Batman: The Killing Joke

The legacy of Batman: The Killing Joke is a complicated one. The 1988 one-shot comic, written by the great Alan Moore before he swore off mainstream work, is controversial for being one of the most violent Batman stories, namely for the personal, sexual nature of its brutality towards the character Barbara Gordon. But it’s frankly that same brutality which makes its depiction of the Joker so unsparing and memorable, along with the haunting, fairly iconic artwork from Brian Bolland. It’s a story that needed an R rating to be translated to the screen the right way, even in animation.

The comic offers a possible origin of the Crown Prince of Crime in a series of flashbacks, while meditating on the hopeless, fatalistic dynamic between the Dark Knight and his greatest nemesis. The narrative for exploring that dynamic, however, involves the Joker committing some truly horrendous acts against Barbara, in a an elaborate plot to psychologically torture her father Commissioner Gordon. Criticism has been leveled against it for not just depicting violence against women, but depicting it solely as the impetus for the Batman-Joker storyline and then promptly moving on from it, despite the fact that Barbara is the victim of the comic’s most heinous suffering.

The film addresses Barbara's (voiced by Tara Strong) raw story deal in the most head-scratching way. It begins in her Batgirl days, with her on the trail of a mobster (Maury Sterling) who has a sick crush on her. The implication seems to be that giving her a blatantly sexist enemy to defeat somehow cancels out the trauma she receives later. That’s wrong-headed enough, but even worse is that the teacher-student dynamic between Batgirl and Batman (Kevin Conroy) is given a sexual tension, culminating in (seriously) a love scene that would be creepy (regular canon casts Bats as more of a parental figure) if it weren’t so laughable. These plot points add nothing but an air of sexism without even addressing what happens to Barbara in the Joker storyline. Or for that matter, anything in the Joker storyline; the first 20 minutes or so seem like a completely unrelated, unremarkable episode of the animated series tacked on to stretch the plot to feature length, only with a little more blood and swearing.

Minus that opening detour (and a happy mid-credits epilogue that defuses the horror about as much as the Ernest Hemingway quote at the end of Seven), however, you’ll find the greatest Killing Joke adaptation one could hope for. Bolland’s artwork comes to vivid, wicked life, retaining enough of the iconic look but changing things ever so slightly so as to burn the images onto the viewer’s brain anew. And Mark Hamill has never been better as the Joker, whom he makes possibly even more horrifying than the comic by bringing gleeful humor to the cruel proceedings. It is, like the comic, haunting, and horrifying.

It’s also, admittedly, just as problematic. In fact, its clumsy and misguided attempt to rectify things with the superfluous Batgirl drama, if anything, only creates more targets for its critics. Still, there’s no denying that a great adaptation of exactly what the comic is lies within this film.