Chicago is the city of the mob and of Mies Van Der Rohe, a potent mix of the clean cut and the corrupt. In the Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne lives in a penthouse apartment rather than the gothic Wayne Manor, and there is no Bat Cave. Instead, Batman works out of a fabulous space that with its vast backlit suspended ceiling and concrete walls is a cross between a corporate office and a contemporary art gallery.
The architecture throughout is clean-cut and corporate. The city may not be exactly friendly, but it is familiar, no longer anything to be scared of. What does have the capacity to scare us though is that this carefully ordered world might succumb to anarchy. Far from representing the city itself as chaotic, The Dark Knight plays on our fear that chaos could come to visit. And in this sense the film can be seen as either hopelessly reactionary, preaching a Bush era fear of so-called terrorist states, or as something more complex and ambiguous.
In The Dark Knight, it is the ordinariness of Gotham City that is meant to terrify us. Here, Gotham represents a well ordered city that could easily be reduced to smouldering rubble. The city in the Dark Knight may look familiar but the gothic darkness hasn't vanished. It is there in the shadows, an endlessly possible flip side to the shiny optimism of Modernity. This doubling occurs throughout the film: in the character of Harvey Dent, Gotham's White Knight and in the brilliant scene where two boats - one full of innocent civilians and one full of criminals - have to choose whether to destroy each other.
The film suggests that it is impossible to design out darkness. It is a product of our own desire, and a nightmare lurking in the same places that also give us comfort. It is not an alternative world so much as the dark side of our affluent lives.
They just didn't show The Narrows.
