ABSTRACT

David Gersten offers a close reading of Morrison's 2004 film Gotham and speculates on the idea of the modern city as a living zoetrope, one that combines film and architecture into a lived experience that may signal a shift in the nature of human nature.

New York City exists in a continuous state of change. At every given instant, at every given moment, the city gives voice to our transformations. In Gotham, Morrison's deep meditation on this city, these voices are made present in the sphere of life, their shadows are captured and cast into the lived space of our shared stories: the metropolis imagines itself out of the human, and the human bears, is born of, and is borne by the city.

KEYWORDS

Walter Benjamin, Louis Lumière, Elisha Otis, ghosts

There are 80 years between the construction of the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the construction of the World Trade Center Towers (1969) – one lifetime. This period is immediately preceded by the emergence of photography (Louis Daguerre, 1839) and its evolution into film (Louis Lumière, 1895). Today, we are 46 years from the construction of the World Trade Towers, and they have been gone for fifteen years, ghosts, halfway through a half-life(time).

William Burroughs, in his short book, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, tells a wonderful story about frogs. He describes how frogs started out living in the water with gills rather than lungs; they could not survive outside water, but some rare frogs had gills that, for short moments, could serve as lungs. In times of drought, these frogs could make short runs out onto land to search for other sources of water. Through natural selection, these frogs survived and, after many trips onto land, their gills transformed. They grew into lungs and the frogs ultimately moved onto land. So the frog, searching for water, found land.

Recently, I read a few stories about two gigantic black holes that scientists believe are about to collide in deep space. These black holes are so enormous that the explosion resulting from their collision was described as releasing an unfathomable force, one that will blow entire galaxies away, like leaves being blown off a tree during a hurricane. The two black holes are only one ‘light week’ apart from each other, making scientists believe that their collision is imminent.