Welcome to Overthinking It, an Esquire series in which editors and writers dig into a very, very specific moment in pop culture—putting our dogged journalistic and critical skills to use in the most unnecessary of ways.
Todd Philipps’ Joker is the first Batman movie to be filmed almost entirely on location in New York City. Seeing my hometown brought to throwback, 1980s-life in the beautifully shot movie was a treat, even if its messaging was not. But, even though it was clear that the busy streets, towering apartment blocks, and yes, those steps, were all in New York, the city still felt a bit unrecognizable. Gotham is plagued by incessant violence, and almost everyone who lives there seems almost unrelentingly miserable—and that’s not New York as New Yorkers see the city.
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Gotham isn't New York, of course. It's a fictional city that serves as a backdrop for a dude in a bat mask to play with gadgetry and beat the hell out of bad guys. But Gotham is based on New York, and I hope I can be forgiven for being a little protective when it comes even to loose depictions of my home city. While watching Joker, I was reminded of a superhero movie that truly captured New York—Spider-Man: Homecoming, which found Tom Holland's Spidey saving local institutions like a bodega cat and the Staten Island ferry. It offered fuel to my theory that Gotham is New York as seen by a scared outsider who’s been fed tales of urban terror, while Spider-Man’s New York is the city as locals see it.
The use of the term “Gotham” as a nickname for New York dates back to the early 19th century, when Legend of Sleepy Hollow writer Washington Irving gave the city the nickname in his literary magazine. The word itself has been traced to the middle ages, and has its origins in the Anglo-Saxen word for “goat’s town.” Goats were seen as particularly stupid creatures, and the Gotham of English folklore was a village full of idiots—so the name is not exactly a compliment. Batman’s creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, worked out of offices in Times Square and used the city as inspiration for the Caped Crusader’s stomping grounds. "Gotham has always been a stand-in for the seedier side of New York City,” Manhattan comic book store owner Gerry Gladstone told the Associated Press in 2008.
And it’s true that the city’s seedier side was a lot more prominent in the 1980s, the decade in which Joker is set. But it’s not the only Batman-related work to portray the city as a tinderbox inhabited largely by no-hope near-animals. Batman is generally noirish, of course, and through the lens of this particular hero the underbelly of any community would loom large. But Bruce Wayne is also a libertarian at best and a fascist at worst throughout a bevy of Bat-media. Damien Walter wrote for the Guardian that in Frank Miller’s The Dark Night Returns, “Gotham is presented to us through the ugly lens of the fascist imagination: everyone in the city is guilty, and Bruce Wayne is the only man worthy to sit in judgment over them, dishing out violent retribution as he sees fit.”
The farther right your perspective, the less appealing urban life can look, and vice versa—Marx and Engels famously wrote of the “idiocy of rural life.” Donald Trump has the gaseous ability to expand to fit any room he occupies, and right now the room he fills is the entire country, so it’s hard not to hear echoes of his rhetoric in the grim depictions of Gotham. He’s described Chicago as being more dangerous than Afghanistan, called Baltimore as a place where “no human being would want to live,” and deemed Brussels a “hellhole.” This summer, he slammed Baltimore as “rat and rodent infested;” coincidentally, one of the ills plaguing Joker’s Gotham are hoards of super-rats.
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Trump is every inch the New York City native, but he savages cities as an easy shorthand for disparaging non-white communities and because politically, he doesn’t rely on urban voters. Those who live in high-density areas are more likely to hold left-wing political views, while those in low-density communities are more likely to trend towards conservatism. American urban-dwellers tend to hold less antipathy towards immigrants, and people who live in diverse communities might even be more inclined towards being helpful to others.
As Eric Levitz put it in New York Magazine, “The logic of urban life bends toward collectivism.” No wonder the stories surrounding a lone wolf like Batman tend to be ungenerous in their depiction of Gotham. “Don’t tread on me” doesn’t work in a rush hour subway car.
All the classic heroes rely on the existence of criminality, or else why don the tights in the first place, so there’s no famed comic book city that’s utopian. And the entirely superhero enterprise is itself a bit fashy. But in the Spider-Man world, which centers around a working-class kid whose most famous nemesis is a billionaire weapons manufacturer, it’s unsurprising that cramped, diverse, bustling New York often seems pretty great. The city not only depends on him, but his powers literally rely on it, as illustrated in 2017’s Homecoming, which finds Peter Parker discovering that you can’t fly from web to web in neighborhoods made up of of two-story detached colonials.
Spider-Man films tend to be loving treatments of the city—take the sequence, also in Homecoming, of Spidey going about his friendly neighborhood business in a working-class outer-borough area. He nabs a stolen bike, gives an old lady directions, and performs flips on demand for a hot-dog vendor’s entertainment. On the sweet but cornier side of things is the much-memed Spider-Man 2 scene in which Tobey Maguire’s unmasked hero, having saved a subway train from careening off an elevated track and into certain doom, slips into unconsciousness and is passed hand to hand by grateful New Yorkers, who instruct each other to handle the hero carefully and vow to protect his identity. That's the New York I know—that "we're all in this together" mentality.
Homecoming solidified its status as my favorite Spider-Man movie with its finale, which finds the hero facing off against the illuminated amusement park skyline of Coney Island. In a deeply racially and economically divided metropolis, Coney Island is somewhere you still see every type of person imaginable, all stuffing themselves with hotdogs and emerging thrilled and windswept from dodgy fairground rides. (Fun story: Once when I was seven at Coney Island on a field trip, I was accidentally punched in the face when walking near a couple having a fight. And I still love Coney Island.) I’ve eaten gallons of ice cream on that boardwalk, ridden the Wonder Wheel more times than I can count. I’ve visited Coney Island with my parents, then with friends, then on dates, and if have kids I’ll take them there, too. It’s my favorite spot in the city.
That a tough town can be a place where joy outweighs suffering is what Gotham misses about the city it’s based on. Batman’s Gotham is the city as observed from white flight cul-de-sacs; Spider-Man’s New York is my New York—harsh at times, sure but collectivist minded and essentially kind, a Gotham that deserves a friendly neighborhood hero, not a violent plutocrat. Plus, we already tried letting a billionaire save us.
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