You Killed Out There
Origin Stories: The Origin Story
Batman: The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore, drawn and coloured by Brian Bolland
Now that every film is an origin story, we told about too many origins. We are given origin stories for things that are quite banal. A good joke in the last decade (when there were a million Star Wars sequels and interleaved with them lay prequels and TV series) was that eventually, there would be a two-season TV show about the origin of the holographic chess set that’s played on the Millennium Falcon in the first film. Or a movie about how, precisely, a lamp that was briefly shown in The Empire Strikes back happened to be there.
A YouTube film reviewer once said, amid a glut of canonical stories redone as ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ origin stories — like the Robin Hood and King Arthur movies a few years back — that origin stories and so on can be good. But they lose a lot of their punch if the audience you’re trying to entice doesn’t remember the conventional story they’re meant to be counterpointing. If no one remembers the classical, traditional version, you get very few points. You’re not only trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re claiming to reinvent something people didn’t even know well enough to find unhelpful or dull.
Comic book stories are a little different, however. The characters in comic books — some of them, at least — are archetypal. They’re endlessly done and riffed on and spun out. They are ubiquitous. They’re furniture, mental furniture. And so if you can do it well, you get some points for doing a radical reinterpretation. A strange and gritty origin. A dramatic change and about-face.
Many of the Batman films of the past forty years have been billed as radical re-interpretations. Most have been dark and gritty — supposed repudiations of, for instance, the old camp comic books and the camp Adam West TV series and film. And later, the camp Joel Schumacher film. Some of those changes work for the better. But they are not the only way to make a story in that world.
What we have in The Killing Joke, from the late eighties, is one relatively early effort at the dark, gritty origin story. It might be blamed, if you’re feeling especially mean-spirited and prepared to overgeneralise, for every grey, dark, muted-colours, grim, violent, monosyllabic version of Batman and, indeed, the Joker — and we have been subjected to quite a few in recent years.
But I don’t think that’s fair.
People steal from things that work, not from things that don’t work.
A million dull detectives, and quite a few bad TV series, have been stolen from, ripped off, the character of Sherlock Holmes. But we hardly need to blame Arthur Conan Doyle for that. We don’t need to go back to The Sign of Four, for instance, and to claim for Twitter likes that it’s actually secretly bad?
What The Killing Joke does well that other efforts at grey grim darkness don’t do is to give contrasts in mood, to give contrasts in tone. In this edition, re-coloured by artist Brian Bolland, we have an even greater contrast drawn: contrast between the lurid but still restrained colouring of the present day, where the Joker puts into action his deranged — and deranging — scheme to prove that the world’s gone forever mad; and the washed out, under-saturated past, where the Joker, not then what he would become, is introduced to crime, introduced to tragedy, introduced to the monstrous unfairness of life — all at once.
One bad day, the Joker says, to Batman and to all who come after him. One bad day like we all encounter from time to time, and you’d see it — the thing that makes life insane, the thing that makes it all absurd.
It’s a mad world.
How he wishes to prove this is instructive. It’s not the plan of a sane man. First, the Joker gets out of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane — the least secure asylum in all fiction, it seems — and then, via some plot movements I won’t spoil for you, he decides to find old enemies and to subject them to a monstering. They are to be tormented in a sick clown festival, something bizarre and cruel and spiteful. All to prove to Batman, who’s on the Joker’s trail, that justice and honour and all those things are just a cover for brute force, and that really, truly, there’s nothing separating them.
May as well descend into madness. It’s the only way to see the truth.
So far, so ordinary. We’ve heard it all before. Heard it in every villain monologue which begins, ‘you know, we’re not so different, you and I.’
We’ve heard it in speeches before the UN General Assembly.
But there is something a little different, a little better, here. And funnier, too. Despite it being built up in a way humour rarely survives, I actually laughed at a joke in this book. I didn’t expect to, but I did.
I must also say, however, as this review wraps up, that I’d been prepared to read something truly repugnant. I’d been told this book was sick and twisted and offensive. It has its moments of great cruelty, of course, but honestly, I expected more sadism. I expected something truly revolting and didn’t find it.
Alan Moore’s writing often transgresses the bounds of conventional taste (cf. Lost Girls, which I believe is a masterpiece and very moving) and it is often concerned with extreme violence redounding upon the violent (From Hell and V for Vendetta being the object lessons here). But I expected to be scandalised and to have my values transgressed and traduced. Instead, they were only mildly ruffled.
Perhaps it’s a sign that this book really is almost four decades old, and the times, they truly have moved on.