Summary
Arthur goes on the talk show, after Murray plays the clip of Arthur botching his standup set. He dances onto the stage in a silly way and takes his seat next to Murray, after kissing an elderly woman who is the other guest on the show. Murray asks Arthur if he wants to tell a joke and Arthur pulls out his joke book. He tells a disturbing knock-knock joke about a woman's son who's been killed by a drunk driver, and Murray and the other guests scold him about his joke.
Arthur tells Murray that he's been having a hard time since he committed the subway murders. The audience becomes upset and Murray questions him about why they should believe him. "I've got nothing left to lose. Nothing can hurt me anymore. My life is nothing but a comedy," he tells Murray. He suggests to Murray that comedy is subjective, and goes on a rampage about the fact that the mainstream system decides what is right or wrong, just as it decides what is funny or not.
When Murray suggests that Arthur did this to start a movement, Arthur insists that "Everyone is awful these days. It's enough to make anyone crazy." He goes on to suggest that society values the three businessmen's lives more than they value his, because Thomas Wayne and the elites hold all the power.
Arthur tells Murray he is awful for exploiting his video and humiliating him in front of a live studio audience, and then begs him to let him tell another joke. As Murray tries to stop him he yells, "What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? I'll tell you what you get! You get what you fucking deserve!" Arthur instantly pulls out a gun and shoots Murray in the head.
As the audience screams, Arthur laughs genuinely and tries to say something into the camera, but is cut off. We see Arthur in the back of a cop car watching as the city descends into violence and chaos. Suddenly, the cop car gets into an accident, colliding with an ambulance. Two men in clown masks get out of the ambulance and pull Arthur out of the cop car, laying his body on the hood.
As the Wayne family leave a movie theater, a clown protestor follows them into an alley and says the exact same joke that Arthur said before killing Murray, shooting the Wayne parents in front of Bruce.
Arthur wakes up later on the hood of the cop car as a group of clown protestors cheer for him. He stands and dances for them, before noticing that his nose is bleeding. He smears the blood on his lip and smiles maniacally as the crowd cheers.
Some time later, we see Arthur at Arkham State Hospital, laughing hysterically and telling a story about his experience. He remembers the fact that his actions led to Bruce Wayne's parents getting killed, and he laughs about the fact that he has ruined Bruce's life in the same way that his own life has been ruined. A social worker tries to talk to him and he tells her he wants to tell her a joke, but she won't get it. Moments later, we see Arthur leaving the room, leaving a trail of bloody footprints, evidently having killed the social worker.
Analysis
The film makes a point of portraying Arthur as a misunderstood target in a cruel world first, and a villain second. Before Arthur goes on to The Murrary Franklin Show, Murray shows the clip of Arthur's much-ridiculed standup set, and we see Arthur smoking a cigarette in the wings, his face drooped in disappointment as he listens to the studio audience laugh at his expense. In this moment, even though the viewer knows that Arthur has ruthlessly murdered several people, we cannot help but see the ways that he is alienated and maligned by mainstream society. Thus, the film draws a correlation between this alienation and Arthur's violent ways, his lashing out at a world that is consistently telling him he is worthless.
The film's rhetorical position, painting Arthur as a victim as much as he is a villain, illuminates the ways that Arthur's transformation into "Joker" is a perversely empowering one. In the same way that he becomes more violent and deranged, Arthur becomes a more confident performer and showman. As Murray introduces him, Arthur dances jauntily onto the stage, no longer a nervous loser but a magnetic, if terrifying, star. While his star power might not translate to a mainstream audience in the way he imagines, he has harnessed a darker and more unhinged star power, exploiting his audience's fear and dread.
In his appearance on Murray's show, Arthur draws a parallel between the ways that mainstream society sets ethical standards and how it sets standards for what is funny and what is not in entertainment. Arthur, having gone completely insane, sees killing people as "comedy," and when Murray questions him about this morally chaotic viewpoint, Arthur addresses the studio audience directly: "Comedy is subjective, Murray, isn't that what they say? All of you, the system that knows so much: you decide what's right or wrong the same way you decide what's funny or not." In this, we see that Arthur's advocacy for himself has to do not only with his insistence that his comedy is subjective, but also with a broader structural critique, a desire to show everyone that no one cares about people like him.
The horror of Arthur's descent into madness and violent chaos is that it infects the entire city. When he is arrested after killing Murray, the streets are flooded with people in clown masks who want to rise up against elite society, an anarchic uprising. While Arthur claimed to Murray that he had no intention to start a movement and no political bent, his anti-establishment rhetoric has done just that, and he finds himself as the unhinged and glorified cult leader, dancing atop a cop car to the cheers of hundreds of people. It is not until he has become a violent villain that Arthur feels like anybody cares about him.
Arthur's confused politics, the fact that his feelings of disenfranchisement come with a chaotic desire to kill and a highly personal, naive view of how structural violence actually works, is encapsulated in the final scene. Todd Phillips' film paints a vivid picture of a white middle-aged man who struggles with economic precarity, mental illness, and the traumatic effects of abuse, but it also ends with a scene of that white man killing a black female social worker, someone who is in many ways more structurally disenfranchised than Arthur. This moment is one of the film's most terrifying and disturbing, escalating Joker's villainy by showing that he is not simply trying to rise up and kill the wealthy (and largely white) elite, but killing whomsoever he pleases, including a black social worker at a state hospital. The scene stages white male entitlement to black bodies and lives, making Arthur's initially class-motivated violence into white supremacy. It remains unclear what the filmmakers' position is in relation to this depiction. Director Todd Phillips he has stated that he prefers the ending to remain ambiguous, unclear about whether the Joker's origin story is Tue, or whether it is simply the ramblings of a psychotic man locked up in a mental hospital.
