Film talk
Is Chicago Gotham?
Christian Bale’s Batman is perched atop a skyscraper, looking over a dark and foggy skyline pierced by glittering lights, preparing for a dive to the gritty streets below.
When he alights, he won’t find the gargoyle-infested, bricks-and-mortar city that Washington Irving first coined “Gotham.” He won’t battle the Joker on wet cobblestones, or loom in the shadows of a dominant spire that evokes the Empire State building.
Heath Ledger isn’t the only scene-stealer in “The Dark Knight.” In the newest incarnation of the movie franchise, the mythical Gotham City — long assumed to be an allegorical Big Apple — is unmistakably based on Chicago.
Not that a move to the Midwest is such a stretch. Neal Adams, who has illustrated Batman for DC Comics since the 1970s, says he’s always thought of Chicago, with its 1940s mobster history and miles of dark alleys, as the basis for Gotham City.
“Chicago has had a reputation for a certain kind of criminality,” said Adams, who lives in New York. “Batman is in this kind of corrupt city and trying to turn it back into a better place. One of the things about Chicago is Chicago has alleys (which are virtually nonexistent in New York). Back alleys, that’s where Batman fights all the bad guys.”
But Chicago’s back-of-the-building ethos isn’t the only reason the “Dark Knight” filmmakers chose to focus on Chicago’s style.
“I think the architecture of the city is really brilliant, fantastic,” director Christopher Nolan said. “That gave us an incredible amount of variety that’s used as the background for the film.”
Nolan, who once lived in Chicago, spent three weeks there shooting “Batman Begins.” For “The Dark Knight,” it was three months.
Chicago’s modern feel lent itself well to Gotham City, said James McAllister, key location manager for “The Dark Knight.”
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