JOKER Director Todd Phillips Discusses The Shocking Ending of the Film and What It Means

If you haven’t seen Joker yet, then this is a post you might want to skip until you do because it deals with some aspects of the story you might not want to know about.

Over the course of the story that director Todd Phillps’ Joker film tells, there are a couple of plot points that we learn are completely made up in Arthur Fleck’s head. These moments certainly threw me for a loop and it made a lot of audience members question whether or not the ending of the movie was real or if it was all made up in Fleck’s head.

The movie is set up as a big joke when Arthur tells his counselor at the end… "You wouldn't get it." Well, Phillips recently talked to CB and was asked if the movie's overall narrative was real in that world's canon or if Arthur Fleck made the whole thing up. This was his response:

"When Scott Silver and I sat down to write it, we knew enough about the comics. I read comics when I was a kid, we knew he didn't have an origin story. We also, I don't want to say whether it's real or not because I think part of the fun, I've shown it to many, many different people and they all have a different reaction. Some of them say, 'Oh I get it, I mean the last line in the movie, you wouldn't get it, to a joke he was telling. Well is the joke the movie? Is the joke the thing? Or is the thing about the --' The idea is you don't like to answer those questions, because its nice to see the different things people take away from it."

So, obviously the filmmaker isn’t ready to give a concrete answer to this question as he intentionally made the movie the way he did to spark the discussions that a lot of people are having. It’s up to the audiences to decide what they want the ending to be. He goes on to say:

"That was the idea, the idea that all of 'My past is multiple,' I like to think of my past as multiple choice, it's a little bit of like, 'Wait, did that happen? Did this?' It's really kind of fun when you make a movie with an unreliable narrator. There is no greater unreliable narrator than Joker. He's an unreliable narrator and he's Joker, so it's sort of like a double whammy, and so I think that lends to people's reaction to the movie and I like that people don't really know what happened. There are certain things if you see it again, on a second viewing, you'll notice about that white room at the end that kind of picks up at the beginning, and you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, that's interesting.' Its kind of one of those."

I love this take on the story because it’s such a Joker way to tell a story! Also, this film doesn’t really give the Joker a solid origin story because we don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Even though this was supposed to be an origin story of how the Joker came to exist, this movie was made in a way where the origin is still kind of shrouded in mystery.

This is one of the things that I loved about the film most. Some people might find it frustrating, but that’s the whole point! The narrator is The Joker, he’s not the kind of person that’s going to give you a clean story. He’s going to go out of his way to make you feel uncomfortable, frustrated, and irritated.

What do you think about this aspect of the film? Did you feel that the way the movie played out was real, or do you think it was made up in Joker’s head?