On December 4, twenty-six-year-old Luigi Mangione allegedly fired a fatal shot into the back of Brian Thompson, CEO of the health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, as Thompson was exiting a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Then, after Thompson was down, Mangione fired at least one more shot into his inert body. It looked like an open-and-shut case of first-degree murder, one of the numerous state and federal felonies with which Mangione has been charged since his arrest on December 9 while on the run in Pennsylvania.
What has ensued since then has been a shocking outpouring of public sympathy, especially among young people—for Mangione, not for the assassinated father of two sons. It’s not a flash in the pan, either; it’s crescendoing. For example, before the arrested Mangione was extradited from Pennsylvania to New York on December 19 to await trial on murder and terrorism charges, jail authorities reported that he had received more than one hundred pieces of mail plus 167 deposits into his commissary account. At least one food delivery service had attempted to bring him a meal paid for by a fan (the driver was turned away per jail policy). Other supporters carrying “Free Luigi”-style pickets stood outside courthouses in both jurisdictions. An online fund has collected at least $100,000 for his legal defense, even though he hails from a wealthy Baltimore family. Most chilling—even more than the hacked electronic traffic sign in Seattle reading “Many More to Go,” or the dance party in Boston under flashing images of Mangione’s face—was the Emerson College poll released on December 18 indicating that 41 percent of voters from ages eighteen to twenty-nine believe that the Thompson killing was anywhere from “somewhat” to “completely acceptable.”
It is easy to characterize all of this as the outcome of an ideological struggle over health-care policy in which emotions have run high because lives of loved ones are at stake. At the heart of the chaos—denials of coverage on one side, allegations of provider greed and over-treatment on the other—is the predictable mess that is Obamacare ten years out. The Affordable Care Act, mandating the supposedly free provision of all sorts of costly services that many Americans neither wanted nor approved of morally, has created an insoluble rationing problem that has led to a near-universal loathing of health insurers, fair or unfair.
But the fact that Luigi Mangione has become the face of a potentially—we hope only potentially—murderous mass movement among young people isn’t mainly a result of ideology. The moving force, I think, is something more powerful and also more alluring: the “glamour of evil.” The phrase comes from the Catholic rite of baptism, with its queries of the person about to be baptized: “Do you reject the glamour of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin? Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?”
The very word “glamour” comes from the medieval Scots dialect, where it referred to sorcery or a magical spell. It was a corruption of the word “grammar,” because it was believed that medieval youths studying grammar—that is, classical literature—also dabbled in the dark arts with their Latin that was incomprehensible to ordinary people. The word eventually acquired the broader meaning that it has today: “an exciting and often illusory and romantic attractiveness,” as Merriam-Webster has it. We associate glamour with entertainment stars, luxury cars, super-slim urban apartment towers, and Louis Vuitton ads with their elegant, hooded-eyed models expressing unattainable standards of beauty as they show off impossibly expensive handbags.
This does not mean that glamour is in itself evil. But it does have a magical element: something veiled and sleek and glittery, its rough edges smoothed away so that it arouses in the viewer a desire to possess or even to become the object or person portrayed. The most perceptive dissection of the phenomenon comes from the cultural critic Virginia Postrel’s book The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (2013). Postrel observed that glamour ‘‘does not exist independently in the glamorous object . . . but emerges through the interaction between object and audience. . . . One may strive to construct a glamorous effect, but success depends on the perceiver’s receptive imagination.’’ Glamour is thus morally neutral, to be used for good or ill. Botticelli’s Madonnas, with their lovely oval faces, their exquisite coiffures, and their eyes that never meet the viewer’s because they are contemplating the Child and his Incarnation, are as glamorous artistic creations as any ad for a Lamborghini or a Vuitton bag. Although Postrel was entranced by advertising, she didn’t let the fairy dust cloud her vision. Ballerinas are glamorous, she pointed out, but so, in their self-presentation, are terrorists. Look at the photos of the Yemeni Houthi showing off their Muslim garb and bandoliers as they wave their AK-47s at the camera.
Which leads us to Luigi Mangione, darkly handsome, athletic, and in top physical condition. (An internet photo of him in swim trunks showing off his abs has garnered more than 31 million views.) He is prime glamour material augmented by the air of mystery surrounding his alleged murderous deed. He is obviously extremely bright, a high-school valedictorian who earned both a bachelor’s (cum laude) and a master’s degree in computer science during his four years at the University of Pennsylvania. More tantalizing mystery surrounds his alleged motivation. He had complained of a botched back surgery that might have underlain a resentment of the health-insurance bureaucracy, but UnitedHealthcare was not even his family insurer. He was captured with a slew of evidence pointing to his identity as the killer—a gun and silencer that seemed to match the murder weapon, the same fake ID that the killer had apparently used in New York City, even a manifesto—all suggesting that he somehow wanted to be caught. The romantic loner, the misunderstood outlaw who needs only the love of a loyal woman, has been a mainstay of glamorous illusion since long before the movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967) made stylishly dressed folk heroes out of cold-blooded slayers of small-town business owners—or besotted females started sending mash notes and marriage proposals to Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The capstone so far of Mangione’s emergence as a figure of glamour has been the decision of someone—a someone who ought to be fired—in the New York City political establishment to perp-walk Mangione from his helipad landing after transport from Pennsylvania to the Manhattan federal court for arraignment a few yards away. What could the officials have been thinking? The two dozen black-clad and heavily armed law enforcement officers who accompanied Mangione, including New York Mayor Eric Adams, looked more like an entourage than a security detail. The handcuffed Mangione, for his part, clean-shaven and wearing his orange jail jumpsuit with neatly belted panache, looked like a martyr. He looked like Jesus Christ being led to Pontius Pilate. The photos are now everywhere: on social media, on the CNN website, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The comments have been devastating: “Is Christopher Nolan directing this?” “If you’re trying to make him the coolest guy alive you’re doing a good job.”
The power of glamour, indeed. Glamour can make life pleasurable, entertaining, and beautiful, and even, as with Botticelli’s Madonnas, provide a veiled glimpse into heaven. But evil can also generate glamour, and the prince of darkness has no compunction about using it for his own destructive purposes. Luigi Mangione seemed to have gotten ensnared by the glamour of evil, and so have the millions of young people who now see him as “the coolest guy alive.”
Charlotte Allen taught medieval history and literature at the Catholic University of America.
Image by Free Malaysia Today, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
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