Before we get down to the sordid business of picking apart The Killing Joke , surely the most anticipated animated film in recent times, it’s worth remembering Heath Ledger, by no means a comics fan. In preparation for his famous role as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Ledger famously locked himself up in a hotel room for a month, perfecting his now-famous Joker voice, recording the Joker’s thoughts in a diary.
The only Batman comic book Ledger was explicitly asked to read was The Killing Joke , a 1988 one-shot written by Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland. The actor acknowledged, in a 2006 interview with entertainment media website IGN: “ The Killing Joke is the one that was handed to me. It’s really good. So I think (the film) is obviously going to be a bit (about) the beginning of the Joker. I guess (The Killing Joke) explains a little bit of where he’s from, but not too much. From what I’ve gathered, there isn’t a lot of information about the Joker and it’s kind of left that way.”
More than any other element, it was the Joker’s backstory, as explained by Moore and Bolland, which Nolan adapted most clearly for The Dark Knight. Actually, the word is ‘backstories’, because after we’re shown three different scenes that add up to a tragic past for the Joker, the man himself dismisses it rather blithely: “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I am to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple option!” Ledger, of course, offered several answers to the question he typically asked of his victims (“Do you want to know how I got these scars?”).
Backstories are the most important part of the new The Killing Joke movie, written by ace comics writer Brian Azzarello ( 100 Bullets, Hellblazer , and Joker , his own take on the Clown Prince ) and directed by Sam Liu. So much so that the film begins with an uneven 30-minute flashback segment (considerable, especially because the total runtime is just over 70 minutes) about how Batgirl (Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Commissioner Jim Gordon, Batman’s greatest ally in Gotham) had to quit being Batgirl. This segment does not appear in Moore and Bolland’s book and was written specifically for the movie.
There have been a lot of brickbats for this segment. And while I did not mind it quite so much as a lot of critics did, I do think that the writing here is stuck in the ’80s (this might sound like a curious criticism to make — the book, after all, came out in 1988 — but bear with me). It boils down to this: a charming psychopath called Paris Franz develops an obsession with Batgirl, a lo-fi version of the Batman-Joker dance of death. Batman, rather more overbearing than usual, takes her off the case, literally saying ‘because I said so’. Batgirl nevertheless falls for Franz’s bait before Batman has to come and rescue her from a goon gang. Here’s the massively clichéd part: goon bash-up done, Batman and Batgirl exchange fisticuffs before exchanging bodily fluids on the Gotham docks. And afterwards, Batman tells Batgirl to hang up her cowl and cape, because it’s now too weird for him to crime-fight alongside somebody he banged while in costume.
Pardon my French, Bats, but you’re a f***ing douchebag, blessed with all the emotional intelligence of my granny’s turnips. The segment ends with Batgirl almost beating Franz to death with her bare fists, before she realises “Whoopsie, almost killed this misogynist creep because of my lady emotions. Time to go back to my lady librarian job.” Please, Mr Azzarello, you’re better than this, and moreover, Moore and Bolland did not deserve this botched cut-and-paste operation.
Because The Killing Joke , alongside Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One , has a good case for being the most iconic Batman graphic novel of all time. It shocks the Batman-Joker revelry into something infinitely darker, bringing Gotham into Gothic territory. It takes the Joker’s anarchy to its logical conclusion: a beautifully indiscriminate heap of body bags: young and old, male and female, with a sexually-charged maiming thrown in for good measure. Moore’s hatred for the superhero format is well known, so it’s no surprise to see Batman receiving a distinctly unsympathetic treatment: he’s brusque with friend and foe alike, his allies are more than a little scared of him and his butler Alfred suffers him more out of habit than anything else.
If Batman seemed particularly batty to fans of the canon, Moore had an explanation ready. In his view, Batman and Joker suffer from two distinct and complementary forms of mental illness. (The titular “killing joke” of the novel begins: “There were these two guys in a lunatic asylum…” with the illustration showing Batman entering the Joker’s prison cell.) Their PTSDs are equal and opposite entities. The Joker abandons reason and coherence in favour of a flamboyant, vaudeville nihilism (“We are not contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause!”). The Batman concocts a suffocating behavioural code for himself: no killing, no guns, no visible vulnerability, no allowing people to come close to you. Like a lot of Moore’s plots, this conspicuous twinning works wonders on the comics page: remember the ‘Fearful Symmetry’ sequence in Watchmen , where a cunningly drawn double-spread presents us with mirrored images of Ozymandias, the character whose ruthless pragmatism itself mirrors the grim world of the novel.
Which is why Azzarello and Liu’s movie picks up steam right at the moment the Batgirl saga is over. From that point on, the film follows the graphic novel quite faithfully. Kevin Conroy, the old faithful voice of animated Batman since the ’90s, turns in a steady performance, especially in the interrogation sequence, where Moore’s dialogue is taken verbatim: “I have been thinking lately about you and me. About what’s going to happen to us in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later. I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.” These are apocalyptic sentiments, and Conroy delivers them with the right mixture of despair and fatigue.
There’s no doubting who’s the star of the show here, the entire reason I would give this film — which, as we have discussed, is eminently mediocre in the first half — a generous three or even three-and-a-half stars out of five. It’s the one and only Mark Hamill, surely one of the greatest voice actors of all time. He’s back to the role that won him a legion of fans (the other role that won him a legion of fans). And he is in imperious form, whether it’s dressing up as a camera-wielding tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, or expressing his headmaster’s approval at Commissioner Gordon losing the thread of sanity.
Moore’s priceless lines help, of course. After the Joker shoots Barbara/Batgirl through her spine, sending her smashing right through a glass-top coffee table, he observes, “It’s a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she’s a coffee table edition. Mind you, I can’t say much for the volume’s condition. I mean, there’s a hole in the jacket and the spine appears to be damaged.”
The high point of the film, for me, is the two-and-a-half minute musical sequence, where the Joker tortures Commissioner Gordon by showing him graphic images of a naked, bleeding Barbara, even as he is taunted — in verse. “When the world is full of care, and every headline screams despair/ When all is war, rape, starvation and life is vile/ There’s a certain thing I do, which I shall pass along to you/ That’s always guaranteed to make me smile!/ I go loo-o-o-ny, like a light-bulb-battered-bug!/ Simply loo-o-o-ny, sometimes foam and chew the rug/ Mister life is swell, in a padded cell/ You can chase the blues away/ You can trade in your gloom for a rubber room, and injections twice a day!”
Hamill is pure gold here, his voice crackling with malevolence and showmanship. All of which only leaves us with the climactic Joker laugh, which he aces once again. But for him, Azzarello and Liu would’ve been left with the sorry remains of their half-baked Batgirl skit.