In a Gotham State of Mind

 

"How Gotham city conquered was

And how the folk turn'd apes- because."

-Linkum Fidelius, as portrayed by Washington Irving

"This town needs an enema!"

-The Joker, as portrayed by Jack Nicholson

When the world feels too large, it can be tempting to shrink it down. The onslaught of dispatches from its every corner can be overwhelming, and the enormity of the chaos unbearable. It's tempting to retreat into a city, especially a fictional one. Whether in a comic book, or a movie or TV series, these fictional landscapes have a familiarity that comforts us while simultaneously operating by different rules, being both home and a land far, far away at the same time. These places can be visited, regardless of their material reality. Cities like Gotham have their own spirit, being almost a character themselves in the tales set within them. These locales can act as a twisted funhouse mirror of our own hometowns, and while we might enjoy spending time watching a Caped Crusader win the day there, we are glad to be safe from the Rogue's Gallery on our respective couches. They stay in Gotham, in the fictional world, where they are Batman's problem. 

I had heard once, from a local historian, that my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, helped inspire the city of Gotham in the comics. I have never been able to verify this in any way, but it hasn't stopped me imagining a Bat Signal over downtown. Most would associate the DC Comics setting with New York City, as it is sometimes referred to as "Gotham". The name was first applied to New York by Washington Irving, under a pseudonym in his a satirical periodical called Salmagundi. It was his way of making fun of the city and its citizens, in reference to an English town of that same name. Dating back to the 1500s, stories were spun about the town and its eccentric residents culminating in The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham. There are several variations on the title; as madness is merely a matter of perspective, the folk of Gotham are also called "Wise Men". Accounts of their foolish activities include trying to drown an eel or send rent checks via hare to their landlords. They tried to build a hedge around a cuckoo, whose presence signified springtime, with the idea that keeping the bird captive would ensure endless warmth. When the bird escaped by flight from its roofless confines, they resolved to just build higher walls on their next attempt.

The motivation behind these apparent acts of lunacy is a strategic one. The tales were borne out of the same time period and location as those of Robin Hood, when everyone in England was taxed into poverty to subsidize wars elsewhere. A road had been planned, going through Gotham, for the King's use. At the time, the townsfolk would be responsible for the maintenance and financial burden of such a road, and feigned madness to make their home a less attractive choice. Madness was considered contagious at the time, and the wisdom of being "mad men" granted them some amount of sovereignty. It is interesting to consider how the social and political challenges of the era informed the tales of a resident vigilante and hero to the people, as well as an assortment of apparently deviant people within the greater Nottingham area. We can see also the corollary to the Gotham of the comics, its hero and its villains.

After the Mad or Wise Men, but prior to Batman, Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comics introduced outlandish outlaws and established the concept of a "Rogue's Gallery" working against the hero. Often the particular villains were distinguished and identified with some physical abnormality, like Pruneface with his dramatic wrinkles and Flat Top, who- you guessed it- had a flat top to his head. The memorable gangsters Dick Tracy fought undoubtedly influenced Bob Kane and Bill Finger as they developed their own Rogue's Gallery; Batman's antagonists upped the ante and became full-fledged supervillains, with flamboyant personalities and fantastical means of accomplishing their grandiose goals. Additionally, this creative admixture of influences probably had some element of true crime included, as well as depictions of organized crime in cinema. The drama was balanced with absurdity, though; villains like the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin were so weird and quirky that no one could reasonably worry we'd see anything like them in real life. The nonsensical elements kept the monsters trapped within the panels and pages of a comic book.

The feedback loop between what we think of as reality and our fiction, though, is more complicated in its effects and manifestations. In writing about the Joker in the past, I had referred to Richard Widmark's role as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death as being tied to both the character of the Joker and that of the Riddler. It seems Widmark was at least in part inspired by the Joker character, and the unhinged Udo inspired Frank Gorshin in his portrayal of the Riddler in the 1960s Batman TV show. Meanwhile, in real life, a young mobster was similarly inspired in both his dress and sadistic tendencies after seeing the film noir classic. "Crazy Joe" Gallo is said to have started mimicking Udo early in his career as a mobster in New York, ultimately culminating in his demise violently at age 43. In the TV series Gotham, the infamous murder scene in which Udo, laughing maniacally, pushes a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs is recreated with the Riddler as the murderer. More recently, the Riddler is depicted in The Batman (2022) as having shades of both the Zodiac Killer and the Unabomber to him. 

