ByVanessa Friedman
December 12, 2024 — 7.30pm
From the moment the world saw the smiling, unmasked face of the young man in the New York City hostel, memes began spreading about his looks.
In the days since, after Luigi Mangione was identified and charged in the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, it has been impossible to escape his photo. Or photos. They are proliferating.
Suspect Luigi Mangione is taken into the Blair County Courthouse.
Suspect Luigi Mangione is taken into the Blair County Courthouse.Credit: AP
They are on television, in the newspaper and all over social media. Not just pictures of Mangione from his booking at a police station in Altoona, Pennsylvania, or his mug shots in prison orange, but photos of him in earlier times, in a navy blazer, crisp white shirt and tie. Images of him hiking shirtless in the hills.
In all of them, he is clean-shaven, curly haired, often flashing a bright, white grin. Even his Tinder profile has gone public, with more pics featuring his six-pack. One commentator compared the stream of pictures to “an endless photoshoot”.
With them have come the comments. The swooning. The fan cams.
“If the guy is fit, you must acquit,” went one post on the social platform X.
Social media photos of Luigi Mangione have flooded the internet.
Social media photos of Luigi Mangione have flooded the internet.Credit: Facebook
“He’s even hotter with his mask and shirt off,” went another.
Indeed, it didn’t take long for Mangione to be popularly christened “the hot assassin”.
Even before a suspect had been named, much was written about the alleged killer’s elevation to folk hero status. He was cast in the role of what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “social bandit” – one man seeming to take a stand against an unfair system. Then, once Mangione had been accused of shooting and killing Thompson, what forensic psychologists call the “halo effect” came into play.
The official term for the tendency of the public to equate innocence with attractiveness, the halo effect, when combined with the social bandit phenomenon, creates a combustible pop-culture archetype – one beloved by mythmakers and Hollywood and rooted deep in the general psyche. You get Robin Hood, as played by Russell Crowe. Jesse James, as played by Brad Pitt (not to mention Colin Farrell, Rob Lowe and Tyrone Power). Butch and Sundance, the Paul Newman-Robert Redford version. You get the thirsty, soft-focus take on the criminal and the bloody revolutionary.
Luigi Mangione in Honolulu, Hawaii, last year.
Luigi Mangione in Honolulu, Hawaii, last year.Credit: AP
Already, Mangione is being compared to Che Guevara. He simply seems to fit perfectly into an existing narrative polished and defanged by the dream factory, with all the preconceptions (and forgiveness) that implies. He looks the part. And the internet is rolling out that portrait in real-time, shaping the story based on the main character’s – well, shape, even before most people even know what, exactly, the story is.
There is a long history of the romanticisation of the beautiful and the incarcerated (with particular privilege given to white men); see, for example, Charles Manson and the number of women who became his prison pen pals. There is also, said Michael TenEyck, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Arlington, a long history of research that shows “attractiveness relates to a decrease in arrests and incarceration length” – especially when you add in good grooming.
This has been exacerbated by social media, where photos are a means of communication everyone can pass judgment upon, often before any facts are known. Or, in some cases, allow viewers to go straight to public declarations of desire before anything substantial is revealed about the person behind the face and the body.
“Hot Felon” Jeremy Meeks became a model after leaving jail.
“Hot Felon” Jeremy Meeks became a model after leaving jail.Credit: Stockton Police Department
Before this case, for example, there was that of Jeremy Meeks, otherwise known as the “Hot Felon”, a former member of the Crips gang who was incarcerated for grand theft, whose mug shot became a meme, who became a model when he was released – and who has more than a million Instagram followers.
The problem is, as each new story is added to the tradition, it loses some of its real horror and takes on more of the glow. Little wonder the proposals have already begun to give Mangione’s story the celebrity treatment. Not long after his photos began to appear, Jameela Jamil, the British actor and TV presenter, decreed: “A star is born.”
Jonathan Van Ness, one of the stars of the show Queer Eye, suggested the next season “should be solely dedicated to Luigi Mangione, no?” Then he added: “I would not touch those gorg curls. Well, maybe just refresh them. But the brows, would never touch.”
Ezra Sosa of Dancing With the Stars made a TikTok to Lips Like Sugar, suggesting Mangione “finna be my partner Season 34”. (There is precedent: Anna Delvey, the society fraudster, was Sosa’s partner during the last season and performed complete with an ankle bracelet.)
Calls have gone out online for Ryan Murphy, executive producer of the FX anthology series American Crime Story, whose recent season on the Menendez brothers inspired its own fan club, to take on the Mangione drama (Netflix is also getting name-checked). In the game of fantasy casting, Dave Franco is a favourite to star. Even Kim Kardashian has been tagged in a nudge to get her to accept the case as part of her prison reform project.
But in all the hoo-ha over hotness – and, potentially, the way such stories often get rewritten and recreated by history – what gets lost is the violence, as well as the victims.