5. (Nearly) Breaking The Joker's Neck In The Dark Knight Returns
It's one of the longest running debates in the Batman comics, and in comics in general, brought up in Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight, in
Death in the Family, in
No Man's Land, and most recently (and rather wearyingly) in Scott Snyder's
Death of the Family story arc -- why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker? The most often stated excuse is the old "he's not worth it" standby (honestly, the
real reason Batman doesn't kill the Joker is that the Joker's a great character, and good for sales). When writing his legendary 1986 opus The Dark Knight Returns, about the latter days of Batman's career, Frank Miller decided to bring the issue to a head. Here an older Bruce Wayne, faced with the reemergence of the Joker, and the murder at his hands by hundreds of innocent children at a carnival, vows to end the madness once and for all... ...but he can't do it. He can't, in the end, bring himself to kill the Joker. But, y'know, twisting his neck almost to the point of breaking? That's totally kosher:
One of the important ideas imbedded within Dark Knight Returns is that Batman is more than a man, almost bigger than conventional morality. Is a man taking up vigilante justice right or wrong? How does one reconcile the positive effects of Batman's reemergence (a drop in street crime, inspiring good people like Carrie Kelly to work for justice) with its negative effects (the reemergence of old foes like the Joker and Two-Face)? It often seems as though Miller is making Batman and his effects purposefully ambiguous, and that is perhaps no more effective anywhere than here. Batman *technically* doesn't break his "one rule", but as in Batman Begins, it might be argued that he slides by on a technicality --
if Joker survives, he'll basically be dead anyway, and in spite of the Joker being an insane mass murderer one has to imagine there will be a public outcry over Batman's mistreatment of him. (The fact that Joker manages to twist his neck that extra little bit, just to frame Batman for his murder, is the final twist of the knife.) Batman himself doesn't look terribly pleased by what he's done; the conflicting feelings coursing through him -- the terrible feeling that he really
should've killed the Joker, the equally terrible knowledge that he
can't -- is perhaps an apt metaphor for the conflicted feelings of the readers themselves.