It could be difficult to include the Joker's origin story (which I interpreted as his objectively true origin and that it being true is important to the story) yet somehow seriously suggest that his memory is distorted and other origins might also have happened or be remembered. It could also be difficult to present it without making him seem too sympathetic.
Batman: The Killing Joke animated movie from Bruce Timm
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
No... I'm not even sure what my point was. I guess... two thoughts:
1. Comics are a beautiful thing. Yes they started as bam whap kapow but they have grown tremendously over the years (and TKJ for good or ill was an important part of that growth) to be so much more than what they started as. But there is still that element of teenage male power fantasy running through these characters that have been running for 50, 60, 70 years, and so if we're talking about Batman or Superman, yes, of course that original impetus is going to affect the stories they will tell.
2. Comic fans are a beautiful thing, because they love comics in spite of the fact that 90% of them are still teenage male power fantasies that oversexualize and disempower women (and now they're doing it in the film versions!) So on one hand they look to this industry they love and want it to be better, but on the other hand go into a defensive crouch whenever anyone points out the obvious. It's a tough spot.
Yes, I want comics to be better. And some comics are better, have gotten better, will get better with pressure. But any one specific comic doesn't need to (and cannot, and never will) cater to all desires and preferences of the audience. If you don't like it, literally the best thing you can do is not pay for it.
^But that doesn't mean that people doing a modern adaptation of an older comic are unable to modify its problematic elements. The adaptation is not the original. It's a new work informed by the original. So it's able to improve things. The animated adaptation of Batman: Year One was the most faithful adaptation the DCU line has done, but it also improved substantially on the comic in at least a few ways. One, it handled Batman's crashing of the mobsters' dinner party far better (by showing it from the mobsters' POV instead of Batman's); two, it gave Jim's wife more agency and presence in the story; and three, it left out that ridiculous bit where Bruce was off on a ski trip doing wild acrobatic jumps just a couple of weeks after he (as Batman) was seriously injured by the SWAT team.
After all, what in the world is the point of doing a new version of a story if you don't take the opportunity to improve on its mistakes? The value of an adaptation is that it's a second chance. The Killing Joke is a great story, but it's deeply marred by its horrible treatment of Barbara Gordon as a character (and I mean its treatment of her, not the Joker's treatment of her). This is a chance to keep the parts that are good and fix the part that's problematical, and thereby make the whole thing better.
After all, what in the world is the point of doing a new version of a story if you don't take the opportunity to improve on its mistakes? The value of an adaptation is that it's a second chance. The Killing Joke is a great story, but it's deeply marred by its horrible treatment of Barbara Gordon as a character (and I mean its treatment of her, not the Joker's treatment of her). This is a chance to keep the parts that are good and fix the part that's problematical, and thereby make the whole thing better.
I hope they do. Certainly, I have faith in the DC Animated studios, they are responsible for some of my favourite animated shows and films.
But so often have I heard the refrain that 'oh well that's how it was in the original, so...' I mean, the Star Trek movies are a great example- they are retrogressive in their gender representation because 'that's how it was'. If they can fix it so that Barbara Gordon is not such a victim, great, but it's not like they're going to remove the fact she gets paralyzed from the story, is it? The problem is central to the story, I think the moment they decided to reimagine it as an animated movie, they made a choice to perpetuate that stereotype.
Is it really central, though? The Joker's goal isn't to cripple Barbara; his goal is to drive Jim Gordon insane. His assault on Barbara is merely a tool toward that end. The significance of TKJ to Barbara herself was something that wasn't established until a totally separate set of stories many years later, and the movie won't be adapting those stories. What the Joker did to her was not about her; it was about Jim. It's more a Macguffin than anything else. That's exactly the problem with it, in fact -- that this powerful, independent, well-loved heroine is reduced to merely a pawn of a conflict between two male characters, and that her life was changed forever because of a story that was not actually about her in any way.
Let's break it down. The Killing Joke is a 48-page graphic novel -- 46 if you disregard the opening and closing pages that are just an image of a puddle in the rain. Barbara Gordon appears on only six pages and is mentioned a single time each on two more. She only has dialogue on three pages, one of which gives her only one sentence. Her last appearance in anything other than photographs is on page 19, less than halfway through. Looking through the GN for the first time in a while, I can really see exactly why it's seen as such an awful, marginalizing treatment of the character.
