Monarch Theater exit. A gunshot rings out in the cold winter. The rich Wayne husbands fall under the bullets of a robber, in front of the eyes of their young son: Bruce. The future Batman is here. Soon the orphan will become a superhero, a vigilante, a myth.
The Dark Knight would not exist without the city in which he officiates. Gotham, dark Babylon, bloodied by crime, plagued by misery, plagued by corruption. An ideal urban maze for giving birth to monsters, carpeted in alleys, hidden in sewers or infiltrated in institutions.
An old nickname for the Big Apple
Like its “Lady of Gotham”, ersatz of the Statue of Liberty in certain versions, the city fully assumes its affiliation with New York, of which it wants to be a distorted, nightmarish version, in an almost gray or semi-darkness. perpetual. “Gotham looks like Manhattan under the 14 e Street at midnight, on the coldest night in November ”, portrayed the late Dennis O’Neil, legendary Batman screenwriter in the 1970s. In the first comics, at the end of the 1930s, the hero played in the Big Apple, before the city definitely became Gotham City from 1940, in reference to an old nickname of the XIX e century of the American metropolis.
As in New York, skyscrapers, headquarters of great capitalist industries, dominate the skies of Gotham – including Wayne Tower, owned by Bruce / Batman. An elevated subway winds between the buildings, like around Yankee Stadium or the Manhattan Bridge. And, like the Staten Island, Brooklyn-Queens, Manhattan-Bronx triptych, the city is structured in three island blocks and faces the Atlantic.
On the ruins of the American dream
If Tim Burton played the gothic and cartoon card in his adaptations and if Christopher Nolan preferred to put his camera in Chicago to bring Gotham to life in his trilogy, it is undoubtedly Todd Phillips who takes on the new side the most. fictional city yorker. In Joker, the filmmaker films Gotham as Martin Scorsese captured the NYC of the 1970s: dirty, grayish, desperate, on the verge of explosion. And it is this cocktail of misery and violence that will give birth to the Joker, sworn enemy of the bat, a match sitting on a barrel of powder.
“From its creation in 1939, Batman has been the expression of fears associated with the proletarians of large urban centers”, recalls the historian of popular cultures William Blanc, in Superheroes: a political story. Batman, “Gentleman from the upper classes”, is experienced as a “Knight of a new kind”, which did not fail to nourish a critical literature, seeing in the figure of the hero a reactionary gesture. Over time, the villains pursued by the vigilante have evolved from the little “scum” to increasingly mythological monsters, but all thrive on the ruins of the American dream. The metropolis, supposed to ensure progress and profits for all, fails as much to meet the needs of its population as to stem the anger. The level of violence is such as in the video game Batman : Arkham City the federal authorities decide to make Gotham an open-air penitentiary, where thugs are free from any rule as long as they do not go beyond the walls.
An Endless Crusade Against “Villains”
Whether he hovers in the night or patrols aboard his Batmobile, the masked vigilante is thus confronted with the scars of his clashes. There, the warehouses of the Falcone mafia, here the Botanical Garden, lair of the poisonous Poison Ivy, further away Ace Chemicals, petrochemical industry which poisons public waters. An emblematic place, Arkham Asylum recalls the insurmountable nature of the hero’s quest: supposed to lock up and “cure” the “supervillains”, the medical establishment is regularly the object of riots and escapes, locking up Batman, who refuses to kill, in a vicious circle. Worse, it’s sometimes staff members who lose their minds to monsters, like psychiatrist Harley Quinn, who ends up falling into the psychotic clutches of her patient the Joker.
Bruce Wayne’s crusade is by definition endless. As long as Gotham’s structural inequalities provide fertile ground for “evil,” Batman is doomed to put bandages on a wooden leg. The vigilante, cursed like his city, can happily count on friendly havens in which to find rest. Like Wayne Mansion, where his parents are buried and where the tireless handyman Alfred watches over the grain. Or the roof of the central police station, when his friend Jim Gordon calls him to the rescue, lighting up the dark night with a Bat-Symbol. From above, the two men scrutinize the evils of Gotham, of which they are among the last to still believe in salvation.
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