The subject of research is the subject of permanent modernity as an amateur, active principle that lies at the basis and beyond the framework of culture, deviant in relation to it, but reflecting and transforming it, and how such a position of the subject, as the subject itself is reflected in the pages of mass literature of the nineteenth century: feuilleton novels by E. Sue and A. Dumas, and the popular movie of the twentieth century: in the films The Dark Knight (C. Nolan, 2008) and The Joker (T. Phillips, 2019). The relevance of the topic is justified by the current debate around the subject, who seems to have died and seems to be alive, and the need for a new understanding of modernity – not as the era limited by the time period, but as the experience of a subject understood in a special way. Rethinking the subject and modernity can be the way out of the impasse in which philosophy found itself after Auschwitz and Kolyma. As research methods, we use narratology, the sociology of literature and the author’s concept of permanent modernity, as a situation of personal living current, personal connection with being, resulting in a project of culture, the totality of which forms a cultural matrix. The main contribution of the article to the theory of permanent modernity, to the theory of philosophy of culture, is to identify common features between the subject of modernity, that is, a cultural man, a person from the real world, and a superhero of a literary narrative – both of them reveal the same functions, models of actions, socio-cultural location, relation to the Law. The connection between literary and real spaces, as well as their intersection, mutual influence in the person of one actor, transforming both fields and through it himself, is traced. As a conclusion, a statement is made on the timeless nature of the subject of permanent modernity.