Given his reputation as an unreliable narrator, it should come as no surprise that the Joker’s solo movie is a story rife with ambiguity that might make viewers question how much truth there is to what is depicted in the DC film, including its deliberately murky ending.

What Happens at the End of Joker?

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Given how open to interpretation Joker is, we’ve deviated from our usual Ending Explained approach to include multiple takes on the film’s ending from IGN editors who have seen the film.So let us all break down as best we can then what happened — or appeared to happen — in the closing moments of director Todd Phillips’ award-winning comic book movie.It is in an atmosphere of growing civil unrest in Gotham City that Joker appears on Live With Murray Franklin — and kills the talk show host on air as retribution for previously mocking him. The shocking televised murder grips the media just as Gotham’s protests against the rich and powerful explode into full-on violent rioting. As he’s driven off by a GCPD officer, Joker watches as Gotham — the city that has thus far been so cruelly indifferent to him — collapses into fiery anarchy. It brings a smile to his painted face despite the cop who’s driving him castigating him for the madness he’s inspired.That’s when an ambulance driven by two clown-masked rioters slams into the cop car, knocking out Arthur Fleck/Joker and more grievously injuring the policeman driving the patrol car. The duo delicately extract Joker from the backseat and lay him reverently on the hood of the crashed police car. Throngs of masked looters and rioters start to swarm around Joker.The movie intercuts with scenes of similar anarchy elsewhere in Gotham. We see rioters turning a more posh part of town into chaos. There’s a glitzy movie theater playing a double bill of Blow Out and Zorro the Gay Blade, attended by Thomas, Martha and young Bruce Wayne, who exit the theater and into the chaos. Thomas guides his wife and son through the crowd before they sneak down a side alley to avoid rioters.Their escape doesn’t go unnoticed by a clown-masked gunman who follows them into the alley. (Remember, Thomas Wayne is a mayoral candidate who previously made disparaging remarks about the clown-masked protestors on TV.) The gunman draws on Thomas Wayne, calling him by name, the latter only managing a “No, pal!” before the gunman says, echoing Joker’s line before he killed Murray Franklin, “You get what you f*****g deserve!” The gunman shoots Thomas dead and then turns his gun on Martha, killing her too — while also breaking her pearl necklace (maintaining the long tradition of portraying the Waynes’ murders).Meanwhile, Joker wakes up aboard the hood of the smashed patrol car and sees the anarchy he’s helped unleash. After a lifetime of being ignored and abused, Arthur Fleck is now someone who is being celebrated. He stands atop the car and uses the blood from his mouth to draw a Joker smile across his face. He preens for the crowd, a hero, an idol, a criminal celebrity.Then the screen cuts to black.Watch Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips respond to the criticism that Joker is a "dangerous" movie:After a pause, we see Arthur (sans Joker makeup) in a cell being interviewed by a shrink. He appears to have been institutionalized in the interim, presumably in Arkham, his handcuffed hands working a cigarette. He’s dressed in all white and within a white room, chuckling to himself. The shrink asks him what he’s laughing about. He says he was thinking of a joke. When she asks what it was, he replies, “You wouldn’t get it.”In those moments there’s a quick shot of young Bruce Wayne standing over the corpses of his slain parents in the alley. We then cut back to Arthur, cigarette in hand, as he speaks the lyrics to “That’s Life” while the Frank Sinatra tune plays.The final shot of Joker is a long take looking down the asylum hallway as Arthur exits the shrink’s office, leaving bloody footprints behind as he goes, implying he killed his therapist. As Sinatra’s “That’s Life” continues to play, a sequence reminiscent of an old silent comedy plays out as Arthur is chased back and forth by asylum orderlies. Then the end credits roll over another Sinatra classic, “Send in the Clowns”.Director Todd Phillips has come out on record to say "we have no plans for a [Joker] sequel," saying, "We made this movie, I pitched it to Warner Bros. as one movie. It exists in its own world. That's it." That being said, there's always the chance Joker's record-breaking $96 million opening weekend might change some tunes, but as things currently stand, there will not be a sequel to Joker.During a recent interview, Joaquin Phoenix did leave the door open for a Joker 2 , however unlikely. “I talked to Todd a lot about what else we might be able to do, in general, just to work together, but also specifically, if there’s something else we can do with Joker that might be interesting,” Phoenix said. “So, it ended up being a dream role. It’s nothing that I really wanted to do prior to working on this movie. I don’t know that there is [more to do]. Me and Todd would still be shooting now if we could, right? Because it seemed endless, the