Much of the criticism of the film has centered on the question of what effect it will have on such people. David Ehrlich of Indiewire called it “a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels,” invoking the term for involuntarily celibate young men that jumped from the saddest corners of the internet to popular parlance in 2014, when a self-described incel killed six people in Santa Barbara, Calif. David Edelstein echoed the idea that “Joker” is “an anthem for incels” in his Vulture review, warning that the film is “scary on a lot of different levels.” At Slate, Sam Adams wrote that “no matter how emphatic Phoenix’s performance, it feels like a risk to feel too much for him, not knowing who might be sitting next to you in the theater using his resentments to justify their own.” Adams could handle this movie’s nuanced portrayal of self-loathing turned outward, but what about its effect on sexless losers?

Every new Joker embodies the element of chaos his audience fears. Thirty years ago, in the age of the superpredator, Jack Nicholson’s Joker led urban-coded henchmen with a boombox into a Gotham museum to graffiti old works of art. In the last year of the George W. Bush administration, Heath Ledger’s Joker was a terrorist who inspired Batman to construct a surveillance state. Even Cesar Romero’s campy, late-1960s Joker resembled a hippie. Our era fears political extremism and senseless public violence, which makes Arthur’s reactionary Joker an order of magnitude scarier than Jack Nicholson shooting acid out of a boutonniere.

The perennial significance of the Joker has made him an omnipresent reference online, both for sincere fans and for ironists. It’s often hard to tell the difference. In a tweet since deleted, the comedian Scott Aukerman observed that “there’s almost something chilling about the character of the Joker — someone who finds the thought of crime to be funny. …” This bone-dry joke captures the fundamental problem of Joker discourse: He’s a comic-book character no adult could take seriously, but at the same time, an ever-larger portion of our culture takes comic books seriously. This fear of other people’s bad taste, of losing movies to a supermajority of grown men in “Deadpool” shirts, seems to be the terror that “Joker” most successfully evokes.