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There are countless reasons why the Joker movie has proved so controversial, from the baggage the character itself carries to the inflammatory statements director Todd Phillips has been making to the press. The movie’s ending adds fuel to the fire in spectacular ways, so let’s break it down and try to figure out exactly what it’s all about–and why it’s so contentious.

Here’s your last warning–there are Joker spoilers ahead!

In Joker’s final act, Arthur Fleck, having been forced off his meds and finding validation in the rush of violence, evades detectives Garrity and Burke and makes it to the Murray Franklin show for his special appearance. An earlier scene suggested Fleck planned to kill himself on the show as the punchline to a joke, but instead, Fleck–energized by the crowd’s reaction and the unrest he’s inspired throughout Gotham–shoots Franklin point blank after a lengthy rant about society.

It’s a shocking moment that serves as the climax to the film–the scene where Fleck finally becomes the Joker we’ve been waiting the whole movie to see.

At some point afterward, Fleck is arrested. However, a renegade ambulance hijacked by mask-wearing protesters t-bones the police car, and Fleck is dragged from the wreckage by his worshippers. He awakes and rises up on the hood of the car, dancing and reveling in the cheers of his fanatics, who appear to have taken over the city.

In the end, he’s back at Arkham, where he laughs to himself about a joke no one else understands, and apparently murders a social worker before the credits roll.

Joker doesn’t have a post-credits scene, so that’s it. However, the movie’s final act raises plenty of questions.

How much of that was real?

Throughout Joker, Arthur Fleck proves to be an extremely unreliable perspective character. There are plenty of scenes that are either completely imagined–like Fleck’s first appearance on the Murray Franklin show–or embellished in Fleck’s imagination, like his attempt at stand-up comedy, not to mention almost every scene featuring Sophie (Zazie Beetz).

Are elements of the movie’s ending, from Fleck’s murder of Robert De Niro’s character to his rebirth from the wreckage, also imagined, embellished, or straight up hallucinated? It’s never exactly clear. However, that could completely change what the ending means. It’s troubling to see a mob of people rise up in adoration of a mentally ill murderer, especially when you consider the real world connotations relating to mass shooters. However, it’s much easier to digest if you consider the whole thing a fantasy playing out in Fleck’s mind.

One argument in favor of the ending being real is the fact that for the rest of the movie leading up to it, it’s always clear when Arthur is imagining things–whether it’s made clear in the moment, as in his warm interaction with the talk show host, or after the fact, like in the case of his interactions with Sophie. With the ending, however, there’s nothing explicit to communicate to the audience that it was all in Arthur’s head.

During a Q&A after a recent screening of the movie in Los Angeles, director Todd Phillips addressed the question of whether the ending is real. However, his answer didn’t exactly close the case.

“I don’t want to say whether it’s real or not, because I think [that’s] part of the fun,” he explained. “I’ve shown it to many, many different people, and they all have a different reaction. Some of them say, ‘Oh, I get it. The last line in the movie is, ‘You wouldn’t get it,’ to a joke he’s telling. Well, is the joke the movie?’ And the idea is, you don’t want to answer those questions, because it’s nice to see the different things people take away from it. I have my own theories on it.”

Phillips also said he enjoyed toying with the audience by making Fleck’s perspective unreliable. “It’s really kind of fun when you make a movie with an unreliable narrator,” the director said. “There’s no greater unreliable narrator than Joker. He’s an unreliable narrator, and he’s Joker. So it’s sort of a double whammy. I think that lends to people’s reaction to the movie, and I like that people don’t really know what happened.”

You can absolutely view Joker’s ending literally–what you see is what happened. However, there’s an alternate reading that Fleck was in Arkham the whole time, which would suggest that most or all of the movie is entirely imagined. The social worker he apparently kills in the final scene resembles the woman he interacted with earlier in the movie, and there’s also a brief flash early on of him bashing his head against a door in a white room, indicating he’s been institutionalized before.

Phillips acknowledged these similarities and the ambiguity of it all, without giving the answers away. “There are certain things if you see it again,” he said. “On a second viewing, you’ll notice about that kind of white room at the end, that kind of picks up at the beginning, that you go, ‘Oh, wait a minute. That’s interesting.'”

Joaquin Phoenix, who was also present at the Q&A, added that they didn’t want anything in the movie to be too definitive, from the exact ailments afflicting Fleck, to the specifics of what was real and what was imagined.

