Just One More Thing - Killing Jerks

Decided to dust off an old title for here; Just One More Thing is the title I'm going to use for commenting on things that are happening, where I get to flex my inner Charlie Brooker.  For this week, I thought I'd talk about the Joker.  That trailer for the new R-rated Joker dropped this week, and I'm really not liking the look of it.  Not that it looks badly made, or poorly acted, or anything like that, and let's face it, you'd have to work hard to present a worse Joker than Jared Fucking Leto.  But the subject matter is bothering me; it's another story of a white guy getting treated a bit badly, told he can't have a thing he wants, deciding to take it out on everyone in a disproportionate way, and we the audience are asked to sympathise with them.  In the age of mass shootings every fucking week in America, it's very poor timing for this kind of thing, and in general I've never liked that sentiment.  The closest I ever came to really liking that sort of thing was Falling Down, only because at the end the film makes damn clear "Michael Douglas is the bad guy here", though only by literally saying it out loud.  But it's not really the film itself I have an issue with; it's some of the fans reacting to the premise, and how it links to the film's most likely source material.

Now there are a lot of films with characters who are the bad guy which various dudes (and yes, it is pretty much always dudes!) really don't get are the bad guy, and latch onto like barnacles, insisting that they are somehow aspirational figures.  You know the sort I mean; those that didn't realise that Fight Club is taking the righteous piss out of toxic masculinity, or who insist "only the highly intelligent get Rick & Morty" whilst somehow utterly missing that the moral of every episode is "Rick is the absolute worst".  The Joker has at times been one of those focus points, especially with Heath Ledger's version.  One version of this I really hate are those showing Harley Quinn and The Joker as relationship goals (probably on account of that one Alex Ross painting), when that's been shown as a hideously toxic relationship from day one, and Harley was so much better off with Poison Ivy.  And now with this movie, people seem to be interpreting that this as Joaquin Phoenix's Joker as some sort of figure of rebellion, like V in V for Vendetta (another character you are really not meant to identify with!).  I mention V in particular because to see how long this attitude has existed, we have to look back at where I think this attitude may have originated, and how this keeps on happening to Alan Moore's works.

Whilst it wasn't officially credited as such, it's very clear that 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was basically created plotwise by smooshing together elements from two of the best selling DC books of all time, The Death of Superman and The Dark Knight Returns.  This new Joker film seems to have borrowed quite a few pointers from another best seller, 1988's Batman: The Killing Joke.  If you've not read this one, the A-plot is dealing with the Joker escaping once again, this time with a particular agenda; taking Commissioner Gordon captive, and putting him through an intense psychological torture in an attempt to break him.  He's doing this to try and prove that anyone can become like him after enough pressure, as it gets paralleled with the B-plot, a possible flashback depicting a version of his past which is probably one of the best takes on where he comes from done so far.  It's that B-plot backstory, where he started off as a failed comedian, that is where this new Joker film has gotten some inspiration from.  Now this came out right as The Dark Age of Comics began, and was one of those titles constantly held up to say "see, they're not just for kids!", and being one of the comics that dealt with extreme material, yet was actually readable (a lot from this period either aged appallingly or were never that good), that reputation has been maintained for ages.  However, not everyone agrees with this assessment, including Alan Moore himself.  Personally I think the story's an OK read, but with some problematic elements.  My main issue with the comic (heh-heh) is that, well, a lot of people really don't get it.  Yeah, I know I just made fun of Rick & Morty fans for playing the "not understanding it" card, but this is one time when I think that does apply.

Why couldn't there be this level of attachment to a more hopeful comic Moore wrote?

See, this comic was originally meant to be a stand-alone, a sort of one-off, but it instead got made into canon, which means that quite a few things that happened in it stuck around too.  Moore has said he wouldn't have had the now infamous scene of Batgirl getting shot and paralyzed if he knew that would be the case (or even if it wasn't to be made permanent).  BTW, the recent animated version of this story did sort of try to fix that, but ended up making things even worse; that's a whole other rant for another time though.  Also, there's a hefty implication that Batman kills the Joker at the end.  If you have it, look at the very last panels again, and you'll see that the way it just "pans away" from Batman and the Joker with Bat's arms round his neck, and the laughter suddenly stopping, that was totally meant to suggest Batman finally did what he mentioned at the start!  Evidently, that may have been a bit too subtle for DC editorial, as since the story was "canon", that obviously didn't happen.  Now these points come from trying to fit into the continuity a story that was never meant to be part of it, like if they tried to make Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? part of the official Superman timeline.  But there's one central thing that a lot of people get wrong about this book, and what spurred this whole rant.  On Twitter, one guy I follow, Nash the host of Radio Dead Air, was talking about Joker, and got this rather alarming reply.

