Joker Is Nothing But A Big—

STOP!

MASSIVE SPOILERS LIE AHEAD!

I MEAN…

YUGE!

AND THAT’S NO JOKE!

Okay, since you’re still here, let’s start anew — but bear with me now, this may just turn into a rambling fanboy mess…

From the top:

Joker Is Nothing But A Big, Beautiful—

Well, before I get into all that I just gotta say once again how great it is for there to finally be a movie out of Hollywood that has the stamina to stick with me for longer than it takes for me to exit the theater.

I mean, my sons and I have pretty much been discussing it continually since seeing it, debating what’s real from it and what was just Arthur Fleck’s delusions.

Of course there are many interesting reviews of it on youtube that are putting forth many different theories…

Theories pondering the likes of, did Fleck kill Sophie and her child? Some say no since we see that he is capable of kindness by letting Gary live;

Or whether or not Fleck is Thomas Wayne’s love child, which would then make him Bruce Wayne’s half brother. Many say yes he is since Wayne is rich and powerful enough to cover up his affair with Fleck’s mother and then gaslight her into insanity.

And there are many, many more questions with many more possible answers floating around out there.

Eventually, I found my way into the camp that theorizes that the entire movie is a grand, narcissistic delusion that Fleck happily recounts to his psychiatrist, of whom we don’t see until the very end.

But something still wasn’t sitting right with me about the movie.

Ever since it was announced, the title irked me.

Why just Joker?

Why not The Joker?

I mean, it has since been corrected, but as late as two days ago even the summary of Todd Phillip’s Wikipedia entry mistakenly referred to his movie as The Joker.

So why not just call the damn thing The Joker and be done with it?

Well, I’m gonna tell you why. It’s because…

Joker is nothing but a big, beautiful joke!

The entire movie…

A joke.

And it’s on us… the entire movie-going world.

Arthur Fleck doesn’t become the genius psychotic mastermind who has the capacity and wherewithal to bring Gotham’s entire criminal element to heel.

He is simply the crazy delusional loser who will eventually inspire the real Joker.

Now we know because Todd Phillips has adamantly told us that Joker is not part of the DC Universe and that there will not be a sequel to Joker. And he also said rather coyly that he won’t divulge the true meaning of Joker for at least a couple of years.

But I bet, while there won’t be a sequel of Joker, there just may be a Universe spinoff from it with the real villaneous Joker that somehow reveals the truth about the loser Fleck Joker…

A truth which I would lay money on being that the entire movie was one big delusion:

Thomas Wayne isn’t really a creepy fat cat who wants to help all the losers in poverty, whom he refers to as clowns, as he’s portrayed in Fleck’s delusion; but instead he’s actually a sincere citizen nice guy (as he always is) who is running for mayor to literally clean up the garbage from the streets;

Which also reveals that the protests aren’t class related, motivated by Fleck’s murdering the Wall Street suits as we’re told in Fleck’s delusion, but instead they’re protests to clean up the city and its government.

Those are the biggest delusions, but there are others of course, such as Fleck’s mother never had an affair with Wayne; Fleck wasn’t given the gun his co-clown worker, he probably stole it from him, which is why he went to Fleck’s place to try to convince him to tell the cops he didn’t give it to him, and on and on…

But what wasn’t a delusion was Fleck killing Murray the talk show host. That happened, and that’s what is going to be the motivation behind the real Joker coming to his full glory in future DC movies.

Now, I came to this conclusion independently when in discussion with my sons.

The first thing I did after coming to it was to search the web for validation.

And lo and behold, I found it in this…

An LA Times article where Phillips maybe confirms everything I just mentioned above, but of course he says it in a much more coherent manner:

“There’s a lot of ways you could look at this movie,” Phillips said. “You could look at it and go, ‘This is just one of his multiple-choice stories. None of it happened.’ I don’t want to say what it is. But a lot of people I’ve shown it to have said, ‘Oh, I get it — he’s just made up a story. The whole movie is the joke. It’s this thing this guy in Arkham Asylum concocted. He might not even be the Joker.’ ”

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-10-04/joker-ending-explained-todd-phillips

So much for Phillips waiting two years to drop the spoilers. Anyway, it’s a great article and, while it doesn’t specifically confirm my theory, it does give mighty big tip of the hat to it.

And let us not forget, Todd Phillips comes from comedy, meaning he himself is nothing but a big joker at heart.

TL;DR: Joker isn’t a movie about the Joker; it’s a movie about a joker who inspires someone yet unidentified to become the Joker.

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Featured image courtesy of MOVIEWEB