I fiori del capitalismo e altre strane icone

This paper has two main goals: to define what cultural icons are from a structural sociosemiotic perspective; and to analyse some of them. In par-ticular, I focus on some critical images and narratives of capitalism, con-necting the analysis of the movie Little Joe (Hausner 2020) to Fisher’s (2009, 2016) and Didino’s (2018, 2020) reflections on weirdness and ee-riness as crucial ideas for understanding contemporaneity. In other terms, I aim at showing how the cultural icons discussed in these texts do sys-tematize with others I studied in the past, and more specifically with the ones identified in the films La vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 (Kechiche 2013), Jeune Femme (Serraille 2017) and Chiara Ferragni – Unposted (Amoruso 2019). My thesis is that the world where we live is increasingly portrayed as a reality that, behind its apparent normality, hides something strange and disturbing. This questions the humanistic ideal that we are at the centre of the universe and masters of our own destiny, requiring us to reflect on our true nature and on the nature of what surrounds us, in or-der to hopefully improve our own condition and to build a better society.