Gotham: The Best Reboot of Any Comic Book Franchise

I have a terrible late night compulsion:  binge-watching television shows.  This is made worse because, like the Federal Government, I regulate myself by cutting off cable like the flow of cocaine across the Mexican border.  And like a common criminal with a switchblade and a ski mask, I find ways to get around the policies that keep the streets of my mind clean.

Gotham is my latest obsession—a television series that reprises Batman, telling an origin story of the making of a young Bruce Wayne.  In this world, the young man is still a lump of clay, searching for a way to triage the hurt of his parent’s alleyway execution-robbery in the mean streets of Gotham City.

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There have been other shows that have covered similar ground.  Superman has his Smallville and it is nothing more than an opportunity to show some pretty-boy actor-model with his shirt off as often as possible.  And this is the limitation of these kinds of shows, which feel like tribute concerts performed by a cover band—you’re into it because you’re into the band but, really, there is no originality and you are left feeling empty inside even if you are among the thousands in the audience lifting your lighter into the air.

What distinguishes Gotham is the fact that the focus is less on Bruce Wayne and more on the backstories of all the arch-villains—arch-villains that have yet to become arch-villains–that will some day form a part of the classic Batman pantheon.  There is Poison Ivy, a young girl whose father is framed for murder.  There is Cat Girl, a street urchin with a rebellious streak and acrobatic acumen.  There is the Riddler, a socially inept lab technician in the crime unit of Gotham P.D. driven to madness by his inability to get laid.

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There are many more—too many to list.  Some of them appear casually without fanfare and you have to pause the screen and scroll backwards when you realize that this nobody will become somebody some day.  You see, these characters have yet to take up their fantastical names and their flashy costumes and this—this is the genius of the show:  Gotham catches these characters at an early stage in their development and turns them from mere caricatures to fully rounded antiheros with motivations that move beyond good and evil.

The best of these characters is Penguin, whom I never really cared for, mainly because I just didn’t understand what his special power and what his particular brand of viciousness was.  I first was introduced to Penguin in the television Batman series when he was already a dandy in a top hat with henchmen.  There he was a comedic character bent on mayhem—one of many characters who already had a strong following and so needed very little explanation as to why’s and wherefore’s.

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But Penguin is now the star villain of the show with a mommy complex—an immigrant who Anglicizes his vaguely Eastern European name and attempts to compensate for his outsider status by dressing in the not-quite-right-hyper-formality of the late Victorian era:  silk ties that are better referred to as cravats and gentlemanly accoutrements that confer the dignity of a station to one who has slim to none.

Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, AKA Penguin, is the real reason I am continuing to watch now that the feverish bingewatching has given way to the rhythyms of weekly expectation.  He is played by Robin Taylor, a nice Midwesterner from Iowa, who has somehow found that sweet spot between villainous and human.  Cobblepot is a nobody who rose through the ranks of Gotham’s organized crime by being a kiss-up and toady.  The umbrella that is his trademark is one that he holds for his bosses—one that he makes into his very own.  Cobblepot is a turn-coat whose status as an underling has allowed him to intuitively understand the vanities and the weaknesses, the lusts and the pridefulness that motivate his enemy-friends…and then he turns these points of weakness against them like the finely honed pen knife that he keeps in his breast pocket.

I was so amazed by the development of the Penguin character and the execution of his persona by Robin Taylor, the gifted young actor who plays him, that I decided to watch Tim Burton’s second installation of the cinematic Batman series, which features the actor Danny DeVito in that role.  And let me just say that it was nothing.  I could hardly stay awake.  And this has everything to do with genre:  DeVito’s Penguin is a figure of allegory—a purely symbolic monster meant to signal all the wrongness in the world.  But allegory does not have the kind of humanity and depth that makes for deep identification.

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The true star—the Good Guy—is not the young Bruce Wayne but, in fact, the yet-to-be Commissioner Gordon, an idealistic young detective.  He is brash and naïve and fit as a fiddle in his straight-laced body-hugging suits.  And Penguin and he are not the oil-and-vinegar of the common hero-villain pairing.  Rather, Penguin appears to have a latent homosexual attraction to the young Gordon and fawns over him, manipulates him.  He works to help the detective get what he needs and they have still yet to make a decisive break.

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The feel of the television show channels the spirit of the detective novel—that feeling of the hardboiled, the noir.  And the world of the precinct is the brain center of the story—a world of crooked cops on the take and politicians with their hands in the cookie jar.  And this is one of the genius flourishes of this iteration of the Batman franchise, mainly because Batman returns to that world that we have forgotten first breathed life into him.  Above all else, Batman when it first appeared was deeply indebted to the pulp world of the Detective genre.

Batman first made his appearance in Detective Comics #27.  And ultimately what first moved the narrative was a crime story—an unsolved mystery.  Batman is a narrative of thwarted ratiocination that moves into the netherworld of revenge.

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In this second season, the major thrust of the story arrives in the form of a villain who, for all appearances, is a good guy.  Galivan—whose name plays with the idea of a bird of prey (Gavilan) and a knight in shining armor (Galan)—is a billionaire real estate developer who is thrust into the spotlight when he returns to Gotham and decides to run for mayor.  He has ulterior motives:  he wants to gentrify the city, to raze the old buildings of Gotham and build shiny glass towers.  He also wants to settle an ancient family feud against Bruce Wayne whose family destroyed his own, mutilating his ancestor, erasing his name from the history books and banishing his progeny from the city.

So the rising action of the narrative is a twist of genius because Batman himself is put into a position of profound powerlessness that stands in counterpoint to his established role in the movies as a caped crusader ridding the streets of ski-mask criminals.  Bruce Wayne appears less like a hero and more like a damsel in distress—a figure that must be saved.  He is the one stereotypical figure in the entire narrative.  And this is the amazingness of the show—one that has kept me up late into the night.  You see:  in relegating the traditional hero to this position, Gotham allows all the anti-heroes to suddenly achieve the flicker of light and shadow that makes them jump into high relief when they ambush you in the alleyway of your dreams.

2 thoughts on “Gotham: The Best Reboot of Any Comic Book Franchise

  1. I’ll admit, Khanh, that I’ve not (yet) watched Gotham. But I truly do appreciate the originality in a show that explores all of these people as they might have been before they became the characters we’ve come to know. That approach can add to the depth of a character, and can allow the writer some real flexibility. I respect the innovation. And, although I’m not a late-night person as a rule, I know all about binge-watching…

    • True enough, Margot–origin stories are compelling whether they are in a television show or just some National Enquirer article. Yet so many people just flub it, no? On TV, I have yet to see any of the comic book franchises move beyond the realm of fan fiction. Maybe that has to do with all the contractual restraints–restraints that hem you in–and hardly give you space to breathe.

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