Meanwhile, since the writing of the aforementioned Joker post, the character has bizarrely been served up in the form of Arthur Fleck in Joker (2019) and Joker: Folie a Deux (2024). Having nothing to do with the Joker we know from the comics, TV shows, and movies, Fleck lives in a liminal Gotham between the one we know and 1970s NYC. The first movie seemed derivative of The King of Comedy (1982), even to the point of having a late night TV personality character, played by Robert De Niro. The second one, a jukebox musical with Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, was trounced at the box office by Terrifier 3. The prevalence of clowns in an election year is worth noting, and Art the Clown and Fleck aren't the only examples- a documentary called From Darkness to Light was shown at festivals, examining Jerry Lewis's long lost movie The Day the Clown Cried- which involves a clown named Helmut, played by Lewis (who incidentally also starred in the aforementioned The King of Comedy) at a concentration camp. 

The proximity to evil, and politics with the clown energy is a running theme, and exemplified well by the fact that then-candidate Donald trump was facing trial not far from where the court scenes of Joker: Folie a Deux were being filmed. In one event, throngs of protesters, really just actors for the movie scene , nearly came into conflict with real life ones. Law enforcement was reasonably concerned such a protest might manifest in support of the felon who would later secure the election, and the confluence behind fake-Joker Fleck's mob and the hordes who blindly support trump is almost too obvious a point to belabor. An egregore of toxic cult mentality and discord existed in both the liminal Fleck Gotham and the New York of the present day simultaneously. By the end of the election cycle, the Insane Clown Posse were endorsing Harris for President.

Incidentally, if you want to hear me discuss the Joker sequel I do so here on John and Alexx Hate Stuff

Folie a Deux ends with (spoiler alert) what we presume to be the "real" Joker murdering Fleck, and carving a Glasgow smile into his face a la the Heath Ledger Joker from The Dark Knight. This reenforces the idea that the Joker exists as a mind virus more than as a singular personage. One might note Ledger's method acting in the movie was reportedly difficult for him to shake, leading some to speculate that it led to his death from prescription medication. Jared Leto, in his minor Joker role for the movie Suicide Squad, annoyed his fellow cast members by playing terrible pranks in the interest of "method". In 2012, during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises at a Colorado movie theater, a mentally ill gunman -reportedly inspired by the Joker- committed mass murder.  This "mind virus Joker" is explored in the series Gotham as well, which keeps you guessing about who the real Joker will turn out to be. In addition, it shows how this ephemeral Clown Prince inspired other killers. 

Gotham did perhaps the best job of amplifying the multifaceted villains of the eponymous city of any interpretation other than the comics themselves. The show managed to give audiences a little bit of all the different permutations of familiar characters, relying on every wacky trope from evil twins to literally raising killed-off characters from the dead. Far from the expected formula of origin stories leading to the hero or villain in action, we see the interactions and the effects they have on each person metamorphose over time. As the series progresses, we see Edward Nigma go through every variation on the Riddler, from the campy Gorshin-esque one to the Udo-esque killer. The series balances well the stakes of a drama with the absurd concatenations of comic book logic. It leaves up walls and dams of unreality between the micro world of Gotham City and the macro world in which we live, while more recent attempts detonate them- not unlike the Riddler in The Batman, flooding the streets with uncertainty and incredibly strange new challenges. 

The series also explored the Penguin more than virtually any other character. We see him as a young lackey to mobster Fish Mooney (invented for the show) working his way up through an increasingly bizarre series of misadventures, double crosses and incarnations. The trademark umbrella of the character is present, and part of his evolution into super villainy. Penguin, aka Oswald Cobblepot, traces his origins back to one of Dick Tracy's rogues- a character called Broadway Bates. The character was also partially inspired by a literal penguin in a Kool cigarette advertisement, which makes sense if you consider the traditional cigarette in a long-stemmed holder he is often portrayed having. The series touches on one told several ways in the character's long history- that of him running for mayor, which again adds to the political correlations. Versions of this were done in the 1960s series and in Batman Returns, where Danny DeVito's monstrous, sewer-dwelling version of the character is propped up through internecine city corruption and campaigning. Considering Gotham to be a small world mirror, the correlations to our world are again fairly obvious.

