Joker proves that it’s still best to experience something before commenting on it, but the weeks-long, adversarial discussion around the film shows that many are simply incapable of doing so.

As you may have gathered from my home page photo, I’m a 30-year-old white dude, so according to a large contingent of Twitter, not only was I going to love Joker but I was going to spend weeks defending the film’s execution and existence until I joined scores of my isolated, greasepaint-clad brethren on Halloween asking normies why they’re so serious and noting how crazy things have gotten out there.

A week after seeing the film, though, my initial elation has fallen away, now resembling the general critical consensus of “meh.” Joker has many narrative flaws and ideological false-starts, but it’s very hard to note them in real-time because this film is teeming with undeniable (if ill-defined) passion. After watching multiple interviews with Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips, I still don’t know why either wanted to make this film—but it’s clear that they really did.

Phoenix is absolutely transcendent as Arthur Fleck, and anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous. Joker is a two-hour tapestry of debatable content, but Phoenix’s physicality, vocal affect, and commitment isn’t part of it. Some reviewers have mocked his turn as kabuki-like “Capital A”-acting, but those sentiments amount to nothing more than shaming someone for putting effort into their craft. Many of those same reviewers would also characterize Joker as a shrewd cash grab masquerading as social commentary destined to rake it in solely because of the character’s near-century-long popularity—and there may be some truth to that. If there is, though, I think we should commend Phoenix for not phoning it in when he conceivably could’ve.

Phillips is also expanding his range in Joker, but the results are more checkered. His work with the production design team should be commended as this iteration of Gotham City not only feels grimy but lived in—something that Christopher Nolan’s movies did not always achieve. Phillips’s claustrophobic framing builds on the discomfort that Phoenix’s performance creates, but his sustained visual fixation with Arthur reduces every character around him to convenient archetypes meant only to help the audience map Arthur’s deepening psychosis and sustained failure at building a normal existence.

Phoenix is measured in presenting Arthur’s devolution, but narratively Fleck is a bullet train of inevitability. There isn’t a single scene where someone in his life steps in and forces him to consider where he’s headed. That may have been the intention of Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver in order to underscore the ruthlessly uncaring nature of Gotham, but it also cheapens Arthur’s transformation when you can’t help but wonder if it could’ve all been avoided had someone in Fleck’s life helped him step outside of himself.

I fully agree that this movie and the people behind it are way too ambivalent when addressing its volatile and very obvious social undertones. Believe it or not, Joker isn’t about white terrorism; it wouldn’t have been greenlit if it was. It’s about how desperate people misappropriate symbols to embody their fear and anger. In The Dark Knight, a film that has risen to an even higher level of inscrutability in the eyes of Joker’s detractors, Michael Caine’s Alfred shares this same sentiment with Bruce while positing how someone like Joker could even exist.

You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand.

Unlike Heath Ledger’s more diabolical and scheming Joker, Arthur Fleck is ultimately hapless and stumbles ass-backwards into being the figurehead of a class revolution, but his ascent is only possible because of Thomas Wayne’s televised mockery of the poor and destitute. One of Joker’s biggest flaws is that it doesn’t clearly track the boiling resentment of Gotham’s disenfranchised—the load-bearing wall of its entire climax—because we’re too steeped in Arthur’s grievance.

At the same time, one of the most common criticisms of Joker is that it has nothing to say, which just isn’t true. It certainly doesn’t articulate its viewpoint; in fact, at times, it feels like you’re watching Todd Phillips juggle landmines while asking, “Wait, these things explode?” But to flatly ignore the scarce crumbs of perspective that are in this movie and characterize it as an endorsement of white man violence because there’s a white man doing violence is just bad faith.

That said, I don’t believe the commentary in Joker is useful enough that everyone should engage with it. While discussing the film later that night, my girlfriend asked if I would begrudge someone subjected to gun violence for either resenting the film’s existence or boycotting it outright. Obviously, my response was no. This film comes nowhere near prescribing the societal ills that lead to mass murder, nor does it chart the gradual disillusionment of people that commit those acts in our world. At the same time, I don’t think art that tackles thorny social issues should only exist if it can provide a 2-hour roadmap for solving them. Adopting that kind of standard only serves to dilute the most frightening aspect of white terrorism: it’s non-monolithic nature.

Many of these monsters go to great lengths to publish their manifestos before committing their atrocious acts but some have no explicit motive, leaving those suffering the aftermath to chase the specters of intention just to make sense of how someone could be so inhumane. After a yearlong investigation of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shootings in Las Vegas, the FBI still couldn’t conclusively say what caused its perpetrator to kill 58 people and wound nearly 1,000 more.

It may seem nihilistic and cynical to some that Joker drops heinous, random violence on our heads for two hours without giving us an emotional out or—at the very least—a prescription for the societal indifference that exacerbates it; but some may also see value in honestly depicting the most nightmarish aspect of the scourge of white terrorism: our own lack of answers.

What’s lost in the interminable controversy surrounding this movie is that you don’t have to believe exclusively in either idea, and that engaging in these uncomfortable questions about our world is not an abetment of real-world gun violence nor is it an endorsement of the toxic ideas of white marginalization and cultural displacement. At the end of the day, you can—and have always been able to—opt out, especially now when the amount of on-demand, niche content has never been more staggering. But to purposefully engage with a film that you know you won’t enjoy expressly to have it expunged from the culture only gives the isolated, disillusioned, and volatile another misperceived example of homogenized groupthink to rage at.

Some, fairly enough, will contend that they simply can’t remain silent and allow what they view as commercialized radical incel iconography to permeate a society that they have to inhabit every day. During its opening weekend, there were Joker screenings cancelled due to credible threats and a handful that weren’t that became needlessly tense because of the overexuberance of audience members. I chose to see the movie during the early afternoon, and I specifically vetted the seating charts of each showing before booking my tickets. I did that for obvious reasons, but I also decided that I wouldn’t allow my fear to deter my engagement with either the film or the subject matter.

The Joker has existed for nearly 80 years, and the reason why is because it connects with either the anarchic sides of the worst of us or the acknowledgement of rational people that unexplainable chaos plays a role in our world and history. Like the self-proclaimed clowns in Joker, some in the real world will adopt a hagiographic understanding of the character to make their grievances more real by giving them a physical manifestation, just like others would do with Travis Bickle or Pepe the Frog or the okay symbol. Crusading for the censoring of all things potentially unsavory in art and society quickly becomes a thankless game of whack-a-mole.

As you disavow one, five more pop up—not only because the underlying motivation to ascribe symbolic legitimacy to ultimately unpopular ideas is key to ensuring their already fledgling survival, but because a chief goal of incels and white nationalists is to co-op innocuous everyday idioms and actions to trick you into thinking their movements are more universal than they are.

It can feel like you’re fighting the good fight protesting a movie like Joker, but you run the risk of validating the false assertion of a toxic few that they are omnipresent boogeymen too secretly entrenched in our world to ever be vanquished. The most important lesson Joker taught me is that the boogeyman is usually not as apt or organized as we believe it to be, and while we may have a hand in its genesis, we also have the power to bring about its end.