper’s article, and likens their argument to a “Rorschach test,” implying that the two critics identify anti-Semitic undertones where none actually exist.

While it’s always possible that Batman Returnscontains unintentional anti-Semitic tropes, much of the controversy seems to have passed. That said, the film provides a valuable lesson in regard to the importance of producing complex, three-dimensional villains who can’t be easily reduced to simplistic “types.” It has been reported that Colin Farrell will play the part of the Penguin in the upcoming reboot The Batman. Hopefully, his take on the character will favor depth and complexity over unnecessary controversy.

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Nickalus Rupert
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Nickalus Rupert is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer located near the Gulf Coast of Florida. In 2019, he completed a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is author of Bosses of Light and Sound, a forthcoming short story collection from Willow Springs Books.

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