The Killing Joke and the Abyss

In honor of “The Dark Knight Rises”, I thought I would take a look at what is widely accepted as one of the greatest Batman graphical novels, “The Killing Joke”.  The story not only sets the stage for future events, but challenges the reader to think about The Joker and The Batman in entirely different lights.

WARNING, CONTAINS SPOILERS (Just incase you're going to read the comic... yeah I just realized how stupid that sounded)

For those of you who haven’t read the Killing Joke, I will provide a very brief synopsis.  Essentially, the Joker hatches a plot to reveal that everyone is really just “one bad day” away from being as crazy as he is.  To prove this point, he goes to Commissioner Gordon’s home and shoot’s his daughter (also Batgirl for those of you who don’t know) in the spine and paralyzes her.  He then kidnap’s the Commissioner and forces him to look at very graphic pictures of her lying in pain.  As you might imagine, the Clown Prince sends an invitation to Batman to see the friuts of his labor.    

Frequently throughout the novel, the Joker has flashbacks to life before he became the Joker.  As a struggling comedian with a wife and baby on the way, he took a job sneaking gangsters into a factory.  During the planning session, his wife is killed and he is grief stricken, although the gangsters make him go through with the heist anyway.  Batman shows up during the heist an accidently knocks him into acid, the last straw in his “bad day”.

Batman arrives and the Joker begins to run away.  As Jim is being freed, he tells Batman to make sure he brings the Joker in by the book.  Upon arriving the Joker proudly proclaims that the doesn’t care if Batman sends him back to Arkham Asylum, because he has already proven his point that everyone is just one bad day away from insanity.  After a final confrontation, the Joker is defeated and lies at Batman’s mercy.  In an attempt to reach out to him, Batman states that one of these battles will eventually lead to one of their deaths, and that they ought to stop their fighting.  Batman offers the Joker a truce and offers to help him get through whatever happened to him.  For what happens next, it may be best to look at the actual panels.

Believe it or not… the goddamn Batman laughs!   At least until he apparently strangles the Joker, or is laughing so hard that he needs the Joker for support.  Or both.  The ending is left intentional vague, and to be honest I’d rather leave it that way.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a major point of this work was to paint a side of Batman that showed that in his own dark and twisted way, he’s pretty insane, and his relationship with the Joker curious.

            The real interest I have in this story is what the joke the Joker tells actually means to tell us.  It is undoubtedly inserted to be a metaphor for Batman and the Joker’s relationship; the dramatic situation reminds Joker of the joke for one, and the actual panels imply it as well.  As the Joker mentions “two lunatics”, the scene pans out to reveal both Batman and the Joker’s silhouettes. 

            The joke itself took me a minute to fully understand, mostly because I read it too fast.  The first lunatic offers to shine his flashlight across the gap so that the other lunatic can walk across the beam of light.  Obviously, this is impossible. However, instead of picking up on this impossibility, during the punch line the lunatic refuses for an absurd reason.

            Assuming that the punch line is a direct allegory for the dramatic situation, the offer to “shine the light so that you can walk across the beam” is being compaired to Batman’s offer to the Joker to live.  Batman admits that the Joker may succeed some day in killing him, so by asking for a truce Batman offers the security of life.  To the Joker, the security of life is as much of an impossibility as walking across a beam of light.   The joke points out that for Batman to try to reach the Joker on this level is insane, and for the Joker to accept it would be insane.  For the Joker, Batman’s offer of a secure life is a bad offer not because the tangible, biological state of life is unreliable (like the man holding the flashlight), but because such a life cannot even exist in his world.   Batman speaks of life for the sake of itself, while the Joker speaks of life for the sake of living.

            Batman firmly states during the final confrontation that the Joker has failed and that Commissioner Gordon has NOT been driven insane.  However, after going through that Gordon did, wouldn’t it be insane to not be insane? Gordon insists that Batman comply by the rules in apprehending and defeating the Joker, but the Joker’s point is that an ability to fall back on the concrete rules or laws does not constitute sanity or living a valuable life.  In a strong sense, the Joker has succeed in revealing both Batman and the Commissioner’s insanity; simply because Gordon can buck up and remember the rules does not mean he is sane

            So according to the Joker, (1)adherence and compliance to rules and morals despite such overwhelming force does not constitute sanity but rather quite the opposite, and (2) simply living does not constitute a life, and believing otherwise constitutes insanity.  Batman, as his is popularly imagined, defies both of these rules with his failure to kill the Joker.  No matter what the Joker does, who he hurts, or who he kills, Batman will not kill the Joker.  And despite what you may think after seeing Batman Begins, it really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with a commitment to justice, but rather simply because the Joker really hasn’t given Batman enough cause to kill him yet.  In Batman: Hush, he believes that the Joker killed an old friend of his and comes within inches of killing the Joker with his bare hands.  He needs to be talked down (strangely by Gordon, although I really don’t remember which novel comes first).

            Elegantly summed up in “The Dark Knight”, the Joker’s main point is that “the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules”.  Ultimately, after dissecting the Killing Joke, it seems that this is true because rules are simply sticks and leaves over the abyss.  Albert Camus was a nihilist but believed that creating your own meaning in life avoided the suffering of life in the face of the abyss staring back at you. We might be reminded of Camus’ Sisyphus who can’t help but feel a small iota of meaning in his repetitive task. The Killing Joke presents two such ways to handle this information.  Batman and Gordon put meaning into rules and life for its own sake.

The Joker puts meaning into the chaos of the abyss. He claims that we “have all these rules, and [we] think they will save [us]”, when really if we didn’t go out to create meaning (rules) and define meaning (life), we’d be saved from a system that could fall apart when a small part goes away, like a Jenga tower.  To the Joker, Sisyphus isn’t content because he’s found meaning in his life, even in hell.  Sisyphus is content because he is completely free from ever having to ask the question about whether or not his life has any meaning in any sense.

That was a big jump…  Why so serious?