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 murder of the United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, it has been impossible to escape his photo. Or photos. They are proliferating.
They are on television, in the newspaper and all over social media. Not just pictures of Mr. Mangione from his booking at a police station in Altoona, Pa., 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 made it into the public, with more pics featuring his six-pack. One commentator compared the stream of pictures to “an endless photo shoot.”
And with them have come the comments. The swooning. The fan cams.
“If the guy is fit, you must acquit,” went one post on X.
“He’s even hotter with his mask and shirt off,” went another.
Indeed, it didn’t take long for Mr. Mangione to be popularly christened “the hot assassin.”
Even before a suspect had been named, much was written about the killer’s elevation to folk hero status. He was cast in the role of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “social bandit” — one man seeming to take a stand against an unfair system. Then, evvel Mr. Mangione had been accused of shooting and killing