I Can't Read Anything Else About Luigi Mangione
The Internet's rabid appetite to exploit the UHC assassin sucks, but isn't surprising.
For the most part, I’ve tried to stay out of the UnitedHealthcare assassination episode. Friends have asked me for my thoughts and expressed eager anticipation for potential fan fiction I may write. But as I was telling a friend last week, the entire situation just feels all wrong in that primal way your body’s senses reject something they are suspicious of. And because of that, I can’t bring myself to keep up with the pace with which we’re trying to flatten and fold Luigi Mangione into America’s Cracker Barrel afghan of legends and folk heroes (and brings up a very separate discussion of how bleak meme-making has become). Is it not strange that for someone so popular and now recognizable, so little of him is actually known? More sobering, I don’t believe we ever will because the burgeoning icon is already and forever will be larger than the 26-year-old could ever be.
Since the NYPD soft launched Luigi’s face with those initial smile cam photos, every known or available aspect of his identity, from his Goodreads account to third-in-the-line recountings of personal experiences with him, have been dissected. Wild debates about his physiognomy have taken over corners as niche as Reddit and as wide as the New York Times. In total, it’s been a surgical theater staged by first-day med students and no one can wait to get a turn to hold the scalpel lest they miss out on a viral moment with diet prada.
The lookalike contests have been held. “Free Luigi” tags have been spray-painted. Bret Stephens has questioned his working-class hero bonafides. Yet, for as thorough as the public and media have been—whether a fan of his work or not—the flurry of fast notoriety has left Mangione the man himself behind. You don’t need a body to make an icon, just an image.
Over the summer, I took two weeks off work after feeling a powerful, ever-growing sense of dissociation and general malaise (that’s what I call summertime depression—it’s more sleepy and dramatic). During that time, I went to the beach every day and among other things decided to finally read Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem as research for another project I’ve been working on. Prior to this, I had read her other books. However, as is my typical mode of operation, I put off reading the most famous one as doing so often feels like it carries a certain mythology of its own. It’s like reading under the spectre of renown when I’d prefer to go in tabula rasa, clean slate. In any case, in her essay, “John Wayne: A Love Song”, Didion disembowels the all-American myth-making machine as she considers her own relationship to it, remarking how, “when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. [...] And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it” (Didion).
I certainly am not the first writer to suggest the existence of multiple “Americas.” In fact, these are more or less observations related to experiences with social strata and exist in most nations today. But, call it exceptionalism or an astute observation, I think the U.S.’s many “Americas” are unique in that it is the foremost superpower on the planet. As such, the stretch and distortions of a U.S. citizens’ experiences with such power are, in turn, also exceptional (derogatory), and the heroes who are our guides through them are archetypes, not men.
They’re Paul Bunyon. They’re Johnny Appleseed or Davy Crockett. They’re kings of the wild frontier, as the many ballads about them will say. Folk heroes are the ones we write all-American histories about. Often, people say that America is obsessed with its history, but I disagree slightly. We are, as most great colonial powers are, obsessed with our lineage and interested in our history only insofar as it can substantiate the myths of said lineage and all that is contained in them—our hopes, dreams, and values. America is a nation of stories, and Luigi Mangione is the latest hero to be submitted into one. The major difference between him and America’s heroes of yore, though, and something that public narrative is trying to erase, is that his actions very obviously and clearly had motivations outside personal glory. He didn’t need to or want to become an American saint. He was a man with a mission purposefully disguised in anonymity. As writer P.E. Moskowitz put it recently in their own post about Mangione, we are confronted with “a young man whose life is now ruined, who will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, whose family is now scarred and who will now all have to bear the mental weight of his actions for the rest of their lives” (Moskowitz). Yet, the moment necessitates forgetting all of that for the sake of its own survival. How can you project pictures of Luigi Mangione onto a screen at a DJ set playing old Hannah Montana songs (painfully, I could not find further context) if you remember that staring at a face too long, you forget it belongs to someone?
An America of the Mind has been something I’ve been curious about for a while. It’s not quite paradise, as in paradise there is no conflict. It’s America, where conflict is paradise. It’s where the complication of national governance is so distant it may as well be nonexistent, and what conflict you need to solve, you can from the comfort of your porch, and your antagonist is your enemy, and they’re always wrong. There’s nothing but miles of nothing and horizons without roads to tell you there’s someplace to be. In America of the Mind, as in a dream, time is neither a constraint nor a resource to spend. Quite simply, life melts away when you pass your property’s fence and the rest is a dream.