Cripes

OK, Nash answered this one pretty well.  This is the sort of "not getting it" I mean.  Alan Moore has said that people have come up to him at signings and have said that they really identify with The Comedian and Rorschach in Watchmen, to which his correct response was "please stay away from me".  Here's what I think the problem is; they just read what those characters say, latch on to things in there, and don't really think about what else they do.  Let's go back to the Joker's motive in the Killing Joke; here's where he comes out and says what he's been up to, his central thesis if you will.

I have seen that "one bad day" speech quoted in a whole bunch of places, sometimes just attributed to Alan Moore, to try and sound profound, like that's an important truth being spoken.  What they are ignoring is something rather important about the story that line takes place in. I'm going to make this point as big and clear as possible, in case anyone reading has taken those lines purely at face value before...

The whole point of The Killing Joke is that The Joker is wrong about everyone being like him.  The story is there to prove that the "One Bad Day" theory is bullshit.

In the story, The Joker tries to break Gordon, that's his central proof to his idea, and it fails.  Gordon doesn't snap, he's not insane.  He's naturally shaken up, but he is still the Commissioner, and his line to Batman shows that his moral code is unchanged.  The Joker was trying to prove that anyone can be made like him, because ultimately he would prefer to think that rather than face the truth that he's just a bad person.  It's why he keeps playing the "we're the same you and I" card on Batman, and why Batman points out in here, when it's trotted out again that he "heard it before, and it wasn't funny the first time".

It's a standard technique a lot of writers have in stories that if they want to refute an idea, they put it into the mouths of characters the audience aren't supposed to like and/or agree with.  For example, Kevin Smith mentioned once about his film Chasing Amy that he was worried that people would interpret it as "all lesbians can be turned by the power of straight sex", so to make clear that wasn't what he intended, he had the character of Banky, the idiot who always got stuff wrong, say that out loud.  The guy who's there to be wrong says it, therefore it must be wrong, that's what's being communicated.  Alan Moore does that a lot with his characters; hell, Rorschach's journal is basically there to show an entire philosophy, extreme objectivism, that Moore disagrees with utterly, and makes clear is hateful, selfish, and doesn't exactly make you a nice person.

I had forgotten before writing this how much Rorschach reads like modern Alt-Righters on Twitter these days!

There is of course a problem in this technique, in that people will sometimes hear these things being spoken out loud, take them as gospel, and act like the mere voicing of the ideas is a validation of them, taking them out of vital context.  One time shortly after the Doctor Who episode The Magician's Apprentice aired, I was talking to someone who took Missy's line about how the Doctor's companions are just pets to him utterly straight.  Of course that utterly ignores the fact that it's the Time Lord formerly known as The Master, you know, one of the main villains, saying that and not The Doctor himself; but that didn't matter, those words were said, that's what fit their views, so that was all the proof needed.  Same thing going on to those that think that Walter Kovacs is the hero of Watchmen, and that the Joker had the right concept.  I find it appropriate that this little phenomenon involves a character called Rorschach, as what details these people choose to focus on in these stories tells us less about the tales, and a lot more about them as people.

So yeah, for years fans have held up The Killing Joke as a masterpiece, thinking that every damn line is a vital truth to the whole world, and not really thought about the idea that in a good story, you should not take every damn thing anyone says at literal face value.  As for this new Joker film, I'm a bit worried in that it seems to be taking cues from Taxi Driver, which is another work with a character that people again don't get is not supposed to be an aspirational figure in the slightest, and I'm hoping that director Todd Phillips isn't one of them.  It's hard to say how this final product will fit in the grand history of "characters assholes make pin-up icons", but I really hope the film will do something to clue people in properly.  Also, if it has taken lessons from The Killing Joke, let's hope it took the right ones; The Dark Knight did in making sure to have a major set piece, the two barges, all about showing the Joker to be dead wrong in his assessment of people.  Now let's hope that this film makes sure to prove that this version is wrong in his warped worldview.

And that he also has his magic talking camera.

Oh, just one more thing.  That trailer reveals that The Joker's life of crime began very early on; with plagiarism.  Listen to 0:56 to 1:04 in that trailer again.  Now listen to this.

Stealing from Bob Monkhouse.  We can all agree that's true villainy!