“In some ways, as much as there was very thorough research and answers for a lot of these things, we also, whenever we got to the point where we felt like we were coming up with a definitive reason for anything, we backed away from it,” Phoenix said. “We found a way to circumnavigate a little bit.”

“He hates logic,” Phillips replied playfully.

“I don’t think we necessarily want to answer those things for ourselves, or for anyone else,” Phoenix continued. “Part of the joy of this movie is how the audience interacts with the film and what they think about the character.”

What’s your interpretation of Joker’s ending, and the rest of the movie? Let us know in the comments below.

Joker is in theaters now.

At New York Comic-Con, HBO screened the full first episode of the upcoming TV adaptation of Watchmen, which returns to the alternate timeline of the original graphic novel but imagines a story set in the modern day.

The new story centers around Angela Abar (Regina King), a masked vigilante named Lady Night who lives with her family in suburban Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the 30 years since Ozymandias’s horrific cosmic attack in the final issue of Watchmen, the world has continued to drift further and further down the strange path characters like the villain (real name Adrian Veidt), Rorschach, and Dr. Manhattan started it down. Mutant squids occasionally rain from the sky–a phenomenon that is so common cities have their very own, completely run-of-the-mill alert system in place to let people know when they should pull their cars over or open their umbrellas. Streets are cleaned with specific vehicles for squid removal. Police wear masks and protect their identities after a coordinated attack (led by a white supremacist group called the 7th Cavalry) had them gunned down en masse in their homes.

Said white supremacist group has “appropriated,” in the words of showrunner Damon Lindelof during the Watchmen panel following the screening, the iconography and talking points of Rorschach, whose manifesto was posthumously circulated after Veidt’s attack back in the graphic novel.

The war between the police and the 7th Cavalry also involves the masked vigilante community, who have apparently sided with the police–but the real nature of their partnership and the specifics of the arrangement are left ambiguous. Watchmen never actually feels withholding, but it’s decidedly cagey with the expository details. The world is familiar, in a way, but also entirely alien, and it’s impossible to actually gauge what does and doesn’t fall under the umbrella of normalcy, given the circumstances.

As with the original graphic novel, the devil is squarely in the details. In order to really piece together some semblance of understanding, you’re left to pick out the subtleties–at one point, images flash in rapid fire montage over the mirrored mask of a character named Looking Glass and there’s the tiniest glimpse of a Mount Rushmore that includes Richard Nixon. Cops are no longer able to carry firearms freely and must instead adhere to a strict bureaucratic set of authorizations to allow them to even carry any weapon at all. Homes and neighborhoods look normal enough, but there’s something just slightly off kilter about the design and aesthetics. Televisions are all projections, cell phones look different, cars are boxier. Characters casually make references to the statehood of Vietnam.

It’s as engaging as it is mysterious, bolstered entirely by the wholesale commitment of the actors and the energy of the bass-thumping electronica of the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score. Watchmen feels like it’s cut from the same cloth as some of the best sci-fi of recent years, surreal genre experiments like Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Maniac, or fellow graphic novel adaptation Snowpiercer, while still feeling inexplicably grounded in reality. The world itself may be alien, but the issues–the struggle against authority, the proliferation of white supremacy and the systems where it is able to grow and thrive–are anything but.

We’ll have a full review closer to Watchmen’s premiere later this month, but suffice to say, we liked what we saw here. Visually, it’s stunning. Symbolism and symmetry take center stage even in the most mundane shots, giving the entire episode an unmistakably choreographed feel. Absolutely nothing on screen is incidental or accidental, and fans of the comic will have no trouble at all making the visual connection to iconic panels, even if the subject matter and the characters are completely new and different.

During the Q&A portion of the panel, the comic’s co-creator and artist Dave Gibbons made a surprise appearance and explained that, even as he was working on the original 12 issues, what really made the story click for him was the moment he stopped thinking of it as a superhero story. “I started thinking of it as an alternate reality sci-fi comic that happened to involve superheroes,” Gibbons explained. “That’s when the nature of the thing started making sense to me.”

The pilot is steeped in that sensibility. Sure, superheroes play a major role, and yes, there’s no shortage of commentary about the complicated interplay between vigilantism and heroism, but at its heart, Episode 1 feels like the start of something truly special for fans of science fiction television.

Watchmen Season 1 premieres October 20 on HBO.

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