Summary
The next day, Arthur follows the woman he met in the elevator, whose name is Sophie, as she drops her daughter off at school, watching her from afar. He follows her onto the train, then on the streets of the city.
The scene shifts to a comedy club. A comedian talks about how he and his wife like to roleplay that he is a professor and his wife is a student. Arthur is in the audience, laughing maniacally at inappropriate moments and taking notes about the performer: "sexy jokes alwaze funny." At home, he makes more notes sitting at the kitchen table. Suddenly, the doorbell buzzes.
It's Arthur's neighbor, the woman from the elevator, who asks him if he was following her that day. He sheepishly admits that he was, and she jokes that she was hoping he would come by and rob the place afterwards, and he jokes back, "I have a gun, I could come by tomorrow." She laughs and tells him he's funny, and he tells her to come see him do comedy some time.
We see Arthur working as a clown in a children's hospital, making the kids laugh and dance. All of a sudden, his gun falls out of his pocket and he rushes to pick it up as the kids giggle. After the gig, he speaks to his boss on a payphone about the fact that he brought a gun into the hospital. Arthur begs him not to fire him, but his boss says that Randall told him that Arthur tried to buy a gun off of him, and fires him on the spot.
Arthur rides the subway in his clown costume. The car is basically empty except for a few drunken businessmen who are aggressively hitting on a woman nearby. When the men start throwing things at the woman and laughing, Arthur laughs along with them maniacally. The woman gets up and leaves the car as one of the businessmen begins singing "Send in the Clowns." The men begin to beat Arthur up, kicking him, when suddenly he shoots two of them, as the last one runs away. Arthur follows him off of the train, chasing him and shooting him on the train platform.
He runs to a nearby empty public restroom and begins to do a strange dance. He returns to his building, still in his clown makeup, and immediately knocks on Sophie's door, kissing her when she answers.
As he clears out his locker the next day, Arthur's coworkers talk about the murder that occurred the night before, but do not know he is the murderer. They make fun of him for bringing a gun to a children's hospital, but he tells them that Randall is the one who gave him the gun in the first place, before punching the wall furiously and laughing.
At home, Penny watches Thomas Wayne on television, who is talking about the subway murders. The three men who were killed were Wayne Enterprises employees, and the interviewer says, "It's almost as if our less fortunate residents are taking the side of the killer." Thomas Wayne says, "What kind of coward would do something that cold-blooded? Someone who hides behind a mask. Someone who is envious of those more fortunate than themselves...And until those kind of people change for the better, those of us who have made something of our lives will always look at those who haven't as nothing but clowns." When Arthur laughs at this, Penny tells him it's not funny.
In a meeting with his social worker, Arthur says that his clown name at work is "Carnival" and he heard a song with the name Carnival the other day. He tells her that until recently, he felt like nobody even noticed him, but she interrupts him to tell him that they cut their funding and she can no longer be his social worker. "They don't give a shit about people like you, Arthur," she says, "And they really don't give a shit about people like me, either." Arthur asks how he will get his medication, and the social worker does not know.
The scene shifts to Arthur preparing to go on stage at the comedy club. He gets up on stage and begins giggling uncontrollably. As he tries to tell his jokes, he keeps laughing uncontrollably, and we see Sophie, the only person laughing in the audience. This helps him get through the set, and he goes on a date with Sophie afterward. When they see a newspaper about the murderous clown vigilante, Sophie says that she thinks the guy who did it is a hero. "Three less pricks in Gotham City, only a million more to go," she says.
When he gets home, Arthur finds his mother has fallen asleep in front of the television watching Murray Franklin. He helps her up and dances with her, telling her he went on a date. She tells him to check the mail again, and goes off to bed.
Analysis
While not addressed explicitly, issues of race are important to the narrative of the film. Arthur is white, and many of the characters with whom he comes in contact are black, and when he is playing with his new gun at his home, a scene from a Fred Astaire movie in which a group of black men are singing is playing on his television. His social worker is a black woman, he has an awkward interaction with a black woman and her son on the train, and he begins stalking a black woman who lives down the hall in his building, seemingly smitten with her. Arthur seems to have a strange identification with or pull towards black women within the film, which many critics have pointed out. Others have suggested that the racial elements are completely unthought. Richard Brody wrote for The New Yorker, "Joker is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering."
Critics have also drawn comparisons between Arthur's story and different stories of racial violence in New York in the 1980s. The scene in which Arthur gets beaten up by the group of kids early in the movie is a clear reference to the "Central Park Five," a group of black and Hispanic teenagers who were indicted on charges of assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder of a white woman in 1989 without sufficient evidence and which has become a historic symbol of racial discrimination and injustice in the American legal system. Arthur's second attack has been compared to the story of Bernhard Goetz, a white man who shot 4 unarmed black teenagers on the New York subway in 1984. In Joker, Arthur's first murderous altercation seems to reference the Goetz case, but it is with a group of white businessmen who are aggressively coming on to a woman. In subverting and mixing up these different political and historical references, turning racially charged incidents into simply issues of provocation and unhinged violence, Phillips depoliticizes the events he's referencing. Allison Wilmore addressed Phillips' convoluted approach to questions of race in an article for Vulture, writing, "As concepts, racism and anti-inequality may be entirely at odds in their relationship to who holds power, but in Joker they’re interchangeable—just two reasons for people to get mad."
Arthur first tries to temper his feelings of marginality in society by becoming a comedian, someone who uses their marginality or non-traditional background to win favor with crowds of people. He idolizes stand-up comedians for their abilities to land jokes and connect with people through humor, and his mother's insistence that he is meant to bring happiness to people makes this dream all the more vivid. It doesn't matter that his mother does not think he's funny at all; Arthur is determined to become a comic. There is something haunting and disturbing about his pursuit of a comic career, as we watch him scribble his nearly incoherent notes in his notebook while watching a stand-up comedian perform, seemingly completely out of touch with the actual meaning of the comedian's jokes and laughing at inappropriate moments.
Arthur's psychopathic violence is paired with his vulnerability and victimhood time and again throughout the film. Phillips makes sure that Arthur is always the protagonist, the person that the audience sympathizes with, even when he is committing horrible acts. On the subway car, we watch as the aggressive and entitled businessmen (who inexplicably know all of the words to "Send in the Clowns") beat him up mercilessly, kicking him and making fun of his freakishness. Even after he has brutally shot the three men in retaliation, Phillips' camera does not focus on the carnage, but on the ringing in Arthur's ears as he comes to grips with his horrific act. Arthur is painted as a victim even when he is resorting to disturbing violence, a monster that society made.
If the film is articulate about any political issue, it is class. Arthur is presented as a man who has been pushed to the brink by his disenfranchisement because of his class position, and his radical turn towards violence is connected to this feeling of desperation and his resentment of those who suggest that he is not working hard enough. Indeed, the fact that his first act of violence is towards a group of entitled corporate types who see no harm in dominating him first does not seem incidental. Meanwhile, he resents the fact that his mother, Penny, is still invested in a fantasy that Thomas Wayne, a large corporate mogul, will help them. Soon after that, his only mental health resource, the social service center he goes to, is defunded by the city and he is left without any resources. The movie implies that Arthur's loneliness within society and his unhinged mental state have to do largely with his limited resources and his understanding that, as a lower-class citizen, he is trapped between a rock and a hard place, and his realization that lower-class individuals are invisible in the eyes of the elite. Arthur's political consciousness, if he has any, is oriented towards the fact that, as a poor person with limited access to resources, the deck is stacked against him; it is this understanding, however skewed and psychotic, that drives him towards violence and his terrifying brand of vigilantism.
