It’s fashionable to update a film or cartoon to account for contemporary mores – but however well intentioned, the original sexism or racism tends to stick. It’s time for new faces to tell entirely new stories

I’m not much of a fan of the original 1988 Alan Moore/Brian Bolland graphic novel The Killing Joke. But I was blown away by just how wretchedly awful the cartoon remake – previewed at Comic-Con and with a limited cinema release on Monday – is.

Director Sam Liu and writer Brian Azzarello have added a half hour of new story on to the beginning of the narrative, in which they methodically turn Batgirl into a clumsy agglomeration of misogynist tropes. Pursued by a creepy stalker mafia tough-guy villain, Batgirl makes amateurish mistake after amateurish mistake, prompting Batman to sneer to her face that the bad guy “led you like a lap dog”.

In response, Batgirl whines that Batman doesn’t trust her, has impulsive sex with him, and then indulges in a series of violent emotional tantrums before deciding to retire her Batgirl identity on the grounds that the stress is too much for her.

As a bonus, Batman hypocritically lectures her on the dangers of objectification while the bad guy compulsively and smarmily sexualizes her, and the cartoon lingers on a closeup image of her butt when she jogs. Girls aren’t emotionally or mentally tough enough to be heroes, is the message; they’re just too darn emotional. But hey, they look good in those tight costumes, right?

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In theory, the additional Batgirl material was supposed to provide a counterweight to the casual misogyny in The Killing Joke. In Alan Moore’s version, Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, is casually shot by the Joker and crippled as a way of tormenting Batman and Barbara’s dad, Commissioner Gordon. Harming women to advance the emotional development of some dude is a wearisome comic-book plot staple, and producer Bruce Timms promised that the cartoon wouldn’t follow that same old script.

“We thought if we were going to expand this to feature length, we didn’t want to just pad out the original story,” Timms said. “So we took that opportunity to basically tell a Batgirl story, which we don’t often get a chance to do these days. And it was great, because we could spend more time with her as a character and get to understand what she’s all about and how she’s similar to Batman in some ways, and really different in others.”

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Perhaps different creators could have managed to craft a non-misogynist Batgirl story, especially if those creators were women. But a big part of the problem is, simply, that this is a Killing Joke adaptation. Superheroes just about never get point-blank shot, the way Barbara does in The Killing Joke. They dodge; they move superfast, they anticipate, they win. The Batgirl in The Killing Joke isn’t a hero, but a victim – and so, Azzarello and Timms follow along with the original material, and create a costumed hero who shouldn’t really be a hero at all. What kind of superhero would just let herself be shot? An overly emotional, unprepared, semi-incompetent hero, the cartoon creators chorus. Input a misogynist comic, add unimaginative creators – and presto! A misogynist cartoon.

The Killing Joke’s failure was predictable. But it’s still instructive. When critics and fans ask for a black James Bond or cheer on the female Ghostbusters reboot, they’re asking for Hollywood to challenge default racism and sexism. All heroes everywhere aren’t white guys, and the stories we tell should reflect that.

But if you’re retelling a racist, sexist story, it’s not always so easy to get that racism and sexism out of the formula. You can see that in the Ghostbusters reboot. As novelist NK Jemisin pointed out in a private Facebook post (quoted with permission), the Ghostbusters are all super-smart scientists … except for the one black character, Patty (Leslie Jones), who is a street-savvy subway worker. “Jones’s character contributed to the team, but she was never fully a part of it,” Jemisin says. And, she adds, with feeling: “She should’ve been a motherfucking scientist.”

In part, the fact that Jones was not allowed to be a scientist is indicative of broad cultural racism; because of longstanding stereotypes, black women are rarely presented as brilliant engineers or physicists. But Ghostbusters also limits Patty’s role because it’s based specifically on the original Ghostbusters. In the 1984 film, the one black man who becomes a Ghostbuster, Winston (Ernie Hudson), is thrown into the team as an afterthought halfway through the film. Winston is a hired hand; the three white Ghostbusters are the core team. Patty isn’t a real Ghostbuster for the same reason that Barbara isn’t a real hero. The original stories were sexist and/or racist, and so the remakes are sexist and/or racist as a way of being true to the franchise.

Rebooting stories that are racist and sexist is one way that racist and sexist narratives and ideas get replicated and perpetuated. You can sometimes change the story and make it better – and then, sometimes, you can’t. The Killing Joke didn’t have to be as wretched in cartoon form as it turned out to be, but remaking it was always going to be a bad idea.

Instead, maybe, DC could have done an animated Birds of Prey – a series in which numerous female superheroes, not least Barbara Gordon, fight crime together without having to ask Batman for permission. Rather than another white-focused 80s reboot, maybe Hollywood could finally get its act together and put out The Last Dragon remake they’ve been promising us. Or possibly, at some point, studios could even hire writers, directors and producers who aren’t white men to tell entirely new stories. I know that’s considered risky. But as The Killing Joke demonstrates, retelling mediocre, sexist stories badly doesn’t always work out so well either.