The challenging yet captivating “Vox Lux,” starring Natalie Portman, was released Dec. 7 to mixed reviews. The project of Brady Corbet, who’s acted in the films “Funny Games,” “Mysterious Skin,” “Thirteen” and “Melancholia,” depicts the life of Celeste, a pop singer who rises to fame shortly after being the victim of a school shooting in 1999.

The film tells Celeste’s story in a three act structure: The first segment centers the shooting incident and her subsequent rise to stardom, the second, her adult life as an egomaniacal and emotionally unstable world sensation and the finale wherein she performs a concert to a stadium of adoring fans.

Over the course of the film, we see Celeste transform from a teenager with a message of hope into a strung-out, alcoholic pop star struggling to maintain a relationship with her daughter. She lashes out at paparazzi, makes a public scene in a restaurant when asked for a photograph and, at one point, falls into a drug-addled sobbing fit over how ugly the concert cameras make her look.

On a surface level, the film is about a victim of violence who capitalizes off of her pain and becomes detached from reality in the process. Upon digging deeper, however, the film presents a bleak message about what frequent acts of extreme violence has done to American cultural sensibilities, as well as the intersection between terrorism and celebrity.

If there’s any one line in the film that seems to explain the connection between these two juxtaposed societal forces, it comes when Celeste is being interviewed by a reporter just following a present-day mass shooting wherein the perpetrators wore masks resembling those her dancers wore in a music video. When asked to talk about the incident, her response includes something to the effect of, “If we ignore these people, they’ll go away.” Though her comment refers to those who commit heinous acts of violence for the sake of public attention, the same can undeniably be said of celebrities. Bad behavior is nearly always sensationalized, and the public nearly always consumes it with gusto.

Actor Willem Dafoe provides narration for the film, presenting Celeste’s life story with ironic grandiosity. Through this narration, we get a glimpse into the true worldview of the film. In a scene in the first act, after the thirteen-year-old Celeste performs the song she wrote to memorialize the victims of the shooting, Dafoe’s narration describes how representatives at her record label would encourage her to change the “I” pronouns in her lyrics to “we,” symbolizing how tragedy is often commodified in a way consumers can personally embrace.

Another noteworthy narration comes at the end of the film as Celeste performs her concert. Two songs in, she addresses the audience, chanting about how people have tried to keep her down, but she has overcome. The fans look on with tears in their eyes, though the audience knows Celeste is putting on a facade. The Dafoe narration that follows describes how in a dream, Celeste sold her soul in order to bring her music to her fans.

Upon release, the film saw a number of criticisms ranging from the unlikability of Portman’s performance, as well as the handling of the films sensitive subject matter.

Criticisms of Portman’s performance are, to put it bluntly, misguided, and bring to mind how seldom male actors are criticized for playing “unlikeable” characters. Many of the same words used to describe Portman as Celeste—emotionally unhinged, whiny, combative—could easily be applied to beloved male characters for which the actors were praised, like Joaquin Phoenix in “The Master,” Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network,” and Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver,” to name a few.

Women aren’t given the same leeway to portray characters whose emotional turmoil manifests itself in attractive ways. The idea that Portman’s depiction of the character is inherently bad simply because the character herself is “whiny” or “unhinged” seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what acting is, as well as a deeply rooted notion that female characters must not only be attractive; they must be likeable.

The criticisms surrounding the narrative of the film are more complicated. While the strengths of the film lie in its Nihilistic worldview, the choice to make a child victim of a school shooting into an almost immediately unsympathetic character is a ballsy one, and one which understandably left a bad taste in the mouths of some reviewers.

Celeste, however, does not stand in for literal victims of violence. In a way, she’s an allegory for American society: She’s exposed to such horrific brutality that all she knows to do is capitalize off of it, masking her pain in platitudes about strength and overcoming, though she herself is hopelessly damaged beyond repair.

There’s a long history of films that center raw and topical acts of violence; in recent memory, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” about a school massacre and “Patriot’s Day” about the Boston Bombing come to mind. These films are about the acts of violence themselves; while “Kevin” explores the psychological motivation behind such acts, “Patriot’s Day” turns its subject matter into a hero narrative about the courageous individuals who helped bring the bombers to justice.

As the American public grows more desensitized to acts of domestic terrorism, “Vox Lux” is a departure from typical narratives surrounding acts of violence. It does not intend to explain, nor comfort – it aims to reckon with what this violence has done to American society. The message of the film speaks to how we water down tragedy with platitudes and immerse ourselves in a culture always looking to profit off of the things it doesn’t know how to deal with.

This is not a film about shootings, nor is it a film about pop music. It’s a film about how American culture, both the violent and commercial aspects, turns monsters into celebrities, and celebrities into monsters. All the while, the American public does what it does best: blindly and desperately embraces the empty messages of hope and strength the machine produces.