Directed by Sam Liu Produced by Bruce Timm Alan Burnett Sam Register Written by Brian Azzarello
When The Killing Joke was announced as the next “Elseworlds” animated feature from Warner Brothers Animation, I thought of a bunch of reasons why this sounded like a bad idea. From its place in the overall constellation of Women in Refrigerator styled misogyny, to the overall creepy, cultish following and valorization it and the Joker receive, and the fact that adapting an Alan Moore comic rarely works out. As those negative thoughts weighed at one side of the scale, reasons why making this might not be a “good” idea would “make sense” weighed on another. DC animated features run on a tight schedule and at its heart Killing Joke is thriller with a propulsive plot making it a good theoretical fit. As toxic as some aspects of the fandom around this work are, it is a popular meaning there’s money to be made. Bruce Timm is involved and he was one of the main architects of the DCAU and helped oversee the one good Alan Moore adaptation Justice League Unlimited S01E02 “For the Man Who Has Everything”. The cast is also an all-star one.
Most importantly on the side of good is the belief in the power of adaptation. The act of adaptation gives the chance and ability to take a story and tell it in a new and different way, a process that can help illuminate the unique qualities of a given medium. Yes, The Killing Joke comic also exists as a bright star in the Women in Refrigerator constellation of storytelling but this new piece could possibly have excised that plot point. By its nature of occurring 30 years after its original publication the animated feature would exist in a completely different context. It’s being brought into a world where the original was (wrongly) brought into the mainstream DC continuity and so the adaptive process can take that into consideration. Something Alan Moore never did because he didn’t intend it to exist within a larger continuity. That’s what the messaging centered around when announcing the addition of a roughly 30-minute prologue emphasizing Batgirl, Barbara Gordon’s role. The Killing Joke prologue addition is an example of when adaptation goes wrong.
On the surface the prologue sounds like a good means to bridge the gap between the sexist writing of the original and an audience that increasingly doesn’t want that rubbish. It is an original story focusing on Batgirl, the most well-known victim of the entire story, as she and Batman takedown a psychopathic gangster named Paris France. In execution however, the storytelling doubles down and reinforces the on the sexist tropes of the source material. Batgirl is made out to be less than the stoic cool macho Batman whom she eternally pines for culminating in a disastrously conceived rooftop sexcapade.
From the sense of flow, the prologue comes off like a second movie grafted onto an adaptation of The Killing Joke. As poor as this prologue is, the fact that it just feels tacked on, like a vestigial tail of storytelling, drags the viewing experience down and should leave no parties content. If for some reason you’d want to watch this movie more than once skip to about 29 minutes and lose this prologue entirely. As a piece of storytelling, it’s execution is incredibly lacking.
“The thing about this is that it's controversial, so we added more controversy," writer Brian Azzarello explained to CBR. "I think she is stronger than the men in her life in this story. She controls the men in her life in this story."
That is such an ill thought out response with no basis for what happens in this movie. Barbara’s strength and “control” is derived from every major male character’s sexual desire of her. Not being Batgirl, smart, independent … or a character. Barbara is given little sense of an interiority or dimension. Out of costume she is paired with a non-threatening stereotypical gay friend to act as a sounding board for her sexual frustration towards Batman. All the women – there are only two types: Barbara and the prostitutes – in this feature are sex objects of one form or another for the men. Everything is funneled by and through male gaze.
My negativity isn’t because they had Batman and Batgirl have sex on a rooftop; it’s never what you do but how you do it. In presentation their rooftop tryst plays like something you’d find on a late night Cinemax adult feature; it’s all male fantasy crap. Batgirl somehow rips the cape and cowl off in one fowl swoop followed by her top. This is also one of the many scenes where sexuality and violence are comingled.
No matter what, there would be apprehension to this pairing: given the master-student power dynamics at play, the overall meta depiction of the Bat-Family, and host of other reasons that say this is a bad idea. If there was something resembling a relationship or connection between these two though, it may not have been as bad. Except there isn’t a connection, or relationship. Batman doesn’t want Batgirl around and all Batgirl dose is pine after Batman.
If it was just a sex scene that’d be one thing. It’d be groan inducing and still terrible but relatively short and I’d maybe be able to block it out. Except there’s about 20 minutes of stuff that comes before it that also undermines Barbra Gordon’s agency and reinforces her status as nothing but a plot device for the real star: Batman. Even in her own “story” it’s still all about him.
By existing in the context of The Killing Joke the whole endeavor doubles down on the vapid man pain based storytelling found in the source not alleviate it. Worse it recontextualizes everything that comes after, transforming Killing Joke it into a story of revenge not an isolated quintessential Batman-Joker plot. Somehow it leaves Barbra even more marginalized then her brief single digit page appearance in the original. It is astounding how poor the storytelling for this prologue is, everyone involved is and should have been smarter.
After the first half hour things swing into, well, The Killing Joke. There is, honestly, not that much to say about it. The story has been picked apart for at least twenty years. There are some minor additions or alteration; if you wanted to hear Mark Hamill give the Joker monologue about the unreliability of memory outside of a convention setting you got it now. The Joker “origin” is there but lacks the connective transitory tissue of the comics, transitions are rough and seem to occur because that’s where they occurred in the source. I can’t help but feel that the power of the original comic is somewhat lost in translation, but that’s something typical of all Alan Moore adaptations. The vocal cast give the good expected performances. With the prologue taking up just under half the features running time, the actual Killing Joke feels rushed. Everything though is undermined by that prologue, it changes the whole for the worse.
And I thought Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was going to be the worst R-rated Batman movie of the year.
I am Michael Mazzacane you can follow me on Twitter and at ComicWeek.org
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