Movie Review: Batman - the Killing Joke

Batman: The Killing Joke

I read the Killing Joke at a relatively young age. I was a big Batman fan back in the day, and I kept wondering how this cheerful Batgirl I see in the cartoons and some of the older comics ended up paralyzed. I mean, Oracle is cool as all hell, but as a kid I wanted all the big 'event' comics, and apparently Barbara was shot in this apparently super-acclaimed comic called the Killing Joke.

Wow, what a fucked-up comic I bought home that day. It was revolutionary in that it was one of the first comics to explore such a dark theme of Batman and Joker's fucked-up relationship, how they revolve around each other, it explores the 'One Bad Day' mentality of the Joker and gives the most iconic (and now kinda definitive) origin of the Joker, it has the shock factor of having Joker go after Gordon in his home, shooting his daughter and then trying to drive him insane. It's far from perfect -- a lot of criticisms can be lobbied at the book, most notably reducing Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, into a weak character who had like four pages of screentime total and crippled without much of a fight, and then literally used as shock value in-universe. And the ending was something that I never liked, even if I grew to appreciate the myriad interpretations it had I always thought the ending deserved something with more... oomph instead of just Batman and Joker laughing.

But man, there were so many themes going on in that comic. The whole 'one bad day can drive a normal man to madness', but people like Gordon (and thus the reader) have the choice to stay sane and strong and uphold the book. Evil people will try to convince themselves that other people are as bad as they are. There's the whole duality between Batman and Joker, their similarities (literally one bad day and the deaths of loved ones by circumstances out of their control fucked the two of them up) and their eternal dance that can only end with one of their death, and humanizing Batman even more here by having him actually offer to help Joker despite all that he's done. Yeah, the story has problems, but it has a lot of other great themes.

But warts and all, it was one of the definitive Batman/Joker stories, and one of the most iconic and pivotal Batman stories of all time. So when DC started making movies based on comic book stories, it's a matter of time before this one made the cut.

THERE IS NO SANITY CLAUSE

The question is, how will they go about it? Even without the brutality and dark comedy of Joker shooting Barbara in her own home, and then stripping her to take photos to torment Gordon (with a bit of rape subtext that has been subject to debate for years and years) the whole point of the Killing Joke was the psychological ramifications of madness and the unending conflict between Batman and the Joker. It isn't something you'd want to air on a Saturday morning for little kids. Plus, the artwork is horrifying... even when drawn in DC Animated's crispier art style.

So when the animation adaptation is announced, I was happy. As much as I have mixed feelings about the original comic book, the simple notion of hearing that Kevin Conroy and Mark fucking Hamill -- the voices of Batman and Joker from Batman: the Animated Series... nay, the definite voices of Batman and Joker period -- will be reprising their roles made me super-excited for this adaptation. And for the most part? Whenever the two are on screen together, holy shit, their voices were music to my ear. And a lot of the iconic scenes from the Killing Joke, from Joker's origin story, to Joker shooting Barbara, to Batman meeting the poser in the asylum with the skin makeup, to faithful reproductions of panels with Joker's hollow sunken eyes, to Batman going on a rampage on the local thugs to look for Joker, to the creepy throne of baby dolls, to the nightmare carnival ride with the weird midget things... so much was reproduced faithfully from the comic, so much lines of dialogue lifted from the comics, that it was beautiful. And hearing one more time Joker's rants that waffle between insane ramblings to jokes to anger at what the world did to it and his desire to prove that normal people are just like him... it's a wonderful script, and, again, it is definitely the reason that Alan Moore's comic is held in high regard.

Of course, the movie should, by rights, be held in high regards, too. Great voice acting, great script, pretty decent animation... it's basically the Killing Joke, just animated and read by Mark Hamill (and oh boy what an excellent job Hamill did with his last work as the Joker) and Kevin Conroy.

Well, so long as you ignore the first one-third of the story, that is.

See, Killing Joke, the movie, adds around... oh... 30-40 minutes of extra screentime of wholly original material. Which expanded on Batgirl's role in the story. Which I was honestly very, very excited about when I heard what was going to happen. The Killing Joke was a pretty short comic, especially compared to other comic books that got turned into movies. And, don't get me wrong, Killing Joke was an excellent Joker story, balancing between his anarchic insanity and some reason for his character's existence... but it was a shit Batgirl story, and it kinda disgusted me because, hey, I'm a Batgirl fan as much as I am a Batman or Joker fan. The fact that this led to Barbara refusing to fall to one bad day and rise up from the ashes as Oracle has allayed a lot of my dislike to her having like three pages in the whole thing, but it is still valid criticism that Barbara Gordon was reduced to nothing but a plot device in the original comic book, reduced to nothing but a plot device as a motivation tool for Batman and Gordon.

If there was one thing that really needed to be changed in the Killing Joke, it was this facet of the story, and trailers showing Batgirl in action beating up thugs made me smile. Yeah, this was the way to go. Expand Batgirl's story, and make it so that when she gets shot, it's not as dehumanizing as it initially was in the comic.

Except... the movie adaptation actually makes it worse.

Sorry if I rant a lot about the Batgirl prologue, but that bit being the only real new material to the movie and the rest being super-faithful to the comics with awesome voice acting, this is the part I really needed to talk about, I think.

