Batmans Gotham City is a dystopian mirror image of New York. In both Frank Millers comic book and the earlier films of Tim Burton, Gotham is appropriately Gothic; a steaming, creaking metropolis full of dead- tech. It is a retro-futurist nightmare, an outlandish conflation of Hugh Ferris meets Alien.
So what to make of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which situates Batman explicitly in the contemporary city? The opening shots swoop through Gotham's towers, but they are familiar corporate skyscrapers, less extraordinary than the ones currently going up in the Middle East.
In both The Dark Knight and Nolan's earlier film Batman Begins, there are still elements of the Gothic lurking in Batman's cyber punk style costume or his monstrous Bat Mobile. And, with his cracking and peeling makeup, The Joker looks like a recently dug up version of The Cures Robert Smith. But this is where the visual similarities with recent incarnations end.
According to DC comics' fictional narrative of Gotham, the city is redesigned at one stage by Superman villain Lex Luther. Luther, showing a Modernist streak when it comes to urban planning, replaced the Art Nouveou and Art Deco skyscrapers with glass and steel ones. It is this Gotham that is evoked in the Dark Knight. In fact, Nolan's Gotham City is a digitally enhanced Chicago and not New York at all.
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.