possibilities of where we can go with the character.”This final scene isn’t the only sequence in the film where we see Arthur in such an institutionalized setting. Very early on in the film, as he speaks to his social worker, Arthur mentions how he thinks he’d been better off when he was hospitalized. The social worker asks him if he’s given any more thought about why he was hospitalized. Arthur dismisses it with, “Who knows?” But in between those lines the film cuts to a quick shot of Arthur, in white scrubs standing in a cell very similar to the one seen in the film’s closing moments, where he bangs his head into the door’s tiny window. Then it cuts back to the scene between Arthur and his social worker. So is it possible that Arthur has been in that white cell the whole time? That he’s simply imagined most of the events depicted in the movie as part of some empowerment fantasy?The film’s ambiguous nature and provocative ending has prompted an array of takes from IGN’s editors on what the ending of Joker could mean. Here’s what they had to say:What if the only unreliable parts of the film’s narrative are where Arthur Fleck imagines someone showing him any affection, from Murray to Sophie to the rioters at the end? Maybe even his mother? If so that would make everything else in the story the truth. That means everything else presented in the film is real, right down to Joker killing Murray Franklin live on TV and Bruce Wayne becoming orphaned during the riots. That begs the question why Arthur is thinking of Bruce Wayne standing over his dead parents during his talk with the psychiatrist at the end. What is the joke he says she wouldn’t get?The lyrics Arthur mutters at this moment are telling: “That's life, and as funny as it may seem/Some people get their kicks/Stompin' on a dream.” Is Arthur laughing because Thomas Wayne, the father he thinks was his own but who rejected him and the mayoral candidate who claims he was the only one who can save Gotham, is dead? Or is the joke that Bruce -- Arthur’s little brother, if you will -- will also never have a happy day in his life now? Or does Arthur realize he’s set some larger, more momentous destiny in motion between himself and Bruce?Or, is it that Arthur is simply mad and that nothing that’s transpired in the film is real, from his transformation into Joker to literally anything else? That even the Waynes are just characters in his head? Which parts of the story can be trusted as true? Frankly, that’s the beauty of the film. Joker never makes it clear what is truth or falsehood. And the filmmakers have thus far refused to tip their hands on how much of the story might be real or imagined. I hope they keep that secret.The first time I saw Joker, I was convinced I could tell what was real in the movie from what was in Arthur's head. The second time, I realized after talking with someone who had a completely different read on the movie than I did that this movie is constructed in a way that someone else could argue why something you're convinced is real never actually happened at all. I think the simplest read on this movie is that it all happened, but the final two sequences -- with Arthur in the mental hospital being interviewed, and then running down the hallway in a very choreographed way that could be taken out of a (very dark) Scooby-Doo episode -- call that read into question.My favorite read of the movie is that everything that happens on the streets of Gotham after Arthur kills Murray Franklin is in his head. Instead, it would propose that the clown mask-wearing masses who so rapturously cheer for him are his interpretation of how people could be reacting, while he's instead likely just been arrested and taken straight to Arkham. I also really like the read that this isn't the Joker, but instead a Joker who inspired the person who eventually became the infamous Batman rogue. We see that set-up by Arthur not being the person who kills the Waynes, and for people who are about the non-canonical age difference between Bruce and Arthur, this would also rationalize how this movie isn't breaking Batman mythology in its interpretation.Joker's divisive ending is all about point of view. And in this case, it's Arthur Fleck's (aka Joker) who we must rely on to tell his version of the story truthfully. Seeing Fleck dressed in white at the hospital makes me think that Joker fabricated his whole story, as he recounts his tale to the social worker.We learned earlier in the film that Fleck is an unreliable narrator, especially after it was revealed that he never had a romantic relationship with Zazie Beetz's Sophie. It seems like the moments when Joker is the happiest in the film, are the times when he's lying: Kissing Sophie, the first time he meets Murray Franklin, being saved by the clowns in the ambulance, etc. Bottom line, you can't trust Joker!The moment in Joker when his love interest (Zazie Beetz) turns out to be no love interest at all — which is to say, their relationship was all in his head — is one of the keys to understanding Joker and its ending. In that scene, the film finally shows its hand: What has been real up to that point and what have been the fantasies of Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur