This week, FOX premiered their new Batman derived TV series GOTHAM, focusing on Detective Jim Gordon’s arrival to the corrupt (and completely non-functional, given Batman’s entire 75 year history of Gotham Police failing to do their jobs) Gotham Police Department. This show joins the countless other series on TV focusing on the drama of being a police officer, and providing viewers with stories about what crime looks like, and more importantly giving faces to the heroes and the criminals.
As described in a 2008 study published by Travis L. Dixon, which focused on television news stories specifically, despite declining numbers, crime continues to be a concern for Americans due to overrepresentation of crime stories in news reporting. Furthermore, overrepresentation of race, as in disproportionate reporting on African Americans as perpetrators with white people in positive roles or as victims, causes increased anti-African American sentiments when it comes to crime and punishment of African American perpetrators. To simplify, the skewed representation of people of color as perpetrators and whites as victims or heroes starts to prime viewers to understand people of color as a threat while they begin to sympathize more with whites, and will take the side of the whites in favor of harsher punishments for people of color.
The news latches on to these stories in order to entertain their viewers, and they begin to form master narratives out of crime that feature whites as victims to perpetrators of color. This kind of crime story needs to be created in order to compete with the alternative of cop and crime drama shows, many which feature the same types of priming but in a more stylized manner. Many of these shows and news reports activate a schema that exists inside of viewer’s minds, or preconceived ideas about a “type” of person being shown, so that the viewer can easily and readily identify who is the criminal. The viewer needs to differentiate between good and bad so that they can more easily be entertained.
The reason GOTHAM intrigues me is that in a way it breaks the formula of association with bad as black and good as white. There still is a focus on two male cop protagonists as the good guys, but the criminals they face, as they have always predominately been in the Batman mythos, are other white folks. There are white victims (like um, Batman’s parents, who I have now seen murdered so many times in so many mediums that I’m just kind of desensitized to Batman’s entire purpose of existence), but the people committing the crimes are also white, and break the typical form set by the media of a hyper aggressive black male going after the poor defenseless whites.
Now there are a few things that I am still trying to put together, one of which is the role of Jada Pinkett-Smith as Fish Mooney, who was created specifically for this show outside of the comic source material. Mooney is an African-American character who does not fit into any major “types” for African American women. However, what is problematic is that she fits perfectly into the “Dragon Woman” stereotype usually assigned to Asian American women characters.
The Dragon Woman is mysterious, she’s deceptive, she’s in a position of power which she executes in a brutal fashion, and she’s shady as hell. Mooney fits all of these descriptions, and for Christ’s sake, her lair is in Gotham’s China Town. So although GOTHAM breaks form so far by representing crimes in a non-typical manner, it is partially due to the fact that there are just not many black actors cast, and the biggest one that is cast is being characterized in a fashion usually reserved for Asian women. This could be positive in the way that applying a stereotype to someone it doesn’t apply to normally diversifies representation by showing no one group or people fit into that type, which in this instance is the Dragon Woman Type. It could also still be just as negative by portraying a woman of color in power as villainous and shifty, as well as continuing to reinforce the elements of the stereotype for further production.
The other thing that caught my attention was the inclusion of Renee Montoya, a fan favorite from the comics, the only major person of color besides Mooney, and an openly gay character. As a reader of the comics I knew about her sexual orientation and wondered if they would directly reference her as Lesbian, in the first episode nonetheless. SPOILER ALERT! I was disappointed that when her sexuality was written into the show, it was written in a way that her dialogue with the male protagonist’s fiancé about their past gay relationship turned her sexual orientation into something mysterious and shameful. The show managed to use Montoya’s sexual orientation as just another device to assist in creating the mysterious crime Noir atmosphere that they are attempting to create. Something like that begins to prime viewers to view homosexuality, or bisexuality in the case of future Mrs. Gordon, as illegitimate. It becomes just another mysterious element of a character’s past as opposed to a sincere identity that can function within the hetero-normative hegemony of the rest of the show.
This is all only after the first episode, so it will be interesting to see what direction the show takes what was introduced here, but they have an opportunity to showcase a different kind of crime paradigm. Instead of showing the person of color vs. white victims that viewers are all too familiar with, there is an opportunity to diversify the face of crime in Gotham. This also means though that they cannot keep showing white perpetrators as poor whites, or as just insane and misunderstood. With origin stories for Batman’s Rogues Galery underway, the path of white folk who aren’t really criminals, just misunderstood, or financially poor white people who are just as much of a problem as other disenfranchised groups, could easily be followed. Gotham can break the mold that primes audiences to see certain types as perps and certain types as victims, but they have a long road ahead of them still.
You can watch GOTHAM for yourself here.
The Pictures Make My Head Hurt 