You're certainly not an idiot (nor did anyone call you one), but you can be very smug towards people who disagree with you sometimes, and often for no justifiable reason, like now. You often seem to stake out an unpopular opinion (which is fine) but then look down on any one who questions your reasoning, even if they do so politely.
That's both very kind and very fair of you. While I didn't intend to go on the attack, I did feel that the use of a "
" smilie right after rebutting a point of mine was akin to an insult. Anyhow, those are all interesting examples you provided, but I stand by my subjective opinion about Nolan's Gotham being mundane. In that sense,
TDK was, IMHO, another improvement by providing more daytime scenes and all but ditching the wildly anachronistic 21st-Century Narrows. And without the monorail and near-infinite skyline shots, it just felt more grounded overall. Which wouldn't be my preferred direction, but it's better than a muddle.
Grant Morrison said this about his preferred look for Gotham two years ago:
I also wanted to show a healthier Gotham City too. That whole Son-of-Sam, Rorschach-narration - 'This city is an open sewer where the rats feed on the broken dreams and filth of umm...other rats...where sneering, gnawing urban predators...blah blah...' - has become clichéd, tired and unconvincing. If Gotham was so bloody awful, no-one normal would live there and there'd be no-one to protect from criminals. If Gotham really was an open sewer of crime and corruption, every story set there would serve to demonstrate the complete and utter failure of Batman's mission, which isn't really the message we want to send, is it? You've got Batman and all his allies as well as Commissioner Gordon and the city still exudes a vile miasma of darkness and death? I can't buy that. It's simply not realistic and flies in the face of in-story logic (and you know I like my comics realistic!) so my artists and I have taken a different tack and we want to show the cool, vibrant side of Gotham, the energy and excitement that would draw people to live and visit there.
Gotham needs as many faces as Batman - it should be the loudest, sexiest, jazziest city on Earth. It has the best restaurants, the best theaters, the best art, the best criminals, the best crimefighters etc etc. People put up with the weird crime for the sheer buzz.
Nolan's Gotham with the mix of old and modern Chicago and London is a hybrid of sorts between old and new depictions of Gotham in the comics and films/tv, which was Nolan's intent.
A fascinating quote; thanks for digging it up!
Allow me to disagree, however, with this bit:
If Gotham was so bloody awful, no-one normal would live there and there'd be no-one to protect from criminals. If Gotham really was an open sewer of crime and corruption, every story set there would serve to demonstrate the complete and utter failure of Batman's mission, which isn't really the message we want to send, is it?
I wholeheartedly agree with his assertion that "if Gotham was so bloody awful, no-one normal would live there"... but he then implies that you can remove the anachronistic/hyperbolic infested city aspect without Batman becoming anachronistic also... and that I just don't buy. Has anyone ever suggested making a murky, gritty and oppressive Metropolis? If not, why make a healthy Gotham? To do a Superman-lite, I guess, and maybe there's value in that... but the Gotham Morrison describes could easily be imagined as
TDK's Gotham - except for everyone carping about how relentlessly corrupt the police, gangs and villains are. As much as I enjoy
TDK, and I do, I
do have to employ a great deal of suspension of disbelief to stomach its take on a modern large American city with a huge crime problem (apart from
The Wire-like crude gang warfare of drug-pushing minorities). To me, there's just something dishonest, and a little sleazy, in trying to imbue contemporary resonance where none really exists. Either take on the savage and real inequalities of addictive drug prohibition, poor to no vocational education/opportunities for disadvantaged communities and the conflicting cultural and civic pressures of gentrification, or just go all-out on the fantasy aspect and give us the Rorschach Gotham.
