Richard Beck, a psychology professor who blogs about theology, recently attended a Southwestern Psychological Association session by Travis Langley, author of Batman and Psychology.
This got Beck thinking about the dynamic between Batman and the Joker, and how it might help us to think about the dynamics at work in the Gospel story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. In Richard’s hands, that makes for a thoughtful and thought-provoking reflection. In my hands, it led me to think of this:
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’and ‘They shall shine their heavenly flashlight and you shall walk down safely across its beam.”
Jesus said to him, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test. And, besides, what if they turn it off when I’m half-way down?”
That’s a Killing Joke joke, albeit not a killer Killing Joke joke.
But I’m also somewhat serious there, following Richard’s line of thinking when he writes this:
Satan isn’t a super-villain with super-powers confronting us from the outside.
Satan is more like the Joker, a force that probes and exploits the darker elements in our psyche, our fears and our perversions.
And that’s what got me thinking about The Killing Joke — one of my favorite Batman stories, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland in 1988. The ending of that story is still hotly disputed. And, like all stories, its meaning depends on how it ends. The argument over how this story ends is, in other words, something like an eschatological debate.
And the outlines of that debate really do echo Richard Beck’s thoughts on the temptation of Jesus — and on the meaning of the Gospel as a whole. How do you think the story ends? Does the Good Guy ultimately have to kill the Bad Guy? And if so, who really wins?
I wouldn’t like this story at all if I thought it ended with Batman choking the Joker to death while laughing maniacally. I think that ending would ruin this story for me — and would probably ruin all the other Batman stories as well. That’s how Tim LaHaye wants his stories to end — with the Good Guys punching the Bad Guys to death. And I don’t think that ending fits with the rest of the story. Not at all.
Not with this story, or with the bigger story either.
(The image of a page from The Killing Joke is copied from Joseph Hughes’ article for Comics Alliance, “So What Really Happened at the End of ‘The Killing Joke’?” For the record, I agree with Hughes.)
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