How did Arthur reach this fate at the end of the movie?
In the last scenes of Joker, Arthur a.k.a. "The Joker" is being taken to jail in a police car, after he killed a host on live TV. Then some people wearing clown masks crash the police car and free the Joker, praising him as their hero. At that point there's a cut and Joker is in some kind of psychiatric hospital / prison talking to a doctor, and the movie ends.
How did he get there?
It seems unlikely that the clowns who are destroying Gotham and who to free Joker considering him their hero, then just left him to be captured again by the police.
Best Answer
This final scene isn’t the only sequence in the film where we see Arthur in such an institutionalized setting. Very early on in the film, as he speaks to his social worker, Arthur mentions how he thinks he’d been better off when he was hospitalized. The social worker asks him if he’s given any more thought about why he was hospitalized. Arthur dismisses it with, “Who knows?” But in between those lines the film cuts to a quick shot of Arthur, in white scrubs standing in a cell very similar to the one seen in the film’s closing moments, where he bangs his head into the door’s tiny window. Then it cuts back to the scene between Arthur and his social worker. So is it possible that Arthur has been in that white cell the whole time? That he’s simply imagined most of the events depicted in the movie as part of some empowerment fantasy?
The article then follows with theories from other IGN editors.
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