is up for debate. Indeed, when we — and Arthur — learn that Arthur’s mom Penny had an affair with Thomas Wayne, and that Wayne is actually Arthur’s father, the film seems in danger of veering off course with a ridiculous twist. But eventually we learn that Penny was also delusional and made the whole thing up. Only... do we?Remember the photo that shows up right before Phoenix goes full Joker? It’s of the young Penny and appears to have a romantic message from Thomas Wayne on it. Based on that, it seems completely feasible that Wayne gaslit Arthur’s mom, faked the child Arthur’s “adoption,” and even had Penny committed to Arkham in order to keep her quiet. So that, in turn, led to Mrs. Fleck’s mental problems or at least exacerbated them, which fueled Arthur’s problems and his descent into becoming Joker... which inadvertently caused Thomas Wayne’s death, which of course sends Bruce Wayne on a life-long mission of vengeance. That read would mean Thomas Wayne triggered his own death and the creation of Batman!But we can’t really know, because there is no “true” answer. Even Arthur doesn’t know what really happened to get him to the point of becoming Joker. And that actually makes this Joker origin story truer to the source material than we might’ve expected it to be.Watch our rave review of Joker below:The open-ended conclusion to Joker is reminiscent of Taxi Driver, which has been cited as an influence by director Todd Phillips. So I’m choosing to make sense of Joker’s curious final scenes through a Taxi Driver lens. Taxi Driver ends with Travis Bickle finally succumbing to his violent urges and going on a killing spree where he seemingly dies in the bloodbath, only for an epilogue to show him in his cab looking healthy and content as he picks up his would-be lover for a fare. Much has been debated about what it truly means, but I subscribe to the theory that Travis died on the night of his shooting and that scene is a vision of what he saw in his mind’s eye during his last moments -- a look at what he wanted the outcome to ideally be.When this analysis is applied to Joker, it’s easy enough to see how, after a certain point, none of what we’re seeing is actually happening. I believe that particular point is the car crash. Joker’s body is taken out of the crushed cop car by masked rioters, but he doesn’t show any signs of life -- and I think that’s because he was killed in the crash, and everything that happens after is the fantasy of a dying Arthur Fleck. As he lay unmoving on the hood, the Waynes are shot in the alley and Bruce is given his Batman origin. That’s the true end to the story. When Joker wakes up with a cough of blood, there’s a dreamlike quality to the scene as he stands up and receives a hero’s welcome for his brutal actions. He drinks it in, basking in the praise that he never got from his standup act. It’s too good to be true, which is why I think it is. That’s the ending he wished he got, but in reality he lay there dying in the car, only imagining this ending that sees him lifted up as a twisted savior. Arthur imagined an ideal relationship with his neighbor, so why not an ideal ending?The Arkham Asylum shown in the final scene is far too clean and pristine to be the same place shown earlier in the movie. The all-white walls, floors, and Arthur’s clothing are bathed in a divine white light, meaning this is an afterlife of sorts. I wouldn’t quite call it “heaven” given that Arthur is imprisoned there, forced to answer for what he did. Arthur is perhaps, then, forever trapped in a purgatory of sorts where the murders he committed, as symbolized by his bloody footprints, stop him from ever moving on, while his endless running from the orderly symbolizes his lack of empathy and his refusal to accept responsibility for what he did.The Joker is dead, long live Batman.While Joker’s ending is as deliberately ambiguous as everything that came before it, leaving room for multiple interpretations that are equally plausible, the shot of the orphaned Bruce Wayne standing over the bodies of his parents in Crime Alley leads me to believe that Arthur did indeed incite the Gotham Riots, and is now reflecting upon the irony that Gotham’s most privileged son has lost everything, just as Arthur has.If we trust that Arthur wasn’t hallucinating Thomas Wayne’s love note on the back of his mother’s photo (and I’m inclined to believe that their affair was real, and that Thomas used his power and influence to gaslight an already unstable Penny Fleck to hide the existence of his bastard son) then it’s easy to imagine why it would be particularly hilarious - from Arthur’s perspective, anyway - that being tangentially responsible for his father’s death has given Arthur a modicum of peace, while, in his mind, simultaneously condemning Bruce to the same life of misery and isolation Arthur experienced growing up without a paternal figure.Little does Arthur know that by destroying Bruce’s family, he’s inadvertently created the man who will someday defeat him... Or, to look at it from Joker’s more twisted and obsessive point of view (or, at least, applying the logic of the Joker we’ve come to know in the comics), he’s inadvertently created the closest bond he’ll ever forge with another