The new Joker, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is—as the commentariat has suggested since at least the release of the movie’s first trailer—a riff on incels and other lonely, potentially dangerous men, or if not a riff, a peer in pain. Arthur Fleck, as he’s known, is a man failed by our social infrastructures. He was an abused child whose mother is also mentally ill. As an adult, he’s got a strange demeanor, a child-simple approach to the world that begins to give way to brutish anger. He’s also got a disconcerting behavioral tic: a condition that makes him heave with laughter even if he’s actually crying. He gets bullied seemingly wherever he goes and no matter what he does; one woman even scolds him for trying to make her child laugh. His angst is overwhelming. You sense the movie positing he’s merely one link in the citywide soul destruction of a struggling Gotham—a New York stand-in so angry and overrun with class injustice that someone could plausibly support the point-blank shootings of, say, three rich, white men. You also sense that Arthur’s peculiarities play a decisive role in this argument. The movie rightly grants him membership in a vulnerable political class, as anyone with a disability, or anyone beholden to the bureaucratic contingencies of social services, surely is.

If your theory is that a film like this might prove dangerous, the associations between Joker and Taxi Driver—thus potentially between Joker and Hinckley—prove no comfort. Never mind how strange it was for attorneys to wield art as explanation for a person’s insanity; the association is ominous. It’s been suggested for months now that the risk of Joker is that it might encourage real violence. It was assumed that this Joker would not only diagnose its central villain, it’d so overtly lay out this man’s feelings that any violence he enacted might, to the wrong sort, seem justified and worth reproducing.

This is logic I’ve struggled to wrap my head around—logic born of fear, which is itself born, at least in part, of amnesia. I was in middle school when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, opened fire on their classmates and teachers, killing 14 people, including themselves, and injuring 21 more. It’s clear to me now that Columbine was the beginning of my political consciousness, the event that forced me to start asking my own questions, independently of anything I’d been learning at school or at home, about the world I was living in. And I was opening my eyes to the world at a time when art and media—violent video games, Marilyn Manson, trench coats, and every other variety of unfiltered cultural “evil”—had become scapegoats in our debates over gun violence, as if they were its source. Despite evidence to the contrary. Despite the obvious irony that though video games are a worldwide phenomenon, mass shootings are a disease practically endemic to the United States.

I saw Joker—another worldwide phenomenon—twice. There’s no accounting for how people relate to or understand even the most didactic movie. But what mostly struck me both times was how rotely, how condescendingly, the movie animates the tortured soul at its center. This is not a genuine exploration of a very real, present social condition, despite a morose seriousness in the movie’s tone that would seem to imply taking the subject seriously. This is a movie that knows how far it can get by appearing to be serious and wears this as a badge of distinction. Yet it takes what’s wrong with Arthur Fleck for granted, telling us, for example, that Arthur takes seven medications while obscuring which medications or what they’re for, because the number of pills, paired with a convenient discovery of childhood trauma, is meant to speak for itself. Arthur’s illness is reduced to context, when, by all accounts, it’s the movie’s prime subject.