Society's fractured smile: The Joker between social deviance and cultural reflection. A sociological and bibliometric analysis of representations of marginality in cinema

The film Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips, has generated a major cultural and social impact, becoming an object of critical reflection on marginalization, mental health and systemic violence. This paper proposes an interdisciplinary analysis that combines a sociological perspective on cinematic narrative with a bibliometric investigation of international academic reception. The study utilizes a mixed-method approach, consisting of a qualitative sociological analysis of the movie content and a bibliometric analysis assisted by VOSviewer software. For the bibliometric analysis, 87 English-language scholarly articles were selected from the Scopus database, published between 2019 and 2025, using the keywords “Joker” and “movie”. Sociological analysis reveals major themes such as alienation, structural inequality, stigmatization of mental illness, institutional collapse and symbolic violence. These have been interpreted through the theories of Marx, Durkheim, Foucault and Becker. The bibliometric analysis highlights six distinct thematic clusters: translation and language, mental health and stereotyping, narrative archetypes, urban culture and media, the psychology of character and phenomenological representation. The co-occurrence map reflects the deeply interdisciplinary nature of the research and provides empirical support for sociological interpretation. The Joker functions as a cultural artifact that reflects contemporary social crises and generates a plural academic reception. The integration of sociological and bibliometric analyses validates the relevance of the film as a source of critical knowledge and as a tool for the symbolic representation of deviance, marginalization and fragility of social systems.