CHICAGO — For years James Gordon patrolled this cesspool we call a city.
And then he moved to Gotham.
Jim Gordon, native of Chicago, resident of Gotham, longtime confidant of Batman, noir construct, huddled beneath a trench coat and bushy mustache, is around 45 years old. Or maybe 125 years old. Honestly, it’s hard to tell. According to the DC Database wiki, the man is 166 pounds and five-feet-eight-inches tall, but everything else about him has been mutable for decades. Sometimes he wears a snow-white flattop, and sometimes he’s a redhead. Sometimes he’s been married twice, and sometimes he’s been married three times. He’s been murdered several times. He was Batman for a short time. He has kids — one of whom is Batgirl, and the other of whom is a supervillain and psychopath.
Sometimes Jim Gordon is the police commissioner, sometimes he’s a beat cop. In the new movie “The Batman,” he’s a lieutenant in the Gotham Police Department. He’s played by Jeffrey Wright — the first time James Gordon has been Black. But next week? Who knows anymore? To put it mildly, superhero canons are fluid. Plus, there are a lot of character actors in the world. Jim Gordon has been embodied by Gary Oldman and voiced by Steppenwolf’s Gary Cole. He’s been played by Lyle Talbot (in 1940s movie serials) and Pat Hingle (in Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher blockbusters), and in countless live-action and animated versions, by J.K. Simmons and Ted Knight, Bryan Cranston, Hector Elizondo and Tom Kenny (best known as the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants).
There are, though, two lines on Jim Gordon’s resume that rarely change.
He was a former cop in the Chicago Police Department. He was so exhausted and endangered by the intractable corruption of Illinois, he left for a safer big city — Gotham.
He’s also the long-running supporting character in the 83-year-old history of Batman.
Commissioner Gordon predates the Joker and Robin by a year. In fact, in the first panel of the very first Batman comic book (“Detective Comics,” issue number 37, 1939), we find Gordon “entertaining his young socialite friend Bruce Wayne” in his home. He’s a portrait of refinement, a touch Errol Flynn-esque, smoking a cigarette and wearing a pencil-thin mustache, complaining that “this fellow they call ‘the Bat-Man’ puzzles me!”
And so, Jim Gordon, not unlike Lois Lane before him (introduced a year earlier), would go on to spend decades as somehow both the savviest professional in town and somewhat uncertain about the secret identity of a superhero constantly in his presence.
But that would change, too.
Jim Gordon was co-created by the original Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger, though who contributed what to the Bat-verse would be a prickly subject for decades. (DC Comics didn’t formally acknowledge Finger as the co-creator of Batman and Gordon and other characters until 2015.) Gordon was never intended as a minor foil. To the casual fan, he’s that guy who flicks on the Bat Signal and pines from a rooftop; in the 1960s TV series, he was the guy who answered the Bat Phone. But across nearly a century of history, he’s also the closest thing that Batman has to a supervisor, and at least in the comic books, the roots of the complicated, sometimes distrustful, generally codependent relationship between Commissioner Gordon and Batman would converge in Chicago. Specifically, in Frank Miller’s canon-shaping “Batman: Year One” books in the 1980s, later fleshed out in a brief prequel series in the 1990s, “Gordon of Gotham.”
Depending who’s telling his story, Gordon was a U.S. Marine, or broadly “special forces”; either way, he knows hand-to-hand combat. He fought in World War I. And Vietnam. After the war, he returned to Chicago and joined the CPD. For acts of selfless bravery, he became a local celebrity. He earned a reputation for incorruptibility, though among less moral colleagues, he was a Serpico-sized headache. While other cops were going to a bar in the Loop called the Nightstick (seriously), he was working. He exposed corruption in the CPD, but couldn’t keep his big fat mouth shut: He went after Chicago City Council, and he found a little too much dirt. His CPD superiors gave him an option:
Look Jim, Gotham is so nice this time of year — why not just transfer there?
And so, once in Gotham, the fates of Jim Gordan and Batman were forever twined.
You might even argue that Jim Gordon became to Batman what Nick Carraway is to Jay Gatsby, a middle-class observer of a dangerous man of vast wealth. You might also argue that he’s the real protagonist of the Batman legend. You think you are following the story of Batman, but actually, this has always been Gordon’s story. Like stewards of many legends, he’s frequently off-camera though always present. He’s the audience surrogate, the moral baseline in a world prone to extremes. It’s Gordon who pokes through the pyrotechnics and flash and questions Batman’s vigilantism and flinches at his rage. Yet it’s also Gordon who gains a degree of trust from Batman, and it’s Gordon who develops a precarious respect for the stranger who is doing his job. Gordon is the character in this story, time and again, who stands to lose the most from the relationship (then does). He’s like Alfred, Batman’s loyal butler; though the real world meaning of Batman impacts Gordon in a way that rarely reaches the Gothic spires of Wayne Manor.
In this new “Batman” movie, we see the Dark Knight as Gordon (and his fellow officers) sees him — as a bizarre, unnerving presence, a quiet guy who arrives at crime scenes in a handmade bondage gear. Albeit, more committed to finding bad guys than the GPD. There’s even a moment when Gordon reminds us of the naiveté of the superhero world.
As they will countless times, Gordon and Batman enter a dark space, on guard.
Gordon pulls his gun.
Batman growls, “No guns.”
And Gordon replies, "That’s your thing."
Batman will not take a life. But it’s a creed that Gordon cannot afford. Right now, in “The Joker,” a new ongoing DC comic book series, Gordon is headed for retirement and hoping for some contentment after decades of frustration, so he decides to do the dirty work that Batman would never allow. He vows to assassinate the Joker, though the ongoing question has been, once he finds the Joker, will he do it? Batman has suffered at the hands of the Joker, but Gordon has lost his share, too. He’s been poisoned by the Joker, and tortured by the Joker, and even killed by the Joker. The Joker also murdered Gordon’s second wife. The Joker paralyzed his daughter. Not to mention, after Gordon’s first wife divorced him and moved back to Chicago with their son, that son would grow into a kind of Joker fanboy and one of his father’s worst foes. Gordon has his reasons.
It’s knowingly out of character.
But there’s contemporary calculus here: Jim Gordon is an idealist, though a keeper of laws who understands laws get enforced (and abused) by ordinary people. He arrives in Gotham just before the murder of Bruce Wayne’s father and mother; in some tellings, he’s the first officer on the scene, the cop who comforts Bruce. When Bruce becomes Batman, they bond, with an understanding that Gordon works within the law. Batman does not. Yet they need each other; without their dance, nothing in Gotham works at all.
No wonder Jim Gordon tends to look as frayed as an old-school Chicago archetype; he often resembles Da Bears fans from “Saturday Night Live,” minus da gut and kielbasa.
He looks older than his years.
He has heart attacks. He smokes so much that, in the early 1990s, the American Heart Association ran ads in comic books showing Gordon in a hospital room, strapped to monitors, recovering from a stroke. “He was a tough cop, and proud of it,” the ad read. “Eating right, exercise, vacations — those things were for guys not so tough. Tobacco was part of it.” One day, “all the pain in the world collected in his heart and squeezed.”
Which would be a fitting epitaph.
Here lies Jim Gordon, Chicagoan, father, police officer, workaholic, ally and Gotham punching bag. He cared too much. He died of a heart attack. And lung cancer. And from being crushed by debris when the Batcave collapsed. He died young. And old. He never knew who Batman was. Or he did and chose not say. You know — plausible deniability.
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