Batman: The Killing Joke

November 14, 2015

A good artist doesn’t just manipulate language or images or sounds, but constructs a perspective largely from the audience’s own expectations. A piece that works does so because the artist understands medium, genre, and the history of what came before, and exploits them to say something unique. As I see it, that’s kind of the point of art, to transform the mundane into something new, something that changes the way we look at the world.

So what does all this have to do with Batman?

Batman lives in a comic book world, a world where physics can be defied, masked heroes and villains can flourish, and spandex-clad muscle structures can grow to impossible proportions. When done poorly, it’s a childish escape fantasy that serves no purpose other than to entertain and reinforce existing points of view.

Batman: The Killing Joke, uses and subverts those expectations to call into question the nature of criminal insanity and the nature of our own expectations about what is real and what is not.

Yes, there are bulging undulating glutes aplenty, and there is the satiating of fan curiosity in giving a fuller back-story for the Joker, but what makes The Killing Joke work is how it pulls back the hood, so to speak, on the nature of Batman and The Joker, and questions the psychology (or pathology) that led them to where they are.

And if you think about it, it’s just a guy dressed up in tights and a bat mask beating the tar out of a clown in the rain at an abandoned amusement park. The fact that doesn’t seem weird to us is probably an indication that the genre has permiated our brains… or that we’re just a crazy as the costumed weirdos duking it out.

For full disclosure, I thought one of the best elements of the Heath Ledger Dark Knight-era Joker was that he had no back-story. His craziness was self-contained and could have come from anywhere. With that said, if you are going to get into the Joker’s history, The Killing Joke does it about as well as you can ask for. While the Joker has always been a strangely likable character (I think because he seemed legitimately crazy and lacking in malice), this interpretation actually makes him pretty sympathetic.

Even though he claims that going crazy is a rational choice made in the face of an irrational world, it was the loss of his previous life that kind of made him snap. I didn’t see much choice in it at all, even though the philosophy behind it is reasonably compelling.

Where it gets really interesting for me is when the parallels between Batman and the Joker come up. Yes, one is “good” and the other “bad,” but those distinctions are artifacts of the sane world. The Joker went irrationally crazy, but Batman kind of went (if there is such a thing) rationally crazy. I mean, have you ever thought about what kind of frame of mind it takes for a person to say “this city is messed up, the best idea I can come up with about how to fix it is to dress up like a flying rodent and punch people in the face?”

Yes, Batman is probably coo-coo for cocoa puffs too, though just in a different way than the Joker. And while it seems fine and well to have a guy out there trying to do the right thing, the question that comes up (as it does with all vigilantes) is how are you going to feel about that same costumed, ass-kicking billionaire when something you are doing gets in the way of what he feels like is “justice?” It might not go well for you, and suddenly you might not see him as quite the hero.

Anyway, this is a topic I could probably go on about forever. I love the exploration of character histories, the nature of justice and reality, and what makes us become the people we are.

I also like seeing spadexed superheroes beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. That’s cool too.

Written by michaelkingram Posted in Uncategorized