human being, given that the Dark Knight and the Clown Prince of Crime have proven consistently unwilling to kill each other over the years, no matter what tortures the Joker inflicts. Adding an unexpected layer of sibling rivalry makes their Sisyphean relationship all the more poetic, and tragic, even if Joaquin Phoenix’s version of Joker will probably never officially connect with any other DC Batman films. That's life, right?Watch director Todd Phillips explain how Scorsese helped out Joker in the video below:While there’s probably one specific, definitive outcome in Todd Phillips’ head, the ending of Joker feels wide open to interpretation on the audience’s part. You can take it at face value, and accept that everything that happened on screen actually transpired — y’know, aside from his relationship with Sophie, which is pretty clearly debunked. On that level, it’s the fairly straightforward story of Arthur Fleck’s transformation into The Joker - or at least, A Joker. On the other hand, maybe none of it happened, and the whole movie was one big joke, playing out in Arthur Fleck’s head while he’s talking to his social worker in a white room in Arkham. Early in the film, she asked him if he remembered why he was hospitalized, and got a brief glimpse of him in a hospital room, bashing his head into a door. Perhaps he never left the hospital, and entire film’s events are his delusional fantasy.In between these two possibilities, there’s a wide swath of other variations. His non-existent romance with Sophie establishes we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, but… How unreliable? Was Arthur’s mother in his head the whole time? Was she really abusive? Did he actually kill her? What about Randall, was he actually a jerk to Arthur? Did he actually give him a gun, or rat him out at work? Did Arthur actually kill him? Hell, did Randall exist at all? And then of course, that grand finale — Did Arthur brutally murder his social worker after she interrupted his daydream, a joke he was laughing at that nobody else would understand? Or was that him lapsing back into his fantasy of dancing down the hall, leaving a trail of blood? Oops, I guess I didn’t explain anything. I just asked a bunch of rhetorical questions. Huh. Welp, anyway.My theory is that Arthur Fleck was in the Arkham hospital under psychiatric care for the entirety of the film’s story, repeatedly imagining himself navigating and interacting with the outside world. He was likely raised in psychiatric care since a young boy and had never actually left the hospital. His visions and imagined actions were all a product of things he watched on television and co-opted as his own. Murders, crime sprees, and more took place on the news every night and Arthur Fleck consumed every moment through wide eyes glued to the mounted television in the corner of his mental institution’s common area until he began to take responsibility for them through his constantly waning battles with reality and delusion.In the real world, a Joker-like character still exists, as does his legion of followers - one of which even murdered Thomas and Martha Wayne in front of their son outside of a movie theater one night. But it’s not Arthur and never was. He never murdered three men on a train or appeared on a popular late night comedy variety show to assassinate its host. Somebody else did, but it was never him. He only watched from afar and decided to make the story and identity his own through hopelessness, mental debilitation, and perverse delusions of grandeur.I don't think it matters at all how much of what happened over the course of Joker was real or not real, that happened or didn't happen. The unknowing and the general disassociation from reality is sort of the point of what makes The Joker such an effective personification of chaos. My initial impression of the film was as a mythologizing of a classic evil archetype, made up of narcissism, impulsiveness, isolation, unrealized potential, unconfronted trauma and impotent rage. Not having a clear answer as to what the impact that combination genuinely has or doesn't have makes it work like a horror movie... What's frightening isn't the result, but the potential of the result, and the randomness with which it could occur. Phoenix’s physical performance mimics this theme throughout; he's wound up tight as a tick and you never know when he's going to explode, or dance, or do nothing. You're left feeling consistently anxious. His very existence creates anxiety.I would agree with what some of the other folks who saw it have said, that there is no point to Joker, that it ends on a hopeless note. It doesn't culminate in him being caught or punished or feeling remorse. But that's also what works about it, what makes it frightening. That these sort of people do exist, and even if and when they are brought to justice, they feel and express no remorse at all. It's an existential threat to civilized society. Joker doesn't offer any solutions, but neither did Requiem For a Dream or Natural Born Killers or any number of other similar films. If there is a political message in there somewhere, it's in how effectively transmutable this madness and interpersonal chaos is to the general population, who