"Spoilers for Joker (2019)"

I still believe Phillips threw the Wayne's murder scene because WB pressure him to have a link to the comics for the general audience.

I agree that the moment Arthur entered Sophie's apartment was the moment that defined the nature of the entire film and how unreliable a narrator Arthur is. I wouldn't go so far as to say the entire film takes place in his head, but literally any scene he experiences could be, and what you choose to see as real determines what kind of story it really is. Did Arthur really go to see Thomas Wayne at the theater using only an improvised bellboy disguise? Seems a little too easy when there's a riot outside. Did Randall really give Arthur that gun? He seemed surprised when Arthur mentioned it later. Did Murray Franklin really invite Arthur onto the show? Even onstage Arthur noticed it felt exactly as he imagined it. Maybe all of it is fake, or hell, maybe half of it is, that alone changes what we think we're seeing. It was a brilliant way to setup the film, leaving the Joker just as ambiguous as he was when we walked in.

At least for me, I interpreted the killing of Thomas Wayne as Joker's revenge fantasy

But that final scene he says he's thinking of a joke and then it cuts back to Bruce standing in the alley and he begins to laugh, which means that entire scene is not from his perspective but from his mind, which begs the question even more of whether it's real or not and it then makes even more sense as to why he says "You get what you deserve" because that's what he already said. This would also tie into the "You wouldn't get it" because she wouldn't understand why that was funny since she didn't know the steps leading up to it AND as established during the Murray show they find it terrible that he would joke about death so him to make a joke to her he knows she wouldn't find it funny because "Humour is subjective".

That final scene simply assures us that yes, this is the same world where Batman exists. Confirms that even tho the previous events are uncertain, they are certainly happening in Batman's Gotham. It doesn't confirm or deny any of the other scenes in the movie, just confirms that whatever DID happen, happened in Gotham...

What if Arthur Fleck "told" the scene of the death of the wayne family, too? Maybe he read about it in the newspaper and thought it would connect to his story.

12:14

Btw, arguably the two most highly acclaimed works of Brazilian literature (Dom Casmurro / The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas) are both character studies told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.

What I think is intresting about joker is that nobody knows his past.... maybe not even himself

Jack Napier:

I can feel it

Hot take: Arthur died in the fridge.

Arthur is unconscious during the Wayne shooting, which is an important detail.

Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo created a comic just called "Joker" that did the character study thing pretty well. The POV character is one of Joker's henchmen, making observations about him. That conceit manages to maintain the ambiguity and the unreliable narrator thing that Joker as a character has built for himself over the past 20 years, but it still manages to elaborate on the psychological workings of a character, as a character study should. I found it to be a creative way of balancing the story they wanted to tell with the legacy of a character built to have an ambiguous history

The scene where the Waynes are murdered kind of took me out of the movie first time I watched it, but upon a rewatch I liked it more. It also may not have happened at all, and Arthur just imagines it in Arkham.

I actually thought that moment in the alley was brilliant, because it folds Joker's story into Batman's origin. And the fact that there was a riot may be the only thing about the film that's concrete. Just my thoughts!

Maybe the final scene with the Waynes is s different perspective because we all know it happened. It's the only thing that for sure happened. Arthur could have convinced himself that his influence did it, but, if the Joker is supposed to fight Batman, it couldn't be the same guy. He's either lying, or wrong, or has his events out of order. Everything with him is up for debate, everything without him is for sure true.

Is that how Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered, or is that how Arthur imagined it? Was that what he thought was so funny? There was at least one other scene in which Arthur imagined a sequence of events that took place entirely in his mind; his "appearance" on the Murray Show in the audience before the clip of him bombing at Pogo's actually brought him there.

If the whole film is constructed around Joker's perspective, then why couldn't the death of the Wayne's be a fantasy the Joker is having. Paired with the white room scene at the end where Joker's laughing at the image of Bruce in the ally with his dead parents, it could easily be interpreted as such. In any case, saying it ruins the movie is stupidly hyperbolic when it arguably enhances the unreliable narration.