Places You Wouldn’t Want To Live: Gotham City
The tourist brochure for Gotham must look like a travelogue of hell.
Of all the fictional cities in the film and TV world, infamous dystopian misery metropolis Gotham City must be the place where you would be most likely to meet an untimely end within a week of living there. Routinely presented as an economically destitute nightmarish urban sprawl suffering an apocalyptically bleak never-ending winter, the tourist brochure for Gotham must look like a travelogue of hell. I mean, come on, when was the last time you saw a Batman story that took place during the day?
You would think by now Gotham would have developed some kind of reputation as a putrid cesspit of vice and corruption, home to pretty much every violently-deranged psychopath in the world. These aren’t just the kind of crime bosses and career criminals who take a finger for every day you miss payment or chuck you into the river with a pair of cement boots, these are villains like The Joker, who would literally kill everyone in a couple of square kilometres just for shits and giggles. Even more financially-motivated bad guys of the Batman canon like Two Face or the Penguin tend to carry out particularly bloody campaigns of crime, racking up body counts that would make Pol Pot blush.
Every member of the Gotham populace is fair game for any number of the murders, kidnappings, robberies, or shockingly senseless acts of terrorism that seem to happen about four times a day there. You would think that if people weren’t deterred by that, they would at least be put off by the severe problem with Gotham’s law enforcement and judiciary. The police of Gotham are about as useful as a jock-strap made of knives, and the cops that aren’t dirty are bumbling idiots, always turning up late to jailbreaks or mass-murders. When a man flying around in a cape can beat you to a crime scene and do most of the police work for, then you perhaps need to consider a departmental restructure.
Not that putting a deranged psycho like Dr. Freeze or Poison Ivy into prison really makes much of a difference, because the law in Gotham is so hilariously lenient that vicious criminals are released what seems like days after they’ve begun their sentence. Probation officers in Gotham must be the most haplessly stupid in the universe, because they always seem to overlook that as soon as someone like The Riddler is released from Arkham Asylum (a psychiatric prison it could only be easier to escape from if the walls were made of Edam) he immediately recruits all of his old gang again and launches straight back in violent crime. I’m no judicial expert, but that sounds like it might be a fairly major parole violation.
Some might sleep comfortably at night knowing that the Batman, Gotham’s erstwhile defender and champion, patrols the city delivering fist-based retribution to the evil and the tyrannous. But then you have to remember that Bruce Wayne is himself a particularly troubled lunatic serving his own twisted brand of violent vigilante justice. One reason why the earlier, more comic Batman films of kooky clown auteur Tim Burton and homoerotic neon trash merchant Joel Schumacher never really resonated with me is because Batman is a character I’ve never found that funny. Here is a man who deals with the childhood trauma of witnessing his parents’ gruesome murder by learning karate, dressing up as a bat, and gliding around beating up hoodlums. That modus operandi speaks clearly of a man with deep psychological issues, and you want him to be your protector, your crusader against crime? It’s a bit like letting Hannibal Lecter run a hospital.
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