Yes, this absolutely. But it’s also one of the serious flaws of action films that show good/bad guys- you never see the aftermath.
Take this scene from Dark Knight. Batman is on his ARMED motorcycle thing, Joker’s sitting there shooting at cars driven by innocent people. So at least 3-4 innocent people are now dead because Batman wouldn’t take the shot.
But you don’t see that- the cars windows are blacked out. You don’t see the innocent people torn apart and splattered all over their cars. You don’t see the little kid sitting in the back seat screaming as Mommy is torn to shreds by automatic rifle fire and the car crashes. You don’t see the family that no longer has a mom or dad or son or daughter. And because you don’t see that, our presentation of Batman’s ‘ethics’ is fake.
Ask any one of those families if they’d trade the Joker’s life to get their family member back. You won’t find a single one that says ‘I’m glad the Joker is alive, it was worth my daddy getting shot to avoid killing him’.
The fact is- Batman is selfish. He ALLOWS 3-4+ innocent people to die, to save his own conscience
Do you see him thinking about them in bed at night? The people he COULD have saved, that WOULD be alive if he just pulled the trigger? Of course not. Because the writers only show us half the story. They black out the car windows, so we don’t see the consequences.
And if you’re all ‘Batman isn’t a vigilante’, well sure. But even for a civilian, there’s rules of engagement. Even in the anti-gun state of California you’re allowed to use deadly force to save the life of yourself or another from a violent psychopath posing an imminent threat. Especially after Joker shot up the first car and showed he was going to do it again.
Avengers touched on it a bit, not as much as maybe they should have, but there was a scene where an entire building came down and one of the people who lost family in it confronted them.
(I thought I replied, but it seems to not be here, not sure if I forgot to hit Reply or what but trying this again)
Sadly not really.
Sometimes aftermath is used as a plot device- for example the Avengers series dealt with that a bit and who should be responsible for the actions of superheroes.
But for real ‘full picture’ it’s almost never shown because it’s messy and bloody and awful and really really sad. Think opening scene of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ just with a lot more feels. If those cars weren’t blacked out you’d see blood everywhere and the people in them would be either wounded and screaming or gasping for air as their lungs fill with blood or dead and mangled as bullets tore their bodies apart. And if anyone else was in the back seat and survived you’d have the terrified screams of a child who just watched as Mommy get turned into so much hamburger meat and then the driverless car crashed. And then, perhaps hours or days later, you’d have families that break down in panicked screaming-cries when they are told their wife/husband/mother/father/son/daughter is never coming home.
Ask any of THOSE people, and any of them would happily trade Joker’s life to get their loved one back.
The REALITY of serious violence can’t be shown in PG-13 movies and even R movies either can’t or don’t often show it. People go to the movies to have fun and feel good, not see a bloody mess that makes them want to puke and then cry as they experience the pain of a broken family.
Perhaps this bothers me more than most because I HAVE seen what the real result is like. I was around for the shock video era in the 2000s and saw some really awful stuff from Chechnya. There’s a bunch of combat footage coming from Ukraine. And closer to this subject, I’ve seen a lot of videos of defensive shooting incidents. It’s not like movies, it’s not fun. It’s just brutal and sad.
You sound dangerously close to blaming batman for the actions of a serial killer. He could attempt to step in sure, but those deaths are squarely at joker’s door.
Yeah when Batman sees killing Joker as just as bad as him murdering random Innocent civilians of Gotham, he’s stupid.
Same for Two Face and Scarecrow and all the others. Batman by leaving people to escape jail and murder more each time is not helping Gotham.
I can understand Batman and his motivations, but I think he has blood on his hands, and not just from the crooks he leaves with crippling medical debt.
I am blaming Batman for his choice and for his reasoning.
He pulls the trigger, Joker (a psycho who’s killed dozens/hundreds already and will kill even more) dies.
He doesn’t pull the trigger, 3-4 innocent people die now and Joker goes on to kill scores more.
I argue Batman can’t just wash his hands of responsibility because he CHOSE to put himself in that position. He decided to be the one with a motorcycle cannon pointed at Joker’s face. If he didn’t want to be responsible for life and death, he should have stayed home and gotten a massage. But no, he chose to be the city’s defender, so there he is.
Perhaps it helps to drop the movie and pick another analogy. Imagine there’s a mass shooter psycho walking around shooting children, and there’s a police officer with weapon drawn and pointed at the psycho. Police officer decides not to shoot the psycho because his conscience says he doesn’t want to kill anybody. And because he doesn’t take the shot, the psycho kills 3-4 more kids.
Do you argue the officer is blameless for those childrens’ deaths?
Each time Batman beat, did not kill, and captured the Joker for arrest the judicial system ruled him insane and he was held in a high security psychiatric ward/prison vs killing him. So, using the same measure, you could blame the laws, judges, juries, doctors, etc for all of Jokers future crimes when he broke out agian.
