Joker (2019)

i'd be TOTALLY game for a phoenix joker SHORT story. in fact, i think it'd be great to do like an "enter the matrix" style film with like 5 or 6 "want to know how i got these scars?" stories. obviously that wouldn't really work as a feature film, but i'd love an anthology of short stories about it. a feature film where joker is the protagonist is problematic at best. hollywood will hollywood it up and make joker sympathetic because they don't have the balls to make a film about an actual psychopath.

a 2 hour film about the joker should leave the audience feeling extremely uncomfortable and unhappy and that doesn't sell tickets. a film that focuses on the joker in any point in his history should seriously cause people all kinds of existential crises; anything less leaves the joker watered down.

that's one of the very few reasons why batman is an ACTUAL foil for joker, because despite how much interaction the two have, it doesn't change who batman is. batman doesn't think about "geez, i should really kill him this time" because batman didn't think that before he met him. the joker is really the embodiment of everything wrong. he twists and perverts everything he touches. i know everyone says he's an agent of chaos, i mean, even he said he was. but he's not. he's not an agent of chaos, he's incredibly ordered in plans. he doesn't want to make chaos (though that tends to be the outcome) he wants to make things "wrong."

anyway, the point is that you can't make a hollywood movie about that because it's not uplifting enough.

lgarthy said:

(Also, I can never understand how Batman could sleep at all knowing he always lets Joker live and then he continues to kill scores of people).

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These days Batman's refusal to kill just makes him look dumber and dumber as the Joker is written more and more hideously evil. Grant Morrison's interpretation of that character is so over the top evil we're just out of reasons for the character to still be alive. By the end of Alan Moore's the Killing Joke, the comic in which the Joker paralyzes and likely abuses Barbara Gordon, Batman is still hoping to find a way to rehabilitate the Joker. One interpretation of that story is that it is the last Batman story. In the end the Joker refuses help and in the end Batman kills him. It's subtle but it's the kind of thing you expect from Moore. That interpretation aside it's a vision of a man with high ideals and moral fortitude. Fast forward to today and you've got the Joker having (now temporarily) paralyzing Barbara Gordon, killing Jason Todd, cutting one of Alfred's hands off, killing tons and tons of people everywhere he goes all the time, and capping it off by releasing a Rage style contagion into the Gotham that very nearly kills everyone in the city. That's where we're at now - attempted global pandemics involving the virus from 28 Days Later. The planet is full of super powered heroes and villains and no one's decided to toss him into the sun? Right.

These days a better reason was presented in the Metal storyarc. It's fairly edgelordy and dumb but the premise there is a dark universe in which all of the worst fears of our heroes have come to pass. A series of Batmen, each representing one of Bruce's fears, are brought together to attack our heroes. Each is given a one-issue standalone comic in which they are introduced. In the Batman Who Laughs we see a Batman finally driven to kill the Joker and in doing so is corrupted utterly. The fear that if he ever killed the Joker that things would get worse than as bad as they are? That I can believe. A link to the comic (warning, it's basically the most edgelordy Elseworlds story ever) https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Dark-Nights-The-Batman-Who-Laughs/Full?id=125191#1

Personally I would just prefer the Joker was less a memetic reincarnation of evil throughout history (not joking) trying to infect the world with a super virus



and more the Crown Prince of Crime.

Jesus this shit is as bad as I remember.

Anyone shopped his face to lose the stupid nose paint yet? Seems like something they could easily change digitally. (Then again, maybe not after Cavill's 'stache)

I can kinda get why Batman doesn’t want to kill Joker: Joker is the worst of the worst. If you rationalize killing the worst of the worst, then he fears that bar will continue to move downwards and he isn’t sure where it stops, esp if the killing becomes easier. You basically become The Punisher at some point.

Although I’m sure the thousands of murdered people would disagree lol

i mean, we're arguing about comic books, so take everything with a grain of salt...

joker killing someone is never batman's fault. i mean it is in some transient, existential way, but not directly. failing to stop a crime and being complicit in that crime are absolutely not the same thing. we, as humans, need to find causation and if that causation doesn't come with resolution, we'll keep looking. joker killing someone stops being about joker being at fault and starts being about batman being guilty for allowing joker to continue, when that is very much not what's going on.

mass public assigns guilt pretty freely, but batman doesn't operate that way, guilt is much more concrete, so when joker commits a crime, that's on joker. it's not batman's fault for letting him live, it's joker's fault for refusing to rehabilitate.