 The Penguin of The Batman, though, who got his own spin-off miniseries for HBO, is a different animal altogether. Colin Farrell's physical transformation for the role, from good looking actor to scarred and portly tough guy, deviates strongly from the rotund and goofy Penguin we're accustomed to. His Penguin seems like he would be more at home in an episode of The Sopranos than in Gotham. It's worth noting that Joachim Phoenix lost a lot of weight for Joker, undergoing perhaps a more extreme transformation. Whether either form of physical alteration was necessary is up for debate, but its interesting that the choices were made. Instead of finding actors who looked the part, the actors molded themselves into a strange new version of familiar characters. One might see it as a weird version of the well-loved "origin story" or "Joker moment" these villains are known for. It can also be seen as a strange way of humanizing them, bringing them ever-closer to our world which is bereft of Batmobiles and Bat Signals, and anything else with a "bat" prefix. Batman is even noticeably absent from The Penguin, and is in fact never even spoken about. The titular character's name is "Oz Cobb", getting away from the Golden Age goofiness of the traditional, longer alternate identity. He is kind of a middleman in Gotham's underworld, and his business is largely the drug trade. Gone are the poison tipped umbrellas that turn into helicopters somehow; no large rubber ducks or actual penguins equipped with rocket launchers are to be found. Entertaining though the series is, in the way that "binge-worthy" dramas are designed these days, it's eerily bereft of whimsy and most importantly, heroes. In the end, Oz / Penguin gets everything he wants through one important lesson- empathy is weakness, and having people you care about is a liability. Sound familiar?

What are we to take away from this melding of realities? Why is the fictional Gotham getting harder-edged, more dangerous, as the real world gets so cartoonishly stupid and hellish? Where are our heroes? If we shine a signal into the sky, who will come to our aid?

The Mad Men of Gotham were wise in knowing that madness isn't actually contagious, but using the fact that this was widely believed played the part. Madness is only contagious if you agree that it is, and allow yourself to contract it. The characters that fall prey to the Joker's mind virus were already inclined toward murder, and were just looking for an excuse- similarly the mobs aligned with trump, Musk, and their ilk long had hate in their hearts and are overjoyed to have permission to express it fully. The appointees being forced on us in this administration are like the super villains of the comics, more than the ones of the current media- they are singularly minded, obsessed with their own pet issues to rant about. The difference is, we've enabled and normalized these weird hills that these ghouls are willing to die on. Most of them are very, very dumb- or just crazy, and sadistic. Their only strength is having a ton of financial backing and an imperviousness to consequences because they refuse to play by the rules. You can't outsmart crazy and dumb, and, as Alfred Pennyworth said in The Dark Knight, some men just want to watch the world burn.

Such burning may be inevitable. It seems likely that it will get much worse before it gets better, but I for one am confident that the Rogue's Gallery hasn't won completely. Perhaps the burning will be purifying, all-encompassing; maybe we'll rise from the ashes and rebuild. I'll be watching the Worcester skyline for any signals, but I'm not holding my breath.

   

Elvis vs the Body Snatchers

 

In late 1978, a remake of the classic science fiction thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers was defying expectations. The movie, which starred Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy, was a box office hit and to some degree helped legitimize the remake in cinema. The tense and paranoid film overshadowed the movie on which it was based, which came out in 1956- the same year Elvis Aaron Presley released his first full length album with RCA Victor. The year before the term "body snatchers" came back into the cultural fore in reference to aliens, Elvis had allegedly passed away- and contended with some all-too terrestrial body snatchers of his own.

Clipping passed along to me by the one-and-only Tim Binnall, who insisted I do a deep dive on it...

The broad strokes of the story, as presented in the above clipping, raise a few questions- even the headline seems dubious, in its presentation of the "police claim". One wonders about the identity of the arrested men, and that of the informant; further, how any of them had expected to pull off such a scheme. In looking for answers, the saga of Elvis vs the Body Snatchers can either become a sprawling, mind-bending web of conspiracy or it can simply be the machinations of a few hackneyed criminals and their tall tales. Our narrators are unreliable, our facts are unsatisfying. All of it is, however, very interesting.