I think the point is that Batman is the only one who can even catch joker to begin with. Plus the legal system in Gotham is rigged so it’s not like they wouldn’t just let joker leave
Rigged for the rich and powerful right. What the hell kinda influence would a chaos agent like the joker have in such a system. Mobsters I can understand, the joker less so.
As an old friend of mine once said “If he killed em the writers would have to invent new enemies continuously. With that excuse they can put them in the Asylum and reuse them for new stories whenever they want.”
It’s funny that Punisher really isn’t all that popular but in the US his skull emblem in a Blue Lives Matter livery is an extremely popular automotive window decal.
The Punisher’s iconic story is about him executing his coworkers on the police force for killing his family. He’s the most directly anti-cop comic book character. But all the vets-turned-cops just remember how cool the skull looked ironed on to their gear in the military I guess.
It actually goes way back to the 80s and 90s when Punisher comics took off. It wasn’t as common as you see today, but the Punisher skull was on lunchboxes and tee shirts and tattoos and rifle cases. We didn’t have social media back then, though, so the cops kept their shared psychotic fantasies about unrepentant murder well hidden.
Pretty much why I prefer manga. The convention for manga is creators come up with their own characters and stories rather then remixing preexisting ones. Of course there’s original stuff in the west, but people don’t talk about those nearly as much. There’s also some examples of Japanese characters getting passed about to different writers, but that’s also less common.
I always think of Batman is a crazy person that he knows he’s a crazy person. Which is why he has to strictly follow rules he set for himself.
If Batman broke his rule against killing, within a few years people of Gotham would have to worry about getting killed by the Batman for jaywalking. Batman knows that he has the potential of going this way so he has to follow his rules to prevent that from happening.
I have felt that way since getting more into it and noticing how every character is broken, mentally, in some way. Bruce over the loss of his parents has been traumatized by death and refuses to acknowledge that some people really need it (Joker). The comics themselves acknowledge this often, with characters pointing out how he’s insane for dressing like a bat and fighting bad guys.
In a world where bad guys routinely obtain super powers and put on costumes to do crime, one guy with a bunch of money fighting crime in a bat suit doesn’t sound so far fetched. I mean his best friend is literally an immortal alien from Kansas, who could, should he fancy it, murder every criminal as they step over some arbitrary benchmark for criminality. Beating them to a pulp and turning them in is just a sick hobby they get away with.
It sounds crazy, even in that world, when you realize Superman exists. The Flash exists. People with actual, bonafide super powers exist. And then there’s Bruce Wayne. A rich playboy with PTSD, no super powers, fighting villains that often do have super powers.
Yeah that’s why the Joker is a great nemesis for Batman. They’re both crazy people, they’re both are aware that they’re crazy, only difference is one has rules and the other doesn’t. That’s basically all that separates them.
I feel like portraying Batman as someone does kill people is boring because there’s not psychological aspect to it.
There’s a universe where Batman was basically the punisher and goes around killing people.
The Grim Knight kills all the corrupt cops, mob bosses and villains. He also blows up blackgate and Arkham. Gotham ends up super safe, but somehow more of a dystopia than regular Gotham. Everyone lives in fear, and Batman has a 1984 setup where he spies in everyone and uses Waynetech to kill people.
Commissioner Gordon ends up arresting him with the help of info given to him by Alfred.
Would it make sense for someone to kill the Joker? Yes. However Batman is, in addition to being an anally retentive genius perfectionist, somewhat emotionally unstable. Dude isn’t the type of person who’d be able to kill the Joker and call it a day.
That being said I’m pretty sure the in universe reason right now is that killing the joker releases a gas that turns whoever is near it into another joker. If Batman killed the Joker, the gas would cause him to turn into a villain who can singlehandedly kill every other hero on earth. He would then continue to pull bullshit out of his ass until he gains the powers of Doctor Manhattan and almost destroys all of existence.
Wow, there’s a lot of cool writing going on there. Im not a comic book nerd, but gotta say I do wish they could do one comic movie with this level of depth and character development.
But I guess this is a case of the book is always better.
They always have excuses in the comics. I think the latest one of “the Joker has a super Joker toxin in his heart that’s released when he dies to turn whomever kills him into an even worse Joker” to be quite forced.
By the way, the Batman Who Laughs really overstayed his welcome.
In the next series “The Batman Who Laughs”, they showed that the mainstream Joker also had this failsafe too and no spoilers because the plot kinda builds around that.
That would actually be a pretty cool premise. A hero who promises he will kill himself once all evil is defeated, as what he does although for good is evil itself. But people love him too much so they themselves become evil to keep him around.
I guess kinda like a incredible situation, but more dark because the protagonist just wants to die instead of raise a family.
One of the bad guys becomes a good guy not because it’s the right thing to do but because he genuinely wants to see if the hero will kill himself but the only way to promise to not be evil again is to be a good guy. Since the bad guy either has to die or stop fighting for the hero to be happy, but he wouldn’t really trust the bad guy if he just stopped. So although he occasionally messes up the bad guys is pretty good now
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