Somewhere inside 15 Minutes of Shame, the new Monica Lewinsky–produced HBO documentary about the intensifying trend of media-driven public shaming, there’s a pretty good film examining one of the defining phenomena of recent culture. Too bad it’s buried under a jumble of incoherence.

We should give Lewinsky’s film credit for taking the matter of “cancel culture” seriously and for making plain to viewers the very real and devastating consequences of being “cancelled” or otherwise pilloried in our polarized, media-saturated world. The film spotlights a few notable episodes to make its point: Matt Colvin, the Amazon seller who bought up thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer to resell at an inflated price (largely, he says, to cover the hefty cost of Amazon’s “free” shipping); Emmanuel Cafferty, the Mexican American San Diego Gas & Electric worker fired after a white motorist mistook his finger movements for a white supremacist hand signal; Laura Krolczyk, the New York health-sector employee fired and dragged for posting in frustration that COVID-denying Donald Trump supporters should give up their ventilators for others.

We see up close the harrowing impact these bouts of public shaming have had on their targets: lingering trauma, physical threats to their and their families’ safety, and financial ruin — without a job, and their names too sullied to quickly bounce on to another, the “cancelled” are forced to lean on a dwindling sum of savings and emergency money. These are, unfortunately, only a handful of the many, many cases the filmmakers could’ve chosen: the customer-care manager who lost his job over accidentally liking a pro-Tibet independence tweet; the low-wage university workers called racist and fired for following their employer’s rules; an indigenous family physically harassed and laid off when a screenshot of a Snapchat video was construed as mocking George Floyd; the biracial makeup artist fired for saying a racial slur while singing along to a rap song; the Bernie Sanders staffers and other leftists fired over various offending content; and the many instances of journalists fired over years-old social-media posts, some written while in their teens, just to name a few.