Joker: What does that ending mean?
OBVIOUSLY SPOILERS
I just saw Joker today and I can’t get over it. It’s so intense and does such a great job giving us an origin for a character I never wanted an origin for. However in this post I’m not talking about what I thought of the movie, I want to talk about the ending.
You get what you deserve.
Joker
While watching this my wife and I kept asking our self “what of this is real?” because if you put any thought into this movie at all you see that so much of it takes place in his head. The way I see it there are three endings to this movie.
- Joker becoming the the iconic villain.
- Arthur Fleck is insane and plays this all in his head over and over.
- A Combination of the two.
Personally I think it’s the third option. I think most of the murders in the movie are real, he killed the guys on the train, he killed his coworker, he killed his mother, he killed Murray Franklin, and I’m fairly certain he even killed the Arkham therapist at the end as well.
I’ve read and watched some theories on this ending, some saying that it was all in his head and none of it ever happened, and some argue the opposite. It is easy come to this conclusion for sure if you believe the ending scene with the therapist is him telling her about what’s all in his head. You could easily say he’s blending truth with fiction and he’s been locked up for a long time, which is shown because in that last scene he has grey hair and looks older.
The way I see it is everything in the movie that is someone looking at him with admiration is in his head, but I whole heartedly believe that he committed every single murder in the film they show him doing. I even think he murdered the therapist in the final scene. I think where the clowns pull him out of the car happened, but I think the clowns giving him a round of cheers is in his head. I think the thug killing Batman’s parents and quoting what the Joker said on the show happened. I mean, it had to.
Ultimately this movie makes me think about it and question everything in it. We’ve talked about about the joker recently, and though I do think DC should let the Joker rest a little and use other villains, this ending and the questions is springs shows why they never will.