As Batman historian Will Brooker once said,
the defining characteristic of Gotham City must be
there is always crime.
"Crime, stalking our city by night and day,
is on the increase.
Our undermanned police force is helpless to cope with the situation, but they have an ally, Batman."
There has to be crime in Gotham because
Batman is, on one key level,
the one who fights crime.
This highlights the inseparable connection
between Batman and his city.
It's actually more like a circular connection in that one is always creating and perpetuating the other.
It was Gotham City that killed Bruce Wayne's parents in the form of a petty thief
that its corrupt conditions created, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the Batman's obsessive
mission to rid Gotham of crime, an obsession that fostered a darker and more twisted criminality.
"I'm an agent of chaos."
In the beginning, Gotham was just a backdrop, a setting. Indeed, it wasn't even Gotham. It was New York City
until Detective Comics #48. In the 1943 and 49 television serials of Batman, most of the action,
largely due to budgets, takes place in interiors on sound stages. Little attempt is made to signify Gotham
as a whole. The same if true for the Adam West Batman series in the 1960s, when the character
was at the height of camp. Scrub through the entire feature length movie from 1966
and you won't see so much as a skyscraper.
When the Adam West show failed, Batman writers brought a darker tone to the stories.
They brought an extended continuity, and continuity meant that individual locations in Gotham gained
importance and the city itself started to breathe as a character.
This run of dark comics culminated in 1986 with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns,
which plumbed the obsessive, tortured psyche of the Batman and found a counterpoint to that troubled mind
in the diseased crime-ridden streets of Gotham.
That essential feeling was intensified even more and three years later, Gotham City became a nightmare.
In what has become the most iconic imagining of the Caped Crusader's home, Tim Burton and Anton Furst
fashioned a city as if "hell burst threw [sic] the pavement and grew", drawing from a number of garishly
juxtaposed architectural styles and the charcoal drawings of Hugh Ferriss.
The creators of 1989's Batman took the 80's fears of worsening crime and augmented them
to a Kafkaesque level. That aesthetic was made more grand and exaggerated in Burton's sequel,
Batman Returns and three years later, Batman Forever depicted a Gotham that was flashier, colorful,
somehow even more removed from reality. Finally, what was macabre and genuinely inspired in Burton's
imagination became gaudy and genuinely ridiculous in 1997's fourth installment in the series,
Batman and Robin.
"Enough monkey business."
And yet, as the movies soured Burton's vision of Gotham, television and comics were taking all the best
parts of the 1989 aesthetic and developing a deeper identity for the city.
In the stellar Batman: The Animated Series, Gotham City is all dark Deco, as if the 1930's World's Fair had gone
on for another sixty years. In the comics, Batman was more loathed than ever to leave Gotham,
and Gotham itself became more isolated and separated from the rest of the world.
In the famous arc called No Man's Land, the national government chooses to abandon Gotham entirely
after the city is almost destroyed by an earthquake. The island quickly carved up by gangs and villains
becomes a hell on Earth. Christopher Nolan made a similar isolating move in Batman Begins when the police
raise the bridges to stop escaped criminals from feeling the city and again in The Dark Night Rises,
when Bane destroys those bridges. Of course, Nolan's Gotham is decidedly more grounded and realistic than
its predecessors, especially in The Dark Night. Burton's Gotham may be more nightmarish, but a Gotham that
resembles our own world can be even more terrifying when it's shown to be fragile in the face of a violent
disregard for the established order.
From its earliest onscreen depictions in the 1940s to the latest in a series of gruesome video games and
a network TV show that bears its name.
Gotham has been flexible to account for a changing world and a changing Batman.
But the one constant is crime, an irrepressible criminal underclass that plagues the streets with whom
the police are either in league or powerless to stop. Indeed, the Batman is, by definition, unable to stop this
scourge, too, or else his existence would be unjustified.
"You are defending a city so corrupt, we have infiltrated every level of its infrastructure."
Gotham, I think, is totally unique in the history of cities, real or imagined. Existing for more than seventy years,
we have an exhaustive knowledge of its attitude, of its feel, of places there, like Wayne Tower
or Arkham Asylum or Crime Alley. Yet, unlike a real city, we can't map it out in the traditional sense.
And every attempt to do so is subject to change and sort of absurd.
Gotham is a city that's performed. We know it by the stories that happen there, by the spaces generated
from encounters in the night. In this view, its many versions don't register as inconsistencies,
but cohere into, perhaps, a new way to think of cities: As a sight of constant reinvention and varied interpretation,
as an expression of the traumas that are reenacted by those who have suffered.
And as a place that can't be mapped by its buildings and streets, but by the events and people and minds
that make them.
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