Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Joker: Folie À Deux.

It’s pretty unclear who exactly Joker: Folie à Deux is for. During 2019 joker grossed more than $1 billion at the global box office and remains the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. Slide for two doesn’t exactly follow the “restless loner, carries out violent revenge fantasy” formula that contributed to the success of its predecessor. Instead, filmmaker Todd Phillips offers a prison/courtroom drama-meets-Lady Gaga musical that undermines the purpose of its title character.

The second part of Phillips’ bleak reimagining of DC Universe lore begins with Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) being placed in Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial for the crimes he committed as his clown in the first film. makeup-wearing alter ego Joker. Arthur has all but degenerated during his time in the glorified prison, where the guards – led by Brendan Gleeson’s cheerful sadist Jackie – taunt and physically abuse the inmates. He has become such a shell of his former self that he can’t even tell jokes anymore. Until the day he is led through the hospital’s minimum security wing to visit his lawyer (Catherine Keener) and sees fellow patient Lee Quinzel (Gaga), also known as this franchise’s version of the infamous Harley Quinn.

“Arthur has become this symbol for people,” Phillips said Rich of the character sheet in Slide for two. “This unwilling, unwitting symbol who is now paying for the crimes of the first film, but at the same time finds the only thing he ever wanted, love. That’s what he was always about, even though he was being pushed and pulled through it all.” So we tried to do the purest version of that.

However, perhaps even more than the numerous musical numbers, the final minutes of the film have the potential to alienate even the most loyal viewers joker fans. While Phillips’ films were always intended to be standalone projects that existed in a significantly different timeline than the DC Extended Universe, Slide for twoThe final twist sheds completely new light on the origin story of this world’s canonical Joker, who – spoiler alert – is not Arthur. We’re trying to make sense of it all, as we imagine many moviegoers will after seeing the highly anticipated sequel in theaters this weekend.

A twisted romance

When Lee – who eventually reveals herself to be a Joker fanatic who admitted herself to the asylum expressly to meet her idol – ingratiates herself with Arthur, he stops taking his medication and begins to regain his Joker mojo. As the trial begins, amateur arsonist Lee has reignited Gotham City’s wild Joker madness, while Arthur appears to have fallen fully back down the rabbit hole of delusional self-righteousness.

But after a night of violence at the asylum shakes Arthur to his core, he takes it upon himself to tell the jury that there is no Joker. There is and always has been only Arthur. Oh, and he wants everyone to know that he is He also suffocated his abusive mother in addition to killing the five other people whose murders the court already knew about.

But as the jury, after an extremely brief deliberation, begins to return guilty verdicts on all charges against Arthur, he is granted a temporary reprieve by a massive car bomb that explodes outside and blows up half the courthouse – a twist that The deputy district court also benefits from lawyer Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) with his characteristic two-face appearance. Arthur flees downtown and finds Lee on the steps leading to his old apartment. (Despite her penchant for setting fires, she seems to have nothing to do with the car bomb that sets him free. Arthur’s rejection of Joker in the courtroom was just about the biggest dislike he could have mustered.) There, she rejects his attempts at love and rejects her, telling him clearly how little he means to her now.

Joker against Joker

Slide for twoThe final minutes find Arthur back in Arkham, convicted of all the crimes he was on trial for, and now likely facing either a life sentence or, as the prosecution said, they would face for his crimes face the death penalty. He is soon called away by a security guard who claims he has visitors and leads him down an empty hallway.

Suddenly a rather creepy fellow prisoner, whom the camera has panned several times throughout the film, appears behind Arthur and asks him if he could tell him a joke. Unfortunately, the point of this part is that the inmate stabs Arthur repeatedly while all the guards remain conspicuously absent.

As Arthur bleeds out on the floor, his killer leans against the wall, laughing, before using the blade to open his mouth in a garbled grin, known in real life as the Glasgow Smile and associated with the Joker by the late Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning role in The Dark Knight. The moment seems to not-so-subtly suggest that the killer (Connor Storrie, credited only as “Young Inmate” on IMDb) is, rather than Arthur, the insane supervillain who later becomes Batman’s nemesis.

It also agrees with what Philips said Rich in advance Slide for twoRelease on whether Arthur would turn out to be Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime. “We would never do that,” he said. “Arthur is clearly not a criminal mastermind. He never was.”

So for those keeping score, it seems so joker The sequel ends with confirmation that the man who claimed the mantle of Joker over the course of the last two films was never the villain we knew and loved/hated since 1940. What exactly is Phillips up to here? Is there one last way to amaze the audience as they leave the theater? A meditation on the danger of idolizing disturbed people with extremely violent tendencies?

Whatever his reasons, I think we finally know how the real Joker got these scars.