With the emergence of hunting camo fashions and Southern Gothic and Ethel Cain and self-lore and January 6th and trad wives and Trump the Fight Fight Fight-er, I’ve been wondering where this is going. It’s Americanism making a Major™ comeback, but to what end? Then we got an old Western-style execution on December 4th, and it clicked. We’ve been in America. Through the consolidation of federal power over the last quarter decade, America’s growing fascist state has created a distance between the government and its people akin to helicopter parents checking their child’s Find My whenever they leave the house. At all times, we’re being watched even and especially in ways we didn’t know we could be watched, and it’s pushed us, like those children, to hide ourselves in plain sight—to retreat into a fantasy. That’s how someone like Luigi Mangione could execute the CEO of one of the wealthiest companies in America and lead the most publicized manhunt since O.J. Simpson rode his own all-American bronco into a fast-setting 405 sun. Cowboy metaphors abound.
As the middle class is squeezed out, those pushed above it have become grifters and those below it dreamers. The grifters have very pathetically embraced Brian Thompson with all the flaccid conviction they can muster for a dead man with no cause and for whom they don’t genuinely care about. But America of the Mind has been, by my best observations, a product of the dreamers, growing out of the rotting sinews of what was the middle class—too wealthy to entertain falling off the face of society, too poor to sincerely hope for better, angry these are the choices and made curious populists of many.
A man like Luigi Mangione is the stuff of legends which, over the last few decades, we’ve been in short supply of. He’s driven, mysterious, elusive, and has a cause whose politics are both specific and vague enough that you can imprint yourself onto them with ease. And did I mention he’s an undeniable no-homo kind of handsome? There’s been a rush to call him a modern-day Robin Hood, but his appeal is more along the lines of Didion’s own John Wayne, whose undeniable appeal in both braggadocio and looks sold his wanton sense of justice to an entire generation.
And as with Mangione, Didion also notices how little room there is for biography in the legend of John Wayne. For Marion Morrison, John Wayne’s birth name, “even his history seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream.” Quite simply, he was no one, but, to quote Raoul Walsh, that “son of a bitch looked like a man.” Into that anonymous ideal, neither too distinct nor mundane, directors could pour “the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost” (Didion).
Some of the aforementioned flaccid grifters have tried to prop up Brian Thompson as the “real” working-class hero who is sexy. One user on X went so far as to lay out the entire case:
But as the uncharismatic CEO of a widely despised company, Thompson was already a shell of a man in the eyes of the public—widely unknown and hated by those to whom he was. His legacy, now, is a plaything for the same class of people he vehemently devoted his life to defending while they seek in vain to mythologize him into a commodity. A hell he tied his horse to.
I can’t necessarily speak to a better fate for Luigi Mangione, though, whose eyebrows have made him ambiguous but distinct enough to be a vessel for disorganized public sentiment. He was a man whose motivations were pronouncedly human in their logical inconsistencies and passionate through-line. He obscured himself in his actions so the message could exist without a face. Yet here we are as a wider public, arm-in-arm with an elite class we supposedly despise, spreading his face and name as far and in as many forms as possible to do just the opposite, proving once again that at least in America, the dream is always alive and well.
Works Cited:
Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York, Picador Modern Classics, 1968.
Moskowitz, P.E. “Heroism Is Dehumanizing.” Mental Hellth, 16 Dec. 20244, mentalhellth.xyz/p/heroism-is-dehumanizing. Accessed 17 Dec. 2024.
Rieder, Travis N. “Opinion | Why the Murder of a Health Care C.E.O. Is Morally Wrong.” The New York Times, 13 Dec. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/opinion/united-healthcare-shooting-brian-thompson.html.
Stephens, Bret. “Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero.” The New York Times, 4 Dec. 2024, www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/opinion/thepoint#brian-thompson-luigi-mangione.
Fealey, Patrick. “The Invisible Man.” Esquire, 14 Nov. 2024, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/.
“if you remember that staring at a face too long, you forget it belongs to someone?”
This one line…stunning some beautiful work here