A photograph of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man accused of killing a health care executive in New York City on Dec. 4, is strikingly reminiscent of one of the most famous images of a would-be assassin from the 19th century. After his capture in late April of 1865, Lewis Powell was photographed aboard the USS Saugus, where he was held before trial on charges of conspiracy and attempted murder for his participation in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln and top members of his government.
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The Powell photograph was taken by the Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner, who posed the 21-year-old man against what appears to be the pitted metal cover of the ship’s gun turret. Like an image of Mangione made shortly after his capture, the Gardner photograph shows a handsome young man against a bland, almost abstract background, staring directly at the viewer with half-open but alert eyes.
Gardner’s portrait is famous today, in part, because it was key to a 1980 book about photography, “Camera Lucida,” written by the brilliant French critic Roland Barthes. For Barthes, the image of a man who engages the camera with a keen sense of intelligence, yet who would be executed only a few months later, encapsulated one of the central mysteries of photography: It can sustain the living presence of something that has passed or died. “He is dead, and he is going to die …” he wrote.
But Barthes was also captivated by Powell’s good looks, as many people on social media are clearly drawn to Mangione’s chiseled features, despite the accusation that he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Images of a shirtless and muscular Mangione have flooded social media, along with memes that pose him as a saint with a halo or a potential martyr protectively embraced by Jesus (“It’s okay they called me guilty too,” reads one poorly punctuated caption). A Free Luigi movement presents him as a folk hero, images of his hooded face before capture have apparently been tattooed on arms or legs, and on TikTok and other sites he’s been given the epithet of a superhero or cinema vigilante: “The Adjuster.”
Praise for him seems to cross partisan lines and is worrisome to the insurance industry, which suddenly seems to be widely loathed in the United States despite polls that paint a more complicated picture. “My empathy is out of network,” another phrase circulating on social media, suggests that many people are struggling to hold in their heads two ideas at the same time: That killing is wrong and yet our health care system, and especially the insurance industry that generates enormous profits, is arguably broken and at times feels cruel.
Memes are a good way to think one thought vehemently, but less efficient at thinking two thoughts simultaneously. Behind many of the images celebrating or excusing the crime Mangione is accused of committing are two ideas that Barthes might have called “mythologies,” spoken or unspoken thoughts that arise within a capitalist society that feel powerfully true yet often elude rational analysis or criticism.
In the case of the Mangione images, these seem to be: “He doesn’t look like a killer” and “Somebody should do something about this,” with “this” being the state of the private health care industry. The notion that Mangione doesn’t look like a killer should be easily dismissed, if we give even rudimentary consideration to how class and race influence popular conceptions of criminality. Mangione is White, comes from a privileged background and went to a private school. But it would be a ridiculous syllogism – racist, classist and just plain ignorant – to conclude, “therefore he can’t be a criminal.”
“Somebody should do something about this” is deeply problematic, too, but in different ways. Who is the somebody, and what is the something? “Somebody” could be politicians, or voters, or health-care executives, who might be chastened by public anger into diverting more of their profits into actual health care and the well-being of the American people. “Something” could be reform or regulation, which voters seem to have rejected in the last election. Or it could be the institution of a single-payer, public system, that doesn’t divert billions of dollars of profit to private shareholders and insurance executives. But voters seemed to have rejected that, too, on several occasions.
The vagueness of the “Somebody should do something” idea is the problem. One of the most disturbing memes circulating shows the moment that Thompson is shot, a grainy image of a figure in a dark, hooded jacket with a backpack points a gun at the back of man in a suit a few feet away, both casting shadows on the momentarily empty sidewalk. Underneath, the word “Hope” appears in sans serif type, just as it did in the famous 2008 Shepard Fairey poster promoting the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.
This meme celebrates the violence itself, the something, with no reference to the someone, or anything else that might put it in context. Rationally, pragmatically, morally, there’s no justifying homicide. And it may be that our insurance rates only go up given the industry’s investment in more security, costs which could be born by the consumer. If violence becomes the routine remedy for consumer dissatisfaction or political dysfunction, the cost to society is inestimably high and unsustainable.
This image is profoundly disturbing because it seems to collapse two more things into one: We know killing is wrong and yet no one will acknowledge and address the rage, the hurt, the death, that comes from harnessing health care to a capitalist system that insists on the highest possible return on shareholder investment. It wasn’t a crime, it was self-defense; it isn’t terrorism, it’s revolution.
Have we reached that point? I’m staring at a 2023 letter from my insurance provider blandly addressed to “Dear Appellant.” It tells me that despite my being told, and reassured twice, that I would only be responsible out of pocket for $800 for a procedure that costs $5,000, they would in fact reimburse only a few hundred dollars of the cost. I fought it, I spent hours on the phone, wrote multiple letters, sent emails, demanded they refer back to their own records, reference numbers and promises, and yet I lost.
I’m looking at the woman’s signature at the bottom of the letter and all the rage I felt then, amplified by the rage I feel at airlines, banks, shrinkflation and the company that made my lemon of a car, comes flooding back. How does Alicia live with herself, writing these terrible letters, doing this cruel work in service of oligarchs, day after day?
I was lucky, the procedure worked, the cost didn’t bankrupt me – and the anger abated. But what if it hadn’t worked, what if the problem and the pain persisted? What if the costs were unsustainable and I lost my home, my car, my retirement trying to stay above water?
The iconography of political violence depends on who wins the argument, who writes the history and who paints the picture. The biblical David is invariably depicted as a beautiful young man, a beauty that helps reassure us of the morality of his single-handed slaying of Goliath. Artemisia Gentileschi’s early 17th century depiction of Judith slaying Holofernes – which probably channeled the rage and hurt she felt after having been raped – depicts the heroine as a beautiful, powerful woman.
People making memes of Mangione may not be thinking of these particular examples, but they are clearly aware of how history determines memory, how it can redefine a savage attack as righteous vengeance, and lone acts of violence as collective self-defense. I find myself profoundly disconcerted by these images, and I waver in what I feel, arguing in my head with both his defenders (that they are paving the path to social ruin) and his critics (that they profoundly underestimate and recklessly discount the quantum of rage at the insurance industry).
One way to keep both of these thoughts balanced in the mind is to look back on the history of violence and iconography, and insert a negative into both of the mythologies circulating in these memes: If somebody doesn’t do something about this problem, then he won’t look like a killer.