Abstract

The article reads the film Joker by Todd Phillips as a denunciation of the pathologies of contemporary society and its self-destructive drift. Caused by a process of homologation of the individual personality to collective models, it not only generates such conformism and massification phenomena underlined by postmodern reflection, but gives rise to processes of disintegration of the subject which lead to the uncontrolled explosion of violence. Prisoner of a growing and systematic dynamic of mimetic identification with the dominant models of mass society - through pervasive containment and control methods, such as «repressive desublimation» (Herbert Marcuse) and «redundancy» (Umberto Eco) - the individual, denied his own difference and uniqueness, is inexorably pushed towards Thanatos. This, now the dominant force, is capable of destroying humankind’s best resources and putting the latter on course to a dead end.