Don’t blame director Christopher Nolan or star Christian Bale.

But maybe it’s worth having a discussion about an entertainment culture that excels at selling violent power fantasies to people who feel powerless.

Initially, little was known about the Aurora, Colo., gunman who killed 12 at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.” We knew his age (24) and his name (James Holmes); the latter fact is irrelevant, the former maybe less so. The audience that has been the most breathless in its anticipation of the third and final film in the “Dark Knight” series — the audience for whom it’s not just a movie but the pop culmination of their lives — is young. But motive is as yet unknown, despite unconfirmed reports at press time that Holmes told police he was “the Joker.” He could indeed be a fan who lost touch with reality. He could be political. Or maybe he just saw the release of “The Dark Knight Rises” as his best potential stage. Where was all of America (or all of America that mattered to him) at midnight on Thursday? At this movie. Where was the place for him to finally be seen, be heard, make an impact? Nowhere else.

The gunman planned his attack for the first local public screening of the film, and it is almost certain he had not seen it himself. Let’s be clear about this: James Holmes is not the poster child for anything but the sickness in his head. Yet it’s difficult, at this point, to fully separate the act of a single deranged man from the all-encompassing mania this series engenders in a surprising number of people. For millions, “The Dark Knight Rises” is just a movie (and, to this critic, a very good one). For a vocal contingent on the fringes, it’s much more — a film that has to be perfect for the world to make any sense at all.

Earlier in the week, the popular movie review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes suspended user comments for “The Dark Knight Rises” because fans were directing multiple death threats and rape threats at critics who had dared to give the film less than a perfect grade. Reviewers like the Associated Press’s Christy Lemire and movie blogger Marshall Fine were promised physical extinction for daring to not like a movie that those posting the threats hadn’t even seen.

There is something truly awful going on here: an entitled fanboy mentality, enabled by the anonymity of screen names, that moves and thinks as a mob and that reacts to any deviation from unanimous praise with the fury of a spoiled child. Of course there were plenty of level-headed responses on the Rotten Tomatoes boards and elsewhere; of course not all fanboys (and girls) are immature dolts. But enough of them are to dominate the discourse, and their assumptions are frightening to contemplate: If someone does not like this movie, he or she deserves to die. Oh, wait, you were kidding? They’re just words, pixels on a screen? How does that absolve you? When you threaten real human beings with violence while hiding behind the wall of DrkKnghtFan, what consequences does that have for the intended victim, for society, for your soul?

More pressingly, it needs to be asked, why does fantasy in general and this fantasy in particular mean so much to so many people? Why does a negative review for a movie strike some as an attack on their own identity? When the second film in Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy, “The Dark Knight,” came out in 2008, it was remarkable to see so many members of a generation that had no cultural focal point discovering theirs in this, the way previous generations had rallied around the Beatles or “Nevermind” or “Titanic.” Even more so; I recall (and wrote about at the time) a young man I met who likened the impact of “Dark Knight” to the Kennedy assassination and the Challenger disaster as events that unified young people and gave them their defining moment.