Director Todd Phillips also responded to questions surrounding the Joker’s completion.
One thing is for sure: there is something to talk about about the mad antagonist film.
Although they didn’t want to complicate the Joker’s plot, there was still plenty to talk about after the staff list, and the various fan theories couldn’t be left out. Todd Phillips also responded to some burning questions, and hereafter serious spoilers follow, so scroll at your own risk!
Joker’s solo, all-night film is a huge success with both critics and viewers, and of course Warner Brothers can be pleased to see the revenue figures. Concerning the end of the original story, when Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is taken over as Joker’s iconic character, a certain issue has moved the imagination of quite a few viewers.
Following the chaotic events of the film, some might rightly assume that what we saw in the last 2 hours never actually happened, we merely followed a tale born in Arthur’s mind. The psychiatric setting that appears at the very end of the plot, or just Arthur’s last joke, dropped “You wouldn’t understand anyway.” half-sentence also somewhat reinforces this theory, and ComicBook.com has spoken to the film’s director, Todd Phillips, about exactly that.
Phillips asked a very mysterious answer to the question of whether the events of the film actually happened, or whether we could merely see a false narrative created by Arthur – which is perhaps not so surprising. The director said that when they started his screenplay with Scott Silver, they both knew that based on the comics, Joker’s character didn’t really have a specific origin story. That’s why they don’t even want to give a concrete answer to the possibility of the film, because the most beautiful thing about it is that the viewer himself can’t be sure what happened – really ?
To be sure, Phillips doesn’t want to give a concrete answer on the subject at the moment, but it very much seems that the film has consciously got a conclusion that can be interpreted in multiple ways. This almost immediately raises another question: does Arthur’s mother tell the truth about Thomas Wayne and the past of the two of them, or does the billionaire really confront the adopted boy with the truth? Phillips reacted to this duality again with a more nuanced, but also interesting, idea that there are few films that entrust the management of the story to a more unreliable, unstable narrator than Joker. This is why it may be worth rehearsing, so details that may not appear at first may appear, bringing us closer to the truth – or vice versa.
How did you interpret the Joker finale?
