Gotham Is a Villain
When your last, best hope is a guy in body armor and a cape, you’re probably not making the list of Top Ten Cities to Live In.
I apologize for not being able to source art in this article. This stuff gets shared a lot.
It’s easy to make fun of Batman.
Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes fun of Batman better than almost anyone.
It’s easy to make fun of most comic book characters, generally because they were first written for children and then adapted for adults. At their heart, they are a bit silly: larger-than-life heroes in funny costumes fighting crime that is both more exciting and less dangerous than actual crime. The moment we take them seriously is the moment we start wanting to knock them down a peg.
But Batman is especially easy to mock. It’s probably because he’s a billionaire, and the idea of a billionaire - a man who embodies an ultra-powerful concentration of wealth - turning himself into a one-man punching machine is funny to begin with. When you add in the suspension of disbelief needed to imagine an actual billionaire dedicating his life to fighting injustice, Batman is a ready-made joke. As Randall Monroe puts it, “A man dressed as a bat has no limits.”
More than joke, Batman is social commentary. The billionaire-playboy-vigilante trope falls apart immediately in the real world, as countless cartoonists have pointed out. The social impossibility of Batman outweighs the practical and physical impossibility of Batman (although that’s still pretty funny - see smbc-comics.com, as always.)
Sarah Gailey, always brilliant, outdoes themself in their essay, City of Villains: Why I Don’t Trust Batman:
Why is this billionaire playboy still a billionaire? It doesn’t seem right to you. Doesn’t seem fair. He funded your orphanage… but when you think about it, it’s pretty weird that the city needs such a large orphanage. You think about the half-the-time-broke-down trolley. You think about the street gangs that roam the city. You think about the twenty-nine times your cousin Lisette has been mugged. You think about your old coworker, sewing underpants in prison.
You start to hate the billionaire playboy.
In the real world, Batman wouldn’t be a good guy. But we need him to be a good guy.
Look, I love Batman. I think most of us love Batman. At his heart, Batman is a human being who has everything - health, wealth, brains, status - and instead of wasting that privilege, he decides to turn it into an engine for fighting evil. That’s the thought experiment and the appeal. What could you do if you had everything? What could you do if you had no limits, and also dressed as a bat?
I want to believe that I would confront evil head-on. That’s the appeal: if I had it all, I could do more good, and not just by eating organic eggs and funding research into clean energy. (That second one was actually a plot point in Batman Returns that didn’t age well.) I can’t argue that I SHOULD spend my billions on souped-up cars and body armor, but it would be FUN (and you can find what it would cost you in Darren Hudson Hick’s essay The Cost of Being Batman in Batman Unauthorized.)
I can’t be Batman in the real world, for numerous reasons. He can’t exist here. But there’s someplace he can, and that place is Gotham City.
Gotham City from, I believe, the 1993 animated movie Mask of the Phantasm. It’s got a real Depression-era vibe, which in 1993 isn’t totally off the mark.
For Batman to be a hero, we need a villain that only Batman can fight. Gotham is that villain.
It’s tempting to say that all Batman needs to exist is the Joker, but I don’t buy it. For one thing, weak as my Batman lore is, I don’t think he sprung into being complete with a rogue’s gallery of villains. Batman was born from an everyday robbery gone wrong (depending on your canon). His black cloak and batarangs are designed to take down gangsters, not Solomon Grundy. Batman doesn’t need supervillains to be Batman; a gunless hero who takes down gunmen is more than enough heroism.
If I am being frank, I feel that a fully functional modern police team probably COULD take down most Batman villains. I don’t think a guy with an ice-gun could hold off SWAT in the long run. I don’t think a clown-themed psychopath would fare any better than the Unibomber once the Feds got involved. Batman’s villains have the same problem that Batman has: the real world doesn’t need them. A botched COVID response is more deadly than a hundred doses of Joker Venom (tm).
We may not need Batman, but Gotham does.
I can’t source this comic panel, but unlike NYC, Gotham is a) patrolled by police blimps, and b) on fire.
All of the problems with Batman go away in Gotham City. Most of us see Gotham as basically New York City, but that’s wrong. New York has problems, but Gotham? Gotham is broken in every way.
Police? The police in Gotham are corrupt, incompetent, or both. It’s a city with One Good Cop, and I am pretty sure he is alive only because Batman keeps him that way. In Gotham City, the cops can’t help you. Only Batman can.
Infrastructure? Gotham is falling apart. The Wayne family TRIED to use their billions on the city - in Batman Begins, the monorail is a cheap public transit system that New York can only dream of. In every version of the Batverse, Bruce Wayne and fam are philanthropists who put real-world rich people to shame (citation needed). But it’s not enough. Gotham is a failed state, and a billion dollars won’t fix it.
Health system? The Gotham mental health system is a revolving door, running their largest facility like a prison. It doesn’t turn mental illness into health: it turns pathology into super-villainy. It’s so bad that it even turns psychiatrists into super-villains. (Admittedly, the real-world mental health system in the US isn’t much better.)
The fantasy of Gotham is that it cannot be fixed by money or policy or community. It can only be fixed by punching.
Gotham City isn’t just a villain. It’s a supervillain, and it needs a superhero.
Here’s my definition of a supervillain: a criminal who cannot be stopped by normal law enforcement. Supervillains can only be stopped by superheroes. By that criteria, Gotham is a supervillain. Its super-power is human misery and despair. It’s a villain that spawns supervillains the way Minecraft spawns mobs.
I doubt I am the first to say this (citation needed), but Gotham’s supervillains are aspects of the city itself. Joker is the senseless violence and chaos of a city that turns its citizens against each other. Penguin is weaponized wealth, the rich eating the poor. Two-Face is justice replaced with the flip of a coin. Scarecrow is fear. Poison Ivy is the only speck of greenery in a city of concrete and smog, and she’s trying to kill you.
A supervillain needs a superhero, and Gotham needs Batman. The one can’t exist without the other, and that’s a good thing. We don’t live in Gotham, and that absolves us of trying to be Batman in a world that needs a better solution. Gotham as a supervillain helps us to imagine that New York (and Newark, and Chicago, and Los Angeles…) don’t HAVE to be villains. We can imagine them as something better.