See, we get to see a prologue of Batman and Batgirl fighting crime in the beginning... which doesn't really paint Batgirl in a very flattering way. Having Batman's sidekicks be worse than him and get angry because Batman refuses to acknowledge their incompetence is nothing new -- every single member of his little bat-family has been through it. But spending so, so much time focusing on Barbara angsting about 'he loves me, he loves me not' both in and out of cape? That is just weird and adds nothing to the story later on. It just paints Barbara as this lovesick girl, and reduced to a mere two-dimensional love interest -- a different feminist stereotype than damsel in distress and died-to-motivate-the-hero, perhaps, but still a very unflattering one.

And honestly, Batman's relationship with Batgirl has always been that of a surrogate father or uncle. It was Batman's adopted son, Dick, that dated Batgirl, and after having that relationship in mind for years it is honestly jarring and absolutely wrong to see them fuck. There's the age gap, and the weird parental surrogate thing going on, and there's how Batgirl is written... she's so... subordinate to Batman, so eager to earn his respect, yet somehow this translates to sex? Having her biggest priority during her ranting is why Batman doesn't pay attention to her, instead of trying to analyze the Paris's obsession... this felt like something out of a fanfiction instead of something that should be latched on with the quality of scripting that the actual Killing Joke parts got. Honestly, after all the rap that the comic book version of Killing Joke got for its portrayal of Barbara, you'd think this movie would do better.

We get a small subplot of Batgirl having to chase down Paris Franz, who is this crime dude fighting his own uncle, a big kingpin, and having an unhealthy obsession with Batgirl. Like, flirting and using date rape gas and shit. I guess it's meant to be a parallel to Joker and Batman's relationship? And Batgirl beating Paris into a pulp might be a parallel to the whole 'one bad day' allegory? None of this really ends up amounting to anything, though, because Barbara quits being Batgirl, and then her role gets reduced back to how she was in the original comic -- does nothing, gets shot, and stays out of the picture. Oh, yeah, she does get a stinger where she returns as Oracle, but honestly that scene was so unindicative that anyone who doesn't already know who Oracle is won't understand what's going on.

And honestly, does any of the prologue really add anything to the story? Did the dull romance accomplish anything? Did the whole insipid subplot about chasing the creeptastic douchebag Paris mean anything in the long run? None of this adds any weight to the movie, and you're left wondering what was the point of showing Batgirl for the first twenty plus minutes if it's not going to do anything to the movie?

Sigh.

Honestly, I think the first thirty minutes do as much disservice to such a beloved character like Batgirl as shooting her and leaving her like a sacrificial lamb did.

Oh well.

Mark Hamill's Joker is excellent and you should watch the movie for him, if nothing else. It's the definitive Joker, blending the gleeful, cheerful sadism with a slightly darker (but not overboard) take on the character, with certain uncharacteristically lucid moments. And you even get him singing at one point. Yeah, there is a reason when people debate about Ledger vs Leto vs Nicholson vs Cesar, I'll just point at Mark Hamill's Joker.

So yeah. Killing Joke the movie is still a very good Batman and Joker story. But it's an even shittier Batgirl story than the original. Poor kid can't catch a break.


DC Easter Egg Corner:

• The monitor with a montage of pictures of Joker is a treasure trove of this, with scenes from 70+ years' worth of Joker stories... ones I noticed are...
• We get a cameo of Joker with Harley Quinn in her New 52 look. Notably, Harley Quinn's character sprouted to life as a random extra mook in Batman: the Animated Series... of which the voice cast of this movie is from.
• We get a reproduction of Jason Todd's dead face after Joker kills him, though in the comics Jason's death happened after the events of Killing Joke -- the GCPD taking drastic measures against Joker was one of the things that actually led into the events of Death in the Family.
• Laughing fish, which is based on a pretty iconic 70's Joker comic which was later adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of Batman: the Animated Series.
• A reproduction of the cover of Batman #1 (which itself is homaged with the more well-known the Man who Laughs comic), the comic that contains Joker's first appearance, with Joker holding playing cards with Batman, Joker and Robin's faces.
• The first appearance of Cesar Romero's Joker in the old TV series with Joker disguising himself as a clown -- you might also recognize the clown mask as the same one used by Heath Ledger's Joker in the Dark Knight's opening scene.
• Joker on a folding chair at a beach, holding a green can while birds fly around him, is a reproduction of a scene from Tim Burton's Batman, starring Jack Nicholson's Joker.
• An animated adaptation of Heath Ledger's Joker with the green vest and all sitting calmly in a jail cell from the Dark Knight. 
• The Laffco factory is a setting from Batman: The Animated Series, which I'm not sure has appeared in other Batman material.
• One of the few lines not really lifted from the comic during the actual Killing Joke segment was the "I swear to god" "swear to me" line from Batman and a random thug, which is one of the iconic and memetic lines from Batman Begins. Which I'm 99% sure wasn't in the original comic.
• The newspaper clipping that Gordon showed off is a reproduction of the very first comic book cover featuring Bat-man, though with him choke-holding Joker instead of a random mook. I think in the comic this was just a random nondescript comic instead of a reference to Detective Comics #27.