The story begins on August 16th, 1977, when news broke about the death of the King. He had apparently died while reading a book about the Shroud of Turin in Graceland, his Memphis estate. Theories about his death being faked began almost immediately afterward, while those presumably more accepting of reported facts were already angling to cash in on the rock star's death. After a funeral he was interred at Forest Hills Cemetery, in a copper coffin inside a mausoleum. The men were arrested for the attempting corpse-napping on August 28th, and by October 4th the charges were dropped in favor of a lesser charge of trespassing. What happened in the gaps of this timeline depend on whom you wish to believe. Those charged were Ronnie Lee Adkins, Bruce Nelson, and Raymond "Bubba" Green- all crooks between the ages of 25 and 30. The fourth man, mentioned in the article as having been arrested at the hospital, seems to have been released without charges. Nelson seems to have been an accomplice. Adkins and Green then will be our star unreliable witnesses.

Ronnie Lee Adkins played the role of the police informant who tipped off the cops. Within a week and a half of the arrests, his credibility was called into question with the police telling the press that the bodysnatching attempt was little more than an elaborate hoax. They had previously considered him reliable enough as an informant, and had helped Memphis law enforcement bust low level offenders over the course of a few years in exchange for reduced time at a penal colony, where he had been held on burglary convictions. Just how much the police had been strung along on Adkins' bogus claim, as they characterized it, is unclear- but by Ronnie Lee's account, which was published in newspapers at the time, the police had encouraged him to go along with the plot in order to catch the ghoulish crooks involved. Adkins spins a yarn about a mysterious man who had offered $40,000 to the four men in exchange for Elvis's coffin and remains; this was to be ransomed back to the Presley family for $10 million. This part wouldn't involve the body snatchers. Initially, Adkins claimed, the plot was to steal the remains of the King from the funeral home prior to the service at Graceland. In cooperation with police, he allegedly entered the funeral home and hot-wired a hearse; Green and Nelson were supposed to take it from there. Both being criminals out on bond, however, they were spooked by a squad car in the area and got cold feet at the last minute. This meant they would have to wait, and dig up Presley later.

In the days that followed, Adkins claims to have been in contact with both Nelson and a police sergeant named Hester. Nelson and Green were happy to learn that Elvis would be interred in a mausoleum, and not buried, as this would make the job similar to their familiar pastime of burglary and less like grave robbing. Their first attempt was on Saturday, August 27, but the crooks were once again hesitant when they spotted Sgt. Hester's unmarked car. On the night of the 28th, in Adkins' car with plates stolen from another vehicle, a trunk full of tools and a shotgun, the trio ventured back to Forest Hills for their crime. The plan was to break into the mausoleum, pull out the coffin, remove Elvis into a body bag, and hit the road. They would then meet their benefactor at a nearby Armour Packing Plant at 2 a.m. for the hand-off. Before they could get into the crypt, the gang panicked and ran, having heard police radio chatter nearby. A brief high speed chase led to a roadblock, where Green and Nelson were arrested in one car and Adkins was brought to another; he was subsequently bailed out by Hester and told he had done a fine job.

This version of events was published in newspapers alongside the official statement from Memphis Police Director E. Winslow Chapman, who presented the idea that the entire plot had been a hoax perpetuated by Adkins. Even if, he said, they had planned on bodysnatching he doubted it would have gone very far. All inquiries from the press were directed to him, and all other law enforcement personnel were instructed to stay quiet on the matter. Chapman suggested there was no evidence of an attempt to break into the crypt, because the men had no tools- although Adkins claimed that there were tools, and a gun, which had been confiscated by the cops. He had seen them himself. Charges were eventually dropped in early October, with the missing tools playing a large role. Adkins' reliability as both an informant and a witness was torpedoed a few days prior to the dismissal, when he went to a hospital and claimed to be a police officer himself in order to use city police insurance. He was then arrested for fraud, while Green and Nelson got lesser penalties for trespassing along with their pre-existing bail agreements.

