Gotham City looks a lot like New York all of a sudden.
In Batman, which hits theaters today, citizens are attending a political rally in Gotham Square Garden, and the Gotham Gazette has been redesigned to mimic your morning New York Post. Thank you, Warner Bros. We look forward to our share of the cash receipts.
It’s all sweet enough. We cannot allow Chicago to be in the spotlight. However, the strongest – and most oppressive – resemblance is in a series of Gotham’s known crimes.
In an early scene from the grim film, a gang of painted faces surrounds an Asian man on a subway platform and is about to beat him for no apparent reason. Then Batman intervenes. Such a moment would have been easier on the stomach in 2012, when we were all trying to get into Soho House, carrying Magnolia cupcakes in our Strand bags. When urban violence on screen feels like a world away. When New York was the safest big city in America.
No longer. These days, such horrific acts appear in the evening news almost every night. Subway attacks and violent crimes against Asians in New York have become an unbearably regular part of city life in recent years. It is disturbing and terrifying.
Batman is looking at Gotham City, which in “Batman” is exactly the model of New York. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy of Everett C
The crimes shown in “Batman” will be depressingly familiar to New Yorkers. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy of Everett C
Going back to the bad old days of the 1970s, people are so afraid to take the train right now that long-avoided platform barriers will be installed at Times Square on Line 7 to prevent pointless collisions. Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams has appointed more cops to the MTA and has begun efforts to remove homeless scooters from the huge transit system.
Fine. But I don’t want to think about all this during a movie about a billionaire who dresses in a tight-fitting bat suit and has a British butler named Alfred.
Still, so much of Batman could have been told by news anchor Pat Kiernan. The characters nervously look over their shoulders at night on streets like New York, for fear of being attacked, as everyone here is doing now. Gotham gang members mark private property with graffiti. (This nonsense returned to the city in the summer of 2020 and is still happening. My apartment building was marked two weeks ago.) There are shootings at a medium-looking Penguin-run nightclub like the one that happened on Flatbush Avenue last month.
The Batman includes scenes of violence at a medium-looking nightclub, unlike in Brooklyn, where two people were shot dead in February.
Many critics, myself included, have called it the darkest Batman movie ever – even more so than The Dark Knight, which restructured the Joker as a domestic terrorist. Why does Hollywood have to continue down this black hole of terrible misery?
The critical and commercial success of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar in 2009, and the victory for Joaquin Phoenix’s Best Actor for the 2019 Joker, have fooled filmmakers into thinking that these superhero movies are just as important as politics and legislation. They think, “Who needs documentaries and on-site news reports about crime and social inequality when I’m making a fictional movie with a villain who tells riddles?”
They see the escape as plebeian and immature. They believe that what the audience wants is less important than their own ego.
I’m sorry, guys – the audience obviously wants fun. Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is as heavy as a Nerf pistol and less than three hours long as Batman, grossed $ 1.85 billion worldwide during the pandemic. Of course there is! The film dares to make viewers feel good.
Walking around the city at night has been annoying lately. When I arrive at the movie at 20:00 and sit down, I want what is on the screen to help me forget about what is right in front of the door, because there is no masked billionaire here to protect us.
Mike Bloomberg does not have the strength of the upper body.