Non-Threatening Boys*:I Need A Hero: Luigi Mangione and the Age of the Antihero
By: Maggie Traxler
Make it stand out
In recent days, much ink has been spilled (keys tapped?) attempting to parse the Internet’s obsession with alleged CEO assassin Luigi Mangione. In many ways, this is just another chapter in the long Bildungsroman of the mainstream media attempting, and failing, to understand its baby sister, the Internet, and her quirky proclivities. In regards to Mangione’s folk hero status, the media, from the New York Times to Fox News, seems uniformly shocked. Yet, in this politically contentious time, the people themselves, expressing themselves loquaciously in the digital town square, seem uniformly pleased.
The handsome smile he flashed over his medical mask took the Internet by storm, earning him the ultimate au courant honor– a lookalike contest in Washington Square Park, before anyone knew who exactly they were trying to look like. The making of a counterculture hero was underway. When the suspect in the murder of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson was apprehended in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, the handsome smile grew into an even more handsome face and, frankly, an even more handsome body. Within minutes of the release of the suspect’s name– the phonetically delightful Luigi Mangione– his social media pages, from his Facebook to his GitHub, had been thoroughly scoured. What they revealed was a shockingly normal, if not aspirational, young man on the familiar trajectory from UPenn frat boy to surf hostel resident-slash-spiritual tourist. With his good looks, family money, and impressive resume, Mangione was privy to the best of what this society, with its fetishes for status and whiteness, can offer a person, yet he ended up as whatever you want to call him now– a vigilante, an icon, a murderer.
