HOW NOT TO MARKET A MOVIE
The story behind Killing Joke, the most controversial comic book ever published. By Ed Power
It was the day the Bat hit the fan. In 2016, DC Comics brought its then forthcoming adaptation of the classic graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland, to San Diego Comic-Con, the world’s biggest fanboy fest. What followed has gone down in the geek annals as a lesson in how not to market a movie.
The Holy Controversy moment came in at the end of the presentation. Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker in the animated film version of the comic, had just dialled in to express his regrets at not being there in person.
He’d proceeded to entertain the throngs with his beloved Joker impersonation. Hamill’s Luke Skywalker-on-laughing gas alter-ego had made the veteran actor a cult figure among Bat-fans.
As Hamill cackled, the room convulsed with laughter. But then it was time for questions from the floor. The atmosphere turned grim. Why so serious? It had to do with the alleged rampant misogyny of both the original Killing Joke comic and the new animated movie.
The Killing Joke had a divisive effect on people. Moore’s chronicling of an encounter between Batman and the Joker has divided opinion since its publication in March 1988. As we count the days to the launch of Todd Phillips’s Joker movie, the ’80s mini-opus stands as the gold standard for Batcontroversies. It might even be argued Phillips’s Joker is just a pretentious retelling of the Killing Joke.
Both Moore’s “one-shot” and the new film claim to tell the definitive origin story of Batman’s ultimate foe. More than that, each in its own way seeks to strip away the mascara and the crazy hair and gaze into the abyss where the Joker’s soul used to be.
The problem with the Killing Joke ultimately has less to do with the Joker than with Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl. In the graphic novel Moore offers her up as a sacrificial naif. She is shot at point blank by the Joker and crippled. Crucially she isn’t targeted because she in any way represents a threat in her own right. It’s because she is the daughter of Commissioner Gordon.
A popular theory is that she is also raped by the Joker. As presented on the page the situation is ambivalent. We see close-ups of Barbara writhing in pain, yet Moore has stated that no rape occurred. Either way, gunned down, stripped naked and photographed, she has certainly been sexually assaulted.
Moore commits the ultimate Bechdel flub. Barbara is violently divested of her individuality. She is defined not by her own hopes, dreams and accomplishments but by those of the men in her life. This is compounded in the movie.
Moore’s humiliation of Barbara occurs when the commissioner is abducted and drugged by the Joker. As part of the ordeal he is forced to look at blow-up photographs of his freshly maimed daughter. She writhes on the floor, naked and spattered in blood.
The Killing Joke has come to be seen as one of the most notorious examples of the comic industry’s “girl in the refrigerator” trope. This is where a female character is debased simply to push the buttons of a male protagonist. The sequence wouldn’t fly in 2019. It barely did in 1988.
Batman: The Killing Joke arrived as comics were reaching peak pretension. Two years earlier, Frank Miller had banished the spectre of camp ’60s Batman with his Wagnerian The Dark Knight Returns. That blockbuster reinvented Batman as a vengeful psychopath, only just on the side of the angels.
The Killing Joke is 50 pages long yet contains multitudes. When the Joker escapes Arkham Asylum and installs himself in a decrepit fairground, the Dark Knight rushes to confront him— and rescue the captured Commissioner Gordon. Interspersed with the adventure are flashbacks to the Joker’s previous life as a struggling comedian with a pregnant wife.
This is the component of the story that lives on in Phillips’s movie. Here again the future Joker is a failed stand-up whose frustrations bubble up into desperation and anger. The essential thrust of the tale is identical: a comedian, crossing the line between humour and madness, finds his true calling is to have his audience die laughing.
Moore felt in hindsight DC should have curbed his darker instincts. He actually queried whether it was acceptable to mutilate Barbara Gordon. The message that came back was that he should feel free to “cripple the bitch”.