MovieChat Forums > Joker (2019) Discussion > Batman and the Joker....brothers???

Batman and the Joker....brothers???


That's the way the story was going, until is was revealed his mother was a looney tune. At first I was like damn that's a serious twist! Manage how Thanksgiving dinner would go.

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I was so glad when we found out that his mother had made it up.

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Me too. It was a stupid twist, but thank god they added a great twist about his mother making it up and being in Arkham, with Joker being adopted.

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Yep, me too.

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I haven't seen this film, but I will say that the best depiction of Joker that I've seen thus far was in the telltale batman series - he seemed human, with as much bad as good in him - crazy, yes, but not single-dimensional as is the case in pretty much every single batman movie/cartoon. Telltale had some really good writers - too bad they went bankrupt.

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/joker-actor-explains-thomas-wayne-twist-hidden-backstory-1245261

"The backstory was that Arthur’s mother had worked for Thomas in his home, and she was a beautiful woman who Thomas was attracted to and it led to a physical relationship," Cullen says of his conversations with Phillips. "Later in life, she’s in and out of mental institutions. And in my mind, Thomas Wayne put her there."

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Yup...thats what I was thinking could be the "real story".

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So Thomas Wayne was even more despicable...

I don't like it.

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I don't like it either, but I think it's left open as a possibility in the film because of his power and connections. I definitely didn't walk away convinced that he WASN'T Thomas Wayne's son.

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Don't think he was.
Think about what was in Arthur's mothers looney tunes file...
She was literally certifiable, allowed and even contributed to his abuse as a child...

The scene in the bathroom, Thomas didn't look like a guy trying to cover his ass... he looked sincere (still an a-hole, though).

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I think you are probably right...but still it's not entirely certain.

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I agree. I didn't see any discussion about this which was why I looked that article above up.

The problem is that the whole film is too ambiguous to call anything with much certainty. However, given we later see Joker scrunching up that photo of his mum with Thomas Wayne's particularly personal comments on the back, I'm not sure we can put too much belief in what he said either. I think the suggestion with that was that their relationship was real, something Wayne denied.

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So that seems to back up a bit what her character says in the movie, that Thomas foraged those adoption papers. I guess the question is, whether Bruce is also his brother or not. He might still be his half brother in that they share a father, but I dunno if Penny Fleck is Bruce's mom.

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Of fucking course Penny ISN'T bruce's mom...

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Lol...How is anything in this movie "of course"? The entirety of the movie's plot utilizes the "unreliable narrator" trope as a device. My understanding (and the understanding of the person next to me) was that Penny was insisting she was at first. Of course, you could chock it up to her being "delusional".

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She clearly wasn't Bruce's mother. Nothing in the movie even hinted at that. Her delusion was that Arthur was Thomas' son, there was never any question about her and Bruce.

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My apologies for misunderstanding then.

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According to deleted scenes, she wasn't pregnant with his child as he only bummed her.

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Does he say this or does she say it?

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Joker finds her diary while she is in hospital, she mentions the affair that Mr Wayne has with her, the sex etc and mentions anal and she questions how she got pregnant with Joker along with the bold text that mentions something about Joker's life. This makes the Joker laugh hysterically and then cuts to him making his way to the hospital, then we all know what happens next, he then repeats the words he found in her diary as he kills her.

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Lol this is so weirdly specific. But the fact the writers insist she was admitted to be silenced makes me think they didn't want to go with this alternate version.

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To be honest, I can understand why they cut it, seeing 'anal sex' on the screen kind of made the movie weird.

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Yeah same here, I agree. The whole "oh but we had anal sex!" would have been an unnecessary detail that cheapened the movie. (Which might be a weird thing to say, but if she was dismissed as delusional, the specifics wouldn't matter).

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Yeah, the mention of anal sex would be over the top and eye rolling.

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It was kind of in context, but felt out of place at the same time.

Needless to say, I think the whole film was a dream.

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I think it's left deliberately ambiguous. There is certainly the suggestion implied that the adoption papers were forged to cover up for his illegitimate child. Given the photo with "I love your smile - TW" on the back, there was certainly SOMETHING there, and she can't have started off crazy otherwise she wouldn't have been working there in the first place. It's impossible to know what was real and what wasn't, but you could draw any conclusion ranging from "The mother is completely insane" all the way to "The mother is completely sane, the adoption and mental illness were all fabrications from Thomas Wayne to cover up the scandalous truth". Depends how much you like conspiracy theories, I suppose.

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