What Does The Ending Of Joker REALLY Mean?

1. How Much Is Even Real?

One of the most interesting questions posed by the end of Joker is about reality versus fantasy.

There are hints throughout that Arthur is an unreliable narrator, which start when he explicitly says he didn't feel real for a long time. We also see his fantasy of being in the Murray Franklin Show audience and then later we're told his entire relationship with Sophie is in his head.

There are more subtle hints that what we're seeing is not necessarily reality (because it's seen through the filter of his eyes), too. Firstly, when he kills the three yuppies on the train, he uses a six shot gun but fires seven shots and then right at the end, when he laughs at the sight of Bruce Wayne and his dead parents, it's an impossible shot. There's no way Arthur could have witnessed it - it's no more than another fantasy. Sure, it could have been based on reports of the deaths, but he can't have seen it.

Without ever really explicitly stating it, the film challenges what we know to be real in a sort of insidious way, which means there's no real way to definitely say that the origin is a definitive one.

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