So really, you could probably cut Barbara out of the story entirely and it would have little impact, as long as you could come up with a substitute way for the Joker to torment Jim in the funhouse. Say, maybe footage of the Joker killing innocent Gothamites. Barbara is nothing in TKJ but a means to an end, so one could substitute a different means to the same end without losing any of the core of the story.
But -- there is another option. Like I said, the story's only 48 pages. That's about half the length of Batman: Year One. The B:YO adaptation was extremely faithful, with hardly anything cut out and a couple of bits even added. So if we assume TKJ is meant to be a 70-odd-minute movie like the others, they'd probably have to add content to fill the running time. We already know they're adding a 15-minute prologue to set up the story. There's still room to add another 20 minutes of content, perhaps.
So what they could do to fix the Barbara situation is to add a subplot that's about her, that gives her agency and a point of view in a way the comic failed to do. Maybe that's part of the goal of the prologue; maybe we'll see her as Batgirl helping to capture the Joker, and his attack on her would be retaliation for that. And maybe later, we could see added scenes showing her coping with her paralysis and considering how to move on -- perhaps hinting at the possibility of her becoming Oracle, although it'd be hard to do that in the brief time frame of the story.
Either approach would help: either remove her from the story altogether, or include her fully in the story as a core character with an inner life rather than treating her simply as an appendage or a prop. Both would be better ways of handling Barbara while allowing the core narrative involving Batman, the Joker, and Jim Gordon to remain intact.
That's actually a really good idea (you must be a writer or something!) I can definitely see the latter case occurring, and that would be great. The former, though? I don't see it. Barbara being paralyzed is a huge event in the DC timeline, even in spin-offs and adaptations (like Birds of Prey and the Arkham games)- I don't think for a second they would adapt TKJ without including it (and you just know a certain set of the fanbase would go bonkers if they did).
Barbara can be assaulted or even shot without necessarily being paralyzed.
Except the whole point is she gets paralyzed. Its a HUGE part of the comic. Maybe not the main plot, but still one big thi9ng the story is known for and why its still remembered. Its like adapting Batman: Year One, but having Bruce's parents not die. I agree that the way the story went about it was messed up, and I can see the DC Animated people improving it, but I seriously doubt that Barbara won't get shot and paralyzed. I can see them improving the why and the how, but I bet she still leaves the story in a wheelchair.
I think the sexual assault is equally as concerning as the resulting paralysis. The whole thing is problematic. I would love for Christopher to be right and they rework the story. I'm not holding my breath however.
More so. Far, far more so. Hell, Barbara's paralysis was arguably one of the best things that ever happened to her as a character, once Kim Yale and John Ostrander came along and found something positive to do with it. The problem is that the story gratuitously used the sexual victimization and objectification of a female character as a plot device to motivate a male character. The problem is also that Barbara isn't even really a character in the story at all, that she's merely an extension of one of the male leads. It sums up everything bad about the way female characters have been treated in comics for far too long.
Here are some articles that should clarify the problems so many people have with the story (and that all point out that even Alan Moore himself thinks its treatment of Barbara was a mistake):
http://www.hitfix.com/harpy/its-time-to-kill-the-killing-joke
http://www.agonybooth.com/agonizer/How_The_Killing_Joke_Ruined_Batgirl.aspx
http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2015/03/27/the-killing-joke-starring-barbara-gordon/
That last article emphasizes the point I made earlier: That Barbara is subjected to horrific treatment in TKJ even though TKJ is not about her at all. Hence the two alternate solutions I posted: Either accept that it's not about her and remove her from it altogether so that she isn't gratuitously victimized and objectified, or change the story to make it about her as much as it's about her father, the Joker, and Batman.
Sorry about reviving this conversation, but I just started playing Arkham Knight and it has a sequence related to this discussion.
We get a flashback scene to Barabara being paralyzed and it starts out pretty much the same as in TKJ, but The Joker doesn't kidnap her, instead tacking pictures of her bleeding out on the floor, and then leaving her there alone, well with Batman in flashback but he wasn't there when it originally happened. While it's still bad, it does at least remove the sexual aspects of the whole thing, which helps some.
