Batman: The Killing Joke (2016)

It’s safe to say that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons turned in a work that is both seminal and controversial when they created The Killing Joke back in 1988. It’s a work that has sparked heated debate about its content, its treatment of Barbara Gordon, and its recently challenged ambiguous ending (which I’ll admit eluded even me at first). And I’m extremely satisfied with the forty-five minute animated adaptation DC Comics released this week, for reasons I’ll enumerate.

But for reasons I cannot begin to understand, the adaptation is preceded by the cartoon equivalent of a steaming dump taken to profane the very concept of the character of Barbara Gordon. Spoilers are going to follow on this one, folks, but the long and short of it is that you can skip the first twenty-eight minutes of the film and regale yourself with everything you wanted from a Killing Joke adaptation, or you can watch the whole thing and sit in a stunned stupor as you wonder how so many people thought this was a good opening act.

The Killing Joke is the quintessential Batman v. Joker tale, in which the Clown Prince of Crime (Mark Hamill) attempts to prove a point to his Dark Knight foe (Kevin Conroy) that madness is the only sane reaction to the tyranny of the world’s “random uncontrollability.” This existential dilemma plays out on the bodies of retired Batgirl Barbara Gordon (Tara Strong) and her father Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise), victims of Joker’s obsession with the Batman.

It’s the ultimate Joker story, proving just how terrifying the grinning jester can be by exposing us to the very blackness at the core of his soul. It features some of the darkest humor ever uttered from those crimson lips, brutally uncomfortable in a way that is precisely the point. It’s a story about how deep the Joker’s obsession with Batman runs, even as the reader begins to see just how close these two diverging paths really are. Is Batman, too, mad? Is this a path that necessarily ends in death? Though Alan Moore has largely dismissed Killing Joke, there are some really good ideas in there.

There are also some really abhorrent things in there, some things with which every comics fan must wrestle, particularly the text’s treatment of Barbara Gordon. And I’m honestly not sure where I end up on this debate – is the text simply presenting the Joker’s horrors in all their appalling brutality, or is there something approaching at best ignorant representation and at worst virulent misogyny in the book’s violence? The book undeniably deprives Barbara of much of her agency and even some of her humanity in reducing her to a pawn in the conflict between Batman and Joker, but fortunately so much good work was done in the comics about how Barbara healed and became something even greater in the form of Oracle, the information broker of the DC Universe and arguably one of its smartest tech-savvy heroes. This, I contend, is the crux of the superhero genre – it’s a core narrative about how we make ourselves into our greatest ideals, how we build ourselves into the best possible versions of ourselves. That’s why Batman is the greatest superhero: he’s us, as we wish to be, at the cost we fear paying. He’s not superhuman, but he is a super human.

When producer Bruce Timm and writer/adapter Brian Azzarello announced some time back that they were adding a Batgirl-centric prologue to the film, in part to pad out the runtime and in part to give Barbara a more leading role, I was intrigued. I’ve always regretted that Barbara is merely a victim in The Killing Joke, so it was good to hear that the film’s creators were attuned to that sensitive element of the book. Now for a little thought experiment: in one sentence, give me a reason to care about Batgirl. If you don’t know much about Batgirl, you can try it with any character you admire – just one reason to care about them. Write it down.

Did you write down, “She’s able to have sex with Batman”? No? Oh, well, that’s the best thing Azzarello came up with. Look, I admire the man’s work tremendously, and I’ve met him in person and found him to be wise and affable. But how in the world did the man who gave us Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality decide that the best way to get audiences invested in Batgirl was to hook her up with Batman in a creepy, sleazy rooftop one-night-stand that reduces both of them to petulant children the morning after? In what alternate universe is that either palatable or acceptable? It’s leery and exploitive in a way that participates in, not decries, the Joker’s violence of the same kind. And I wish to heavens I were exaggerating when I say that the prologue is capped off by a scene of Barbara jogging as – and I swear on all that’s holy, I’m not stretching the truth – the camera lingers over her jiggling behind and chest, never ascending past her shoulders. I try to keep the language PG on this blog, but I have all manner of vituperative commentary just under my bitten tongue.

After that, about which I could decry so, so much more (like the fact that the prologue is ultimately, from a cinematic point of view, entirely unnecessary, as it’s never so much as acknowledged again), the film takes a complete 180-turn into a rendition of the graphic novella that leans hard into accuracy, embellishing just a little bit in ways that are really quite engaging. This Killing Joke does more with the carnival freaks, an intriguing visual here made into a coterie of Joker’s maddest henchmen, and it sets one of Joker’s monologues in a room that’s quite literally topsy-turvy, amping up the madness in a way that the comic only used words to accomplish.

In a very real sense, this is the Killing Joke for which we waited. The animation is a compelling if visibly low-budget approximation of Brian Bolland’s highly precise penciling, and the voice cast is Conroy and Hamill at their level best. The first time we hear Joker’s laugh, I burst into an irresistible smile and snicker. “That’s my Joker,” I thought, “and here’s my Killing Joke.” But that first half-hour I can guarantee I will never watch again. It angers me just to think about it. A friend of mine once said, “I know Batman better than I know most real people I know,” and I feel that way about Batgirl too. I care about this character in a way that I think no one watching only this film possibly could. She’s plucky, brave, and brainy as all get-out, and she deserves so much better. The original Killing Joke comic did violence to her, and it’s abhorrent to see that the violence continues. In the comics, Barbara healed and became Oracle, but here the credits roll and nobody seems terribly bothered by any of it. (Do stay through the credits, though.)

As I wrap up this review, I’ve got a stack of new comic books waiting for my eyes, but I’m so eager to go back and enjoy the forty-five minutes of Killing Joke proper once more. It’s on those grounds, then, that I can recommend The Killing Joke: it’s a gourmet steak dinner preceded by the crudest crudité imaginable. If I were a principled man, I’d boycott DC Animated Films from here on out. But next up, it’s Justice League Dark. And I can’t say no to an animated Swamp Thing. I just can’t. And that’s no joke.

Batman: The Killing Joke is rated R for “some bloody images and disturbing content.” This isn’t one for the kiddies; Barbara’s injuries are pretty graphic, and the shots of her pained body are framed in a way that obscures the most explicit details but leaves the imagination to run rampant. Then there’s the offensive hypersexualization of the character, the aforementioned jogging shot and a beat in which Barbara removes her mask and costume, wearing a bra, before the Hitchcockian pan away. The film is relentlessly dreary, bleak in the way it needed to be to do the book justice, and it spares no blood. Weirdly, though, the language is self-censored, as when a mobster says “What the eff?” If you’re going to go for the R rating, why stop short on that point?