The film critic is in a difficult position, because obviously they understand movies differently from most people. How could you not, when you spend all day watching and writing about them? An enormous gap develops between your taste and the taste of the ordinary moviegoer, who—in the aggregate, at least—loves the Fast and Furious franchise and multi-part epics about a purple guy collecting magic stones. The thing about this gap, though, is that the critic never knows how wide it is. To be read, you have to decide not only what you think of a movie but also what the general public will think of it. And film critics’ assessment of the general public appears low. Take, for example, their warning that a certain class of undersexed loser is about to misunderstand the Joke movie.

The worry that involuntary celibates, made stupid by the superhero-industrial complex and driven mad by their inability to get laid, will watch Joker and do violence doesn’t really make sense. But I submit that we might not all be thinking sensibly right now. American society is A) scared and B) in the midst of an ongoing debate about who it’s appropriate to feel bad for. The incel might seem pathetic when you first learn the term, but his hatred of women and reactionary political views place him beyond the pale of sympathy. He is a loser, yes, but he is also wrong. Wrong ideas seem scarier now than they did before—probably because we have rightly identified them as the source of historical problems instead of, say, wrong ethnicities or wrong religions. It’s good that our culture has made this progress, but we are still struggling to decide what to do about it. Progressives have yet to embrace the idea that wrong ideas can come from structural forces in the same way as low income or social isolation. We feel sorry for the wronged group, but the wrong individual is a tougher sell, characterized as he is by stupid opinions and often unpleasant personal habits. The consensus is that compassion is good, unless it’s compassion for bad people.

The promise—i.e. threat—of Joker is that it will make us feel compassion for a well-known villain that a certain segment of society kind of identifies with already. The sincerity of this identification is another known unknown: in the same way the critic can’t tell just how far he’s drifted from popular taste, none of us can tell how serious any given Joker avatar is on the internet. Maybe Alex Nicholson is right when he says that most Joker allusions are ironic. But how can you know? The tastes of the general public are inscrutable, and the knowing consumption of the smartass who goes to see Joker ironically is indistinguishable from ticket sales to malcontents thrilled that someone finally made Taxi Driver for nerds. This fear that other people are getting behind something awful is the fear the Joker represents. His superpower is to mislead the mob. It’s kind of funny that critics have bought into it, unless some act of violence really does happen at a Joker screening this weekend. Then I’ll look like a colossal asshole for writing this essay. But I’m betting that the critics hate normies more than the nerds do, and both populations will find it in their hearts to restrain their murderous rage.