this starts to get into real unwieldy territory because the entire reason joker doesn't rehabilitate is because he's a character that makes DC money. the narrative is built from the meta data that joker cannot be rehabilitated because it would cost DC money. batman doesn't know this, as far as he's concerned, arkham is an upstanding facility with excellent patient care. the entire universe has to think that or else everything false apart.

j00t said:

i mean, we're arguing about comic books, so take everything with a grain of salt...

joker killing someone is never batman's fault. i mean it is in some transient, existential way, but not directly. failing to stop a crime and being complicit in that crime are absolutely not the same thing. we, as humans, need to find causation and if that causation doesn't come with resolution, we'll keep looking. joker killing someone stops being about joker being at fault and starts being about batman being guilty for allowing joker to continue, when that is very much not what's going on.

mass public assigns guilt pretty freely, but batman doesn't operate that way, guilt is much more concrete, so when joker commits a crime, that's on joker. it's not batman's fault for letting him live, it's joker's fault for refusing to rehabilitate.

this starts to get into real unwieldy territory because the entire reason joker doesn't rehabilitate is because he's a character that makes DC money. the narrative is built from the meta data that joker cannot be rehabilitated because it would cost DC money. batman doesn't know this, as far as he's concerned, arkham is an upstanding facility with excellent patient care. the entire universe has to think that or else everything false apart.

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One of the subthemes of the two characters that makes an appearance from time to time is the idea that the Joker only exists because Batman exists. I always think of the scene in the Dark Knight Returns where we see the news reports about the reappearance of Batman slowly restore a semi-catatonic Joker to his murderous self but in the aftermath of Endgame the writers put subtlety aside -




As real people than no, it wouldn't be Batman's fault but in fiction I think it has some merit. Batman being pathologically incapable of taking a life doesn't excuse everyone else on the planet however. Superman doesn't even have a no-kill policy. He just generally doesn't.






The Adventures of Superman #14 is a pretty fine comic all things considered.

Actually I love this comic too much to not post more of it -

Not killing the joker and other such evil fucks is stupid and anyone who buys in to "you become evil by killing evil" is stupid and all the made up bull shit encounters where bats goes crazy or bad bc he killed the joker is stupid crappy SJW writers ejaculating their bullshit all over.

After any chance batman had to kill the joker, all deaths, rapes, mutilation etc. Are all on batman... but he can apparently live with that just fine.

Xadion said:

Not killing the joker and other such evil fucks is stupid and anyone who buys in to "you become evil by killing evil" is stupid and all the made up bull shit encounters where bats goes crazy or bad bc he killed the joker is stupid crappy SJW writers ejaculating their bullshit all over.

After any chance batman had to kill the joker, all deaths, rapes, mutilation etc. Are all on batman... but he can apparently live with that just fine.

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But what if things get worse!

Then someone should have killed him.

Xadion said:

Then someone should have killed him.

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BUT WHAT IF IT THINGS GOT REALLY REALLY WORSE

Another new Joker? good lord, i havent even gotten used to the last new joker yet.

Chukzombi said:

Another new Joker? good lord, i havent even gotten used to the last new joker yet.

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It's an Elsewords style story that represents one of Batman's fears. This is going to be mainline continuity however -



Three Jokers at once! THREE

Honestly the best explanation I've come across is that if Batman killed the Joker than the Joker would still have to show up at least as many times as before (maybe even more after his death) and Batman would eventually be killing him two or three times an issue. The Joker is too popular to go anywhere.

The whole thing would just get absurd!

yeah, like i said, it's starts to become a difficult argument to make, because we want to argue in terms of batman and joker being real people and they aren't. in the real world neither character can exist. they are monoliths and paragons and they just can't survive in the real world.

batman is the definition of gray area. he maims people, breaks bones, tortures them... as a reader you want to look at it and say that anyone who does that kind of stuff SHOULD at some point start using a sliding scale on what's okay and what's not. it's INCREDIBLY easy to justify joker's death vs hundreds or thousands, but again, batman doesn't think that way. he can't, because as Big Toe puts it, batman is just as insane as the joker. might honestly be even worse. and honestly? batman probably knows this as well. if he budges even an inch on his stance he'll be off to the races.

batman doesn't not kill people for some altruistic "killing is bad" reason. batman doesn't kill because it's the ONLY thing separating himself from the ones who murdered his parents. he doesn't kill people for HIM. he doesn't dress up like a bat and fight bad guys to save the world. he is 100% selfishly acting out. gotham is HIS city. he says that all the time. in his eyes, gotham doesn't belong to the people, it belongs to him and he gets to do whatever he wants in that city. and he WANTS to hurt people.