هتروتوپیای شر: بازنمایی شر مطلق و تکوین شخصیّت آز کاب در ‌سریال پنگوئن

This article analyzes the first season of The Penguin as a contemporary visual narrative that foregrounds the structural production of evil within a collapsed urban and moral order. Rather than interpreting the series as a conventional origin story of a villain, the study argues that The Penguin presents Gotham City as an active spatial agent that shapes subjectivity, normalizes violence, and reorganizes ethical judgment. In this sense, the city operates not merely as a backdrop for criminal action but as a constitutive force in the emergence and reproduction of evil. The primary theoretical framework of the article is grounded in Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, through which Gotham is understood as a real yet deviant space that simultaneously reflects and disrupts dominant social norms. Gotham functions as a heterotopian city in which legal, ethical, and political structures have lost their regulatory capacity, allowing violence and domination to become normalized modes of action. This Foucauldian spatial logic provides the structural foundation of the analysis, particularly in examining disciplinary institutions such as Arkham Asylum, surveillance mechanisms, and fragmented urban zones as technologies of power that produce compliant and controllable subjects. Within this spatial configuration, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” is employed as a complementary interpretive framework to analyze individual agency. Rather than positioning Arendt’s theory as a competing paradigm, the article mobilizes it to explain how characters act within Gotham’s heterotopian order. Evil, from this perspective, does not emerge from radical malice or ideological fanaticism, but from the absence of critical thinking, ethical reflection, and political judgment. The character of Oz Cobb (the Penguin) exemplifies this logic: he is not portrayed as a metaphysical embodiment of evil, but as a subject formed within a city that systematically eliminates moral alternatives. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative interpretive approach, combining visual analysis, narrative analysis, and philosophical reading. Key scenes, spatial compositions, institutional settings, and character relationships are examined to demonstrate how Gotham’s urban and institutional spaces actively participate in the reproduction of evil. Particular attention is given to Arkham Asylum as a disciplinary institution that transforms care into control, as well as to the hierarchical relationship between Oz Cobb and Victor Aguilar, which illustrates the transmission of violence through obedience and normalization rather than coercion alone. The findings indicate that The Penguin depicts evil as a systemic and self-reproducing phenomenon embedded in spatial arrangements, institutional practices, and social relations. Gotham emerges as a heterotopia of evil: a city in which ethical collapse is spatially organized and politically stabilized. The absence of a counterbalancing moral force allows violence to circulate as an ordinary and legitimate practice. By integrating Foucauldian spatial theory with Arendtian political ethics, the article demonstrates how contemporary serial narratives can critically expose the mechanisms through which modern societies normalize domination, discipline, and ethical indifference. In doing so, The Penguin offers a distinctly contemporary reflection on evil—not as an exception, but as a structurally sustained condition of urban life.