We get a flashback scene to Barabara being paralyzed and it starts out pretty much the same as in TKJ, but The Joker doesn't kidnap her, instead tacking pictures of her bleeding out on the floor, and then leaving her there alone, well with Batman in flashback but he wasn't there when it originally happened. While it's still bad, it does at least remove the sexual aspects of the whole thing, which helps some.
Umm, that's exactly what did happen in TKJ. The Joker didn't kidnap Barbara, he kidnapped Jim. He shot Barbara, and while his henchmen carried Jim away, the Joker began to strip her and photograph her right there in the Gordons' apartment, and then the scene cut away to a flashback. Later we see Bullock telling Batman that they found Barbara nude in the apartment, with a lens cap on the floor to establish that she'd been photographed (although there's no mention of sexual assault beyond that). The Joker later showed those nude photos of her bleeding body to Jim Gordon as part of his torture.
Oh, I thought they found her at his hideout. Either way, this did remove the sexual aspects, he photographed her still fully clothed and then just left her without even an implication that he did anything else. She was also living alone in this version.
Here's the scene:
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNCNKlhYcLg[/yt]
Here's the scene:
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNCNKlhYcLg[/yt]
Yes, he's hallucinating because by this point Joker has been dead a year. Plus you think that's creepy just wait till you see the Death in the Family based stuff
In the context of the game, no doubt. But an adaptation of The Killing Joke itself would have to do more to fix it -- either leave Barbara out entirely or actually make her a viewpoint character with agency. I just wish I had more faith in the DCU line's producers, but their track record with female characters lately hasn't been that great. (Although, as I think I said before, they did improve on Frank Miller's portrayal of the other Barbara Gordon, Jim's first wife, in Year One. But then, improving on Frank Miller's portrayal of a female character is an incredibly low bar to clear.)
But, ugh, I know I'm repeating myself, but is their remit to do a faithful adaptation of a classic work from a genre that is notoriously unfriendly to female characters and readers, or is their remit to revise those works to make them less unfriendly to female characters and readers? And if it's the latter, why not make original stories that don't have those problems to solve?
The word "adapt" means "change." It does not mean "copy everything exactly, even the bad stuff." It means to do something in a new way, to bring a fresh perspective, ideally to add something new to the story. Otherwise, why bother to do it at all? And often that means fixing the mistakes of the story, leaving out the parts that didn't work. Alan Moore himself has agreed that the way he handled Barbara was a mistake. It's something he'd surely change given the chance to revisit the work. So it's hardly wrong for the adaptation to change it.
A lot of adaptations improve on their source material. I've already said that the Year One movie, while remarkably faithful to the source in most respects, did make some substantial improvements. It gave Jim's wife Barbara more presence and personality, and it left out the ridiculous bit where Bruce Wayne was off in Europe doing insanely acrobatic ski stunts just eight days after being badly injured in the SWAT raid (changing it so that the ski vacation is just Bruce's cover story for his injuries). Being faithful does not mean blindly, slavishly copying every single detail. Details are flexible; what matters is the core of the story and the characters.
There's also Timm's other Alan Moore adaptation, "For the Man Who Has Everything" from Justice League Unlimited. I actually think the animated version is far better than the original comic. The Black Mercy flower is supposed to trap someone in their ideal dream world, but the comic has Superman imagine a dystopian version of Krypton where his father is a terrorist, which doesn't make sense at all. The episode gives him a fantasy that's an amalgam of the things he values most from both Earth and Krypton, and it works far better. Then there's the classic B:TAS adaptation of "The Laughing Fish," which ditches the original climax and grafts on the ending of "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge," yet actually provides more unity to the story because it carries the fish theme all the way through (with a shark being the climactic threat).
Besides, as I've already pointed out, The Killing Joke is a short enough story that they'd have to add maybe half an hour of material to fill it out to movie length. We already know they're adding a 15-minute prologue. So it's a given that they are changing it. And as I've already said, you could add a subplot for Barbara that would fix the problem by giving her agency and a viewpoint in the story, without needing to change or remove anything about the existing story (though as JD's example shows, the stripping of Barbara could be easily left out because it contributed nothing significant to the story).