It has all the trappings of a bizarre conspiracy, as though Adkins was some manner of patsy in a weird and pointless scheme. This, however, is only the case if you believe what he said. Director Chapman confirmed that he had been a reliable informant up until this caper, but everything else about his account is without corroboration. A look at where Ronnie Lee pops up in the news after the whole affair gives a clearer perspective of the man, and lends credence to Chapman's assessment. 

A 1981 article in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, for instance, identifies Adkins as an assistant to Timothy Snider, the head of the Memphis klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Snider had been charged with kidnapping a former klansman along with another man. Adkins denies holding an official post in the organization, but is quoted as saying he was a "supporter of the Klan." The article goes on to describe his arrest record, which included over 20 arrests of petty crimes such as theft and fraudulent checks. He appears as well in a book called The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by William F. Pepper. The controversial author's claims in the book which is reviewed here by Martin Hay, include statements made by Adkins, who apparently also used the alias Ron Tyler. The elaborate story he tells Pepper involves his father, Russel Adkins, who he claims was a 32nd degree Mason and a high-ranking klansman with powerful friends and a job as a fixer and hitman. If we're to believe Adkins here, his dear old man had a direct line to Deputy Director Clyde Tolson of the FBI, who worked directly under J. Edgar Hoover. Reverend Doctor King's assassination had been in the works for years before it actually happened, according to Ronnie, with the orders coming from the very top- he further says that as early as 1956, when Invasion of the Body Snatchers was thrilling teens along with Elvis's eponymous debut album, the FBI man Tolson had handed a list to the senior Adkins scumbag containing the names JFK, RFK, and MLK, insinuating that all three assassinations were part of the same plan. Having died before getting the chance to shoot Dr. King, Russel's duties got passed down to Ronnie which, one assumes, is how such things work. Ronnie Lee claims to have delivered the rifle to the gunman who shot MLK, at the age of 16 no less, and, according to him, it was not James Earl Ray. For more details on the insanity of these claims, the reader is encouraged to read the linked book review...

The final tragic nail in the coffin, as it were, for Adkin's credibility comes in 1992 when his mother was gunned down, and either his own children or nieces and nephews of his were injured. It seems Adkins had been given money to bail out a Memphis woman who was being held on drug charges, but the bail was never posted. Presumably, Adkins pocketed the money and his own mother paid the ultimate price for it.  

This is all to say that perhaps it isn't wise at all to trust his account of the attempted bodysnatching. The yarns he spins would have you going down all manner of ugly rabbit holes, which can be tempting but is from the outset obviously fruitless. A simple crook and stool pigeon for the Memphis PD, whose story constellates outward to include secret societies, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, along with government involvement and cover-ups is a familiar and well-trodden path in the zeitgeist of the late 20th century. Not to mention the synchromystic connections, with the King of Rock and Roll, Martin Luther King, and the "Camelot" dynasty of the Kennedys, which all are tangential to paranoid screeds like King Kill 33. This writer draws the line here, as this well trodden path is also laden with horseshit. It was tempting to draw a line between the American Memphis and its namesake in Egypt, where the body of Alexander the Great was once interred, before being removed a generation later to Macedonia and reburied in a now unknown location; and perhaps its worth mentioning, as we include Egyptian burial rites alongside Elvis and JFK; the absurdity of it all is exemplified by this combination in the form of the movie Bubba Ho-Tep. That is to say, the purely batshit logic one employs to construct a narrative around such claims can be fun, but at the end of the day is still batshit.

The present writer would be remiss in at not at least mentioning one of his favorite movies

