Representations of New York City in the Superhero Genre (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1.0, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language: English, abstract: This paper attempts to provide a scholarly analysis of the discussion triggered by Frank Miller's comment that "Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night." The paper aims to analyze the representation of Gotham City in Nolan's "The Dark Knight" trilogy and the representation of Metropolis as fictional version of New York City in selected episodes of the television series "Smallville." Starting from a disambiguation of the respective city's name, it continues with an analysis of the resulting relation of factual and imagined place. In the following,the author discusses the possibility of understanding the cities, both Gotham City and Metropolis, as characters within the framework of the respective superhero narrative. To do so, three different theories of space and spatial practices are being introduced: Michel Foucault's "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" (1984), Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1991), and Michel de Certeau's The Practices of Everyday Life (1984). These theories and their respective approaches to space, as contradictory as they might seem, open up various ways to discuss the city as character.