The Killing Joke: Just as toxic when animated

The Killing Joke: It’s taken me a few weeks to process this movie. I needed time to decompress, to find the words behind how bad this movie made me feel.

Most of you know, I am a big Batman fan. I love the masked vigilante who despite not having “super powers”, manages to fight crime just fine with his angst and infinite money. I accept the problems associated with this property, and can still call it my favorite comic property. There are some great stories (Hush for example!), and some not so great stories. The Killing Joke is squarely in that camp.

(I’d say spoilers are ahead, but honestly – The Killing Joke is 28 years old. That’s long enough to not need spoiler warnings I think.)

Because I can criticize the media that I like, it means I don’t have to accept it lock, stock, and barrel. The Killing Joke is awful to women. This property is a classic example of Women in Refrigerators (women who have been either de-powered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator – often as a plot device for male heroes).

The Killing Joke tells a possible origin story for the Joker (there is no set cannon origin for the Joker), one that shows him as an angry, failing, miserable husband who lashes out at his pregnant wife. He can’t make it as a stand up comic, so agrees to pull a heist with a gang dressed up as the Red Hood. Before the heist goes down, he finds out that his wife has died – To make  us feel bad for him I guess? The heist goes awry, and Joker takes a fall into – you guessed it – a vat of chemicals, and ultimately he turns into the Joker we all know.

Before we get to the rest of the story, we’ve already had a woman and child sacrificed – she didn’t even die on screen! – as a plot device for someone else. That’s uncomfortable as a woman to read.

So Joker is out of the asylum and trying to commit a heinous crime – because he wants to prove to Batman that it only takes one bad day to make someone go as crazy as him. He’s off to prove that the world is not worth fighting for. Joker tries to make this point by pushing Commissioner Gordon past the breaking point, and make him go crazy in one bad day. He does it by taking him to a run down amusement park, stripping him naked, and abusing him with a nightmare circus troop. All of this is after having witnessed the Joker breaking into his house and being forced to watch him shoot Barbara Gordon in the stomach and do who knows what to her. Jim Gordon is further traumatized by seeing photographs the Joker then took of a naked paralyzed Barbara inside the amusement park of horrors.

Let me clarify here. Barbara Gordon – aka Batgirl – is a badass Super hero. Only to further a plot for Joker and Batman, she is shot and paralyzed, stripped naked, and at a minimum emotionally abused. Joker didn’t know she was Batgirl – he just took her down to abuse Jim Gordon, to in turn, abuse Batman. WTF. That should be uncomfortable for anyone to read.

The Killing Joke was a stand alone comic by Alan Moore that got a lot of attention – you’ll find it on a lot of must read Batman Comic lists. I started digging into why people recommended this comic once I was able to put a finger on why the story made me so uncomfortable. Many of them do so because it’s what set the stage for the next phase for Barbara Gordon – Oracle. I just don’t buy it.

You don’t thank the drunk driver for the volume of get well cards you get in the hospital. That someone was able to make a good story out of the shambles The Killing Joke left Barbara Gordon in doesn’t mean that The Killing Joke is a good story. I won’t fight you if you liked it, but I didn’t.

Fast forward 28 years after the release of animated feature film of The Killing Joke, and I had the opportunity to see a special preview screening of The Killing Joke while down at San Diego Comic Con. Despite my reservations about the source material I decided to go watch the movie. I heard they were adding a lot more original content to the film because the source material wasn’t enough to make up a full length feature film. Maybe they would add more depth to Barbara! Maybe they would cut out the naked photos of her. Maybe they would at least make Joker aware of who he was shooting!?

I should be careful what I wish for.

Yes, Bruce Timm did add a lot of new content about BatGirl and Barbara Gordon. He gave her a stalker,  he had her sleep with Batman, and he made her pine after him. WTF times INFINITY. I assume that the stalker was supposed to represent the Joker and that Batman knows how to deal with deranged people like him? But he clearly does not, so I didn’t get the point of the stalker. Batgirl sleeping with Batman felt like I was being forced to watch a porn of two people I know who aren’t attracted to each other do it. It was uncomfortable and upsetting. It felt so unbelievably out of character.

But lastly, why in the hell would they have Babs pine after Batman? Don’t have her act like she only became BatGirl because of Batman – she did it because of her father! I’m not saying that Babs and Batman can’t have their own sexual identities, but at least let her come to the still-drunk-Sunday realization that that evening should never have happened let that be the end of it.

So not only did the animated movie of the The Killing Joke start with the source material I found troubling, they essentially doubled down on treating Barbara Gordon like crap. I went into that movie hoping that something was going to change how I felt about The Killing Joke, and instead, they only cemented it further. What hurts is the people who aren’t raving about the movie, but still defending it because it’s the origin story for Oracle.

Again, you shouldn’t thank the people who knocked you down just so you could prove you could get up again. You get angry at them, and you avoid them at all costs. Which is my relationship with The Killing Joke.