Terrore ed eccitazione. I media come pelle del mondo

The essay examines the production of parallel worlds within late-modern culture as a response to the uncertainties of human existence. Through J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, it investigates how cultural industries articulate imaginaries that oscillate between protection and estrangement, normalization and rupture. Consumerist enclaves, televisual dispositifs, and digital matrices emerge as emblematic devices through which late capitalism organizes experience, neutralizes risk, and reconfigures subjectivity. At the same time, these narratives expose the fragility of such constructs, revealing how violence, doubt, and resistance resurface as forces of disillusionment and liberation. By engaging with theoretical perspectives from Žižek, Benjamin, Hobbes, and Esposito, the analysis suggests that the creation of illusory worlds is not a secondary cultural by-product, but a structural necessity: a way of negotiating fear and finitude, and of giving form to the ambivalent relation between media, society, and the conditions of human life.