![]() The addition is made possible via computer effects and, like most of Batman Begins’ embellishments, it’s gone by the time of The Dark Knight. Situated more or less where the city’s River North neighborhood begins on the north side of the Franklin Bridge, it’s a crowded, decrepit area modeled after Hong Kong’s now-destroyed Kowloon Walled City. ![]() It looks positively cozy compared to the Narrows, a slumlike district that is Batman Begins’ most imaginative overwriting of the Chicago landscape. In real life, Chicago has earned criticism for the ways it’s dealt with the homeless population of Lower Wacker and other spots that have become shelters for the displaced. Later to be the site of The Dark Knight’s famous Batman-versus-Joker chase scene, the multilevel street is a haven for the homeless and others made desperate by the hold that organized crime has taken on the city since the death of Bruce’s parents and his subsequent disappearance. To illustrate this, she drives him through a stretch of Lower Wacker Drive. “This city is rotting,” Bruce’s childhood friend turned assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) tells him. Bruce’s dad points next to a building at the center of it all, Wayne Tower.īy the time Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham as an adult - after spending years training as a crime fighter abroad - the whole city’s taken on an ominous cast. The city is never allowed to forget the Waynes’ generosity. Riding with his parents on an elevated monorail, Bruce is told that although Gotham has been good to the Wayne family, the city has been “suffering,” and that the train they’re riding on is part of a Wayne-spearheaded effort to give the people new, affordable public transportation. Batman Begins offers its first look at downtown Gotham in flashback. It took some experimenting, and time spent shaking off an older approach, to get there. On camera, it’s a sleek, modern cityscape barely containing the chaos threatening to bring it down, one that looks a lot like the city I’ve called home since 2001, one I’ve watched grow and change in ways both inspiring and alarming as it’s struggled to address its underlying imbalances and inequities. However counterintuitively, Chicago, subtly altered, is the right Gotham for Nolan’s Batman. The Dark Knight features the least-disguised superhero metropolis since, well, Metropolis in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman, which let Superman fly through a city filled with recognizable New York landmarks. Instead of reshaping the city in Batman’s image, he let it be itself. He also used Chicago in strikingly different ways, rethinking his approach to Gotham between the two films and breaking with a tradition that dates back to the dark, art deco-inspired imagery of Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns. It’s easy to make the imaginative leap from Chicago to Gotham thanks to director Christopher Nolan, who employed the Midwestern city as a stand-in for Batman’s hometown in both the 2005 film Batman Begins and its 2008 sequel The Dark Knight. And the other cars? They better stay out of my way. ![]() I’m in pursuit and single-mindedly focused. But in my mind I’m on Gotham City’s Lower Fifth in Batman’s Tumbler, taking the turns at an alarming speed. I’m driving a red Prius on Chicago’s Lower Wacker Drive, carefully observing the speed limit and keeping a mindful distance from the other vehicles. This is the retrospective you deserve and the one you need right now. Why so serious? Because Christopher Nolan’s Bat-sequel gave us lots to talk about. On the occasion of The Dark Knight ’s 10th anniversary, Polygon is spending the week investigating the comic-book blockbuster’s legacy.
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