imaginary places

by Match

In my mind Gotham City and Metropolis are both New York City. I always knew that in the DC Comics universe they were separate places, but I held onto the idea that at least they were very close together. Gotham could be New York, Metropolis could be Philadelphia, maybe Boston. At age twelve my sense of geography was less than exact.

Smallville confused me. If it's a short drive from a small town in Kansas, where does that leave Metropolis? Kansas City? St. Louis? Chicago? My brain still wants to map fake cities over real terrain, but I'm trapped in an unworkable, implausible landscape.

Here's how it is: like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon and Glastonbury, or Neil Gaiman's London and London Below, which one you arrive at depends on who you are and how you travel. Same place, same time, different frequencies. They're both New York City because hey, there's room. Metropolis is skating at Rockefeller Center, the Newtonian choreography of the Rockettes, Andy Warhol's silkscreened color blocks. It's "Fame" and the City of Tomorrow, and when hopeful girls step off the Greyhound maybe they don't make it big or bright, but they make enough. Maybe they find what they needed all along: artist friends, a studio apartment. Window boxes in summer. The stone lions flanking the steps of the Met.

Sometimes, though, the same girls step off the Greyhound and fall into Gotham. Metropolis might be the Great White Way, but Gotham City is the stage door, the dry and pitted skin of the chorus dancer. It's Weegee and the Ruth Snyder case, CBGB's, mutant alligators loose in the sewers. High-priced call girls in Metropolis fall off and fall into Gotham's Times Square whores, all smeared lipstick and runs in their stockings. Here, streetwalkers pick up a mic and become punk rockers, MCs, groupie superstars. High rollers snort cocaine in the VIP room of the Copa while the CIA peddles crack in Brooklyn.

Every city creates the hero it needs. Superman is Metropolis' cosmic boy scout overachiever. He swoops down from clear skies to pluck us from floods and collapsing buildings. He exists to save us from acts the world commits upon us. In Gotham, Batman prowls earthbound by night. He takes down the crime lords and gangsters, but every heart is vulnerable to darkness. He will never be able to save us from ourselves.

We dream of Metropolis, but wake in the night thinking of Gotham and don't sleep again for a long time.