This brings us, in a circuitous fashion, back to another Bubba- Ray "Bubba" Green, who in recent years came out with his own version of events for a short documentary called The Man Who Dared to Steal the King. In this scenario, Ronnie Lee Adkins was little more than an acquaintance and the wheel-man for the caper who ratted on Green, Nelson, and the fourth man who he only refers to as "Mike". In Green's telling of the story, it was he who was charged with the duty of stealing Elvis's remains and was linked up with the mystery man behind the plot through his bail bondsman, Barron Blue. The characters certainly don't get more colorful than this, especially because the "yankee" who put up the money for the scheme gets referred to as "Mr. Cincinnati". Meeting in a dimly lit Tiki bar, Green was patted down and made to surrender his butterfly knife before the meeting. Mr. Cincinnati had two briefcases with him; one was filled with money, and the other detailed maps, arial photos, diagrams and other useful information related to Elvis's would-be-final resting place. The deal was for two million dollars; Green would need to recruit three men, pay them whatever he liked, and deliver the body to be ransomed for ten million. Green seems proud of himself in the documentary for the line "My own mother ain't safe for two million", which eerily harkens back to the fate of Adkins' mom. Green never mentions any plans for the funeral home, but he does account for the tools- "Mike" was waiting on the other side of the cemetery in a stolen appliance truck containing them, and got away, never to be seen again, well before things went haywire in the graveyard. 

Green credits his lawyer with the reduced charge, as Adkins was allegedly made to commit insurance fraud under threat of bodily harm from Green and Nelson at his attorney's suggestion. The case was thrown out with Adkins' flagrant unreliability as a con artist, and while Green was still in trouble he was looking at a much smaller sentence.

The story again begins to inflate with wildness as only an ex-con can deliver. Green goes on to explain that while in prison he met a Cape Cod mobster he calls "Moose", who let him in on some secrets related to Presley. In a narrative that will sound familiar to any enthusiasts of "Elvis is Alive" theories, or anyone who read the National Enquirer a lot back in the day, Moose explained that at Elvis's funeral was seen to sweat in the coffin. "Wax sweats," says Green, "dead bodies don't." 

Moose spins a tale to Bubba, or so we're told, that Elvis was beholden to the mob during his Vegas days and had been convinced to transport large sums of cash using his personal jet for them. This didn't sit well with the King, as Elvis had always thought of himself as the Good Guy and had tried to ingratiate himself with law enforcement at every opportunity. So, the story goes, Elvis made note of the serial numbers on the bills he transported and tipped off the feds, leading to arrests in the upper echelon of the underworld. 

Elvis meeting Nixon in order to become an honorary agent of the DEA

So, in Green's telling of events, Elvis didn't die at all. He was being sent to steal a wax dummy out of the mausoleum, for purposes unknown. Elvis presumably would be in hiding, from either the mob, the feds, or both. Elvis's remains, along with those of his mother, were interred at Graceland following the events at Forest Hills. The documentary seems to suggest that the whole point of the alleged attempted body snatch was to justify the move- but why such an elaborate scheme? It does bear the hallmarks, as previously mentioned, of a patsy arrangement. That Mr. Cincinnati had $2 million to burn on some low-level druggie and crook, who obviously wasn't very good at crime since he kept getting caught, in the hopes that he'd deliver the goods; that this mystery man hoped he could recoup $8 million at the end of it all boggles the mind and invites further questions. The idea that Vernon Presley and / or Colonel Parker would need some convoluted scheme to bury Elvis where they wanted to seems equally absurd, given the outrageous amount of money, sway, and sympathy they had in the wake of Presley's death. 

The brief documentary featuring Green's story ends with a screen of text, listing some of his crimes- which include manslaughter- and state that his current whereabouts are unknown. 

If we are to try that old, well-trodden and shit-strewn path of building an unbelievable narrative here, we might suggest that the Bubba Green in the documentary isn't the man who got away with attempted corpse-napping in 1977. We could also speculate wildly about the identity of Mr. Cincinnati, or be more sympathetic to the bizarre claims of the klansman con artist who almost literally threw his own mother under the bus. We might just as easily believe the characters involved were actually pod people, having replicated and displaced their original forms. Perhaps there was a rogue mummy involved, and Elvis is still out there, on the lam.

"Elvis is out there, I tell you! He's out there!"

As with seemingly everything around Elvis, there are so many divergent narratives that finding the truth of the matter often means settling for the most boring story. Like the final resting place of Alexander the Great, perhaps some things will never be known. We have "official stories" for a lot of these tales of intrigue, and for those who enjoy tugging on the conspiratorial threads there will never be a satisfactory explanation. In this case, with either unreliable narrators or authorities who brush the crime off as a hoax we may never know what really drove the miscreants to attempt the crime and you know... that's alright, mama. That's alright with me.