may also feel isolated, and a sense of impotent rage, and are increasingly likely to lash out in some way as we've seen. It's a little crazy that a deep and disturbing societal observation like this is coming from a comic book movie, but I don't think it's the filmmaker's job to solve it in 122 minutes.In leaving the ending up to interpretation, Joker leans into underlaying cultural mythology of the character and asks the audience to draw their own conclusions as to what responsibility "the good and the just" have that such an evil could even exist, as The Joker has always and will always do. Joker represents the irrational, hopeless despair that makes Batman second guess the conviction upon which his entire worldview is built. How could his titular film end in any other way but despairing, hopeless and irrational?My take is that this is Fleck revelling in the chaos that has erupted from the barrel of his gun and stating that only he can understand the satisfaction that he has reaped from it. Not only does he find the fact that he has seemingly brought Gotham to its knees hilarious, but also hints at a more personal joy. The cut to an orphaned Bruce Wayne plays as a sick joke in his head, he smiles and takes pleasure in knowing he has destined the most privileged child in the city to a childhood as traumatic as his was. After all, Arthur Fleck ultimately never had Thomas Wayne as father, so why should Bruce? This will ultimately, of course, will lead to Master Wayne spending his life searching for his place in society and acting as a vigilante for the people of Gotham, much in the same way Arthur Fleck had done decades previously, albeit with more honest intentions. Fleck utters the words, “some people get their kicks, stompin' on a dream”, from Sinatra’s “That’s Life” in the same scene.This is another line that can be taken one of two ways. The more literal being that Joker literally takes joy in the stomping on the dreams and aspirations of others. Another inference could be Fleck’s own feelings towards Robert De Niro’s Murray Franklin, who humiliated him on live television, in turn stomping on his dream of being a successful comedian. This is something he can know smile about however, ever since he painted the set of his show with his own brain. I believe these words to be a statement by director Phillips towards the audience though. Yes, you can believe that most, if not all of the twisted events of Joker took place in Fleck’s mind, but in doing so you are stomping on his dream, which in turn is Gotham’s nightmare and Batman’s birthplace.Ultimately, the ambiguity of the film’s ending perfectly mirrors the ambiguity of the Joker himself. Becoming chaos incarnate means that you write your own rules, and create your own past, present, and future. It doesn’t matter if the entire thing happened in the confines of Arthur’s mind, or if Gotham actually burned. In either scenario, he’s accomplished his goals, he’s made himself the (anti) hero. Outside of the obvious sequel set-up, which I honestly hope doesn’t happen as this film feels like a standalone work, the questions that the ending poses to the audience are completely subjective. If you’ve bought into the mythos, does it matter if it’s all made up?As far as explanations are concerned, I won’t even waste the time to try and convince folks one way or the other. You either trust an extremely unreliable narrator and watch a city burn, or assume you’ve managed to see inside the mind of a sociopath and then head home for a cold shower and a stiff drink.Directors who leave their movies open-ended are playing a dangerous game. The intent, of course, is to allow the audience to project their own meaning onto the film – did Arthur Fleck realize his destiny as an avatar of mayhem or did he while away the movie’s runtime tucked safely within the padded walls of Arkham? But modern audiences are just as likely to conclude that the movie’s end has no meaning at all, that, like the Joker himself, its purpose is to divide opinion, set people to arguing, and cause mayhem.I’ve decided to resolve this dilemma ontologically: if Arthur Fleck is only a mental patient who dreams of bloody vengeance then he simply is not the Joker in any meaningful sense. Fleck is a sad, disturbed, and neglected man. The Joker is the rallying point of a city’s fury, he is Gotham’s repressed id, he is Batman’s murderous reflection. He can’t be these things if his violence isn’t real, if the havok he wreaks doesn’t cause real damage. Violence isn’t the subject of the Joker’s delusions, it’s how he fulfills them.I’m saying he really did shoot Robert De Niro in the face and then dance on the hood of a cop car. That’s what I’m saying.What did you think of Joker’s ending? How much of what you saw in the film is true and how much is the figment of the main character’s twisted imagination? Let us know in the comments.For more on Joker, enjoy our rave review , find out why Joker doesn't have a post-credits scene , learn what director Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix had to say about the controversy surrounding the film , get the story behind Joker’s makeup , find out which movies inspired Joker , and discover how Martin Scorsese helped out the DC film