Bohemian Rhapsody’s fumbling of history also comes at a moment in which we’re witnessing the rise of post-facts popular culture: creative projects that purport to tell the story of real-life historical figures but have no interest in whether the telling of those stories resembles the truth. Contemporary examples abound, but at the top of my list is The Greatest Showman, a brazen revisionist movie musical biopic that reimagines P.T. Barnum as an ahead-of-his-time liberal savior who gives voice to a ragtag community of outcasts, including queers and people of color, when, in reality, he was a slave trader who built his fortune on minstrel shows and the mass commercial exhibition and exploitation of social pariahs as “freaks.” While post-facts films like this rage on, trenchant documentaries like last year’s Whitney, which presents Whitney Houston as sexually fluid rather than as the compulsorily heterosexual icon she publicly appeared to be, suggest that some consumers want their entertainment to richly render the multi-dimensional lives of iconic figures otherwise left out of, or reduced by, establishment narratives.

In some ways, music biopics are almost intrinsically post-fact: They’ve often skirted the truth in the effort to mythologize the lives of historical figures. Perhaps Bohemian Rhapsody is indeed “true” from Queen’s perspective—and the remaining band members lived the history, we didn’t. But the problem with post-fact pop culture isn’t necessarily that it’s anti-truth, or even hostile to truth. Much worse: It’s indifferent to the truth.

Some viewers will watch Bohemian Rhapsody and not know or realize that it’s full of historical inaccuracies. Others just don’t—and won’t—care. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people who’ve seen the film but respond to its criticisms with a curt, “But it was entertaining!” The thinking here is that feel-good entertainment is a standalone value that should be able to justify and explain away the suppression of historical fact without any further need for discussion: Why would I pay attention to facts, when it’s got all my favorite songs and I can sing them out loudly at the screen?

I’m all for pop culture as entertainment, and the pleasure that movies bring has profound value all by itself. And full disclosure: I, too, enjoyed aspects of Bohemian Rhapsody, especially Rami Malek’s mesmerizing physical performance as Freddie Mercury. Malek brings a profound truthfulness and moral integrity to the proceedings that exceeds the straitjacket limitations of the script.

But let’s not conflate the act of taking artistic liberties with the willful distortion of historical fact, also known as, well, bullshit. In his ahead-of-its-time 2005 tome On Bullshit, writer Harry Frankfurt defines it as a form of communication designed to persuade where you have no real interest in the truth. While liars know that they are obfuscating the truth, bullshiters don’t even care if what they are saying is true or false, as long as they win over the person at the receiving end of the bullshit.

While Bohemian Rhapsody may be entertaining for some, it’s ultimately an entertaining fraud. It does what marketing is supposed to do, drawing consumers in by way of emotional storytelling. But entertainment doesn’t have to come at the expense of complexity, because glossing over the sometimes difficult details of historical truth makes us all impoverished and, frankly, ignorant.

At their best, Queen have shown us how the skillful deployment of marketing techniques can sustain a brilliant body of artistic work over time. Bohemian Rhapsody, on the other hand, reminds us that branding can also dangerously alienate us from historical fact, obscuring and misrepresenting the lives of marginalized communities for the enjoyment of those who already enjoy access to power.