The self-styled “Doctor Batman,” Will Brooker, cried SJW tears yesterday when he announced that he will be boycotting all DC products over the soon to be released Killing Joke movie with his article, “Batman’s Killing Joke, and its ‘edgy’ rape storyline, is not a comeback I want to see.”
The Killing Joke is a 28-year-old graphic novel by Alan Moore, as beloved by fans as it is hated by bowdlerizers. DC will release an animated film version of the novel in late July. The controversy stems from a scene where the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon, AKA Batgirl, in the spine before stripping off her clothes and taking naked pictures of her. And despite Brooker’s click-bait headline, there is no actual rape in The Killing Joke.
The novel not only sets up the Joker’s most popular backstory but transformed the character from the goofy “Jack Nicholson” clown prince of crime, to the psychotic maniac we know and love today, a la Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
The film also brought fan favorite Mark Hamill out of Joker voice retirement to play the role.
Brooker, who has made his career off Batman as a professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University, did not see it fit to boycott DC for the past 28 years the novel has been in existence, but only now after the pictures started moving on a screen.
His argument hinges on the fact that Barbara Gordon’s victimization is used to as a vehicle to torture her father, Commissioner Jim Gordon, who Joker captures and subjects to the photos he took. While this is true, it’s a common theme of thousands of pieces of art, especially in the superhero genre where heroes specifically use a disguise to protect the ones they love. The Joker just took it to a whole level because, you know, he’s a terrible person.
The second point is that Jim Gordon’s nudity is more tasteful than Barbara’s, although neither’s go beyond PG-13 levels of exposure.
“Jim’s nakedness is tastefully obscured and shadowed: Barbara’s is broadcast over multiple screens,” Brooker said.
So sitting fetal and naked in a cage is tasteful now apparently. They are both frightening imagery. It’s dark, gritty and intended to trigger the reader.
Brooker has been a longtime critic of Moore’s work. He complained that Moore’s 2012 film Act of Faith was just “a short film about a young woman stripping, dressing in “slutty clothes,” and killing herself on screen.”
Moore responded to the criticism in a later interview: “If I don’t wish to say that this person is obtuse to the point of actual stupidity, or that he was prevented from understanding the film by reason of a suspiciously sheltered upbringing, then I’m at something of a loss when it comes to explaining his actions and behavior.”
And Moore got Brooker right. Despite spending his life’s work overanalyzing Batman’s heroics and the Joker’s terrible deeds, he must now shelter himself from the film adaptation of one of the cannon’s most influential works — forever robbing the world of the much-awaited 50,000 word dissertation on the post-modernist, neocolonialist implications of The Killing Joke on the feral tree toad population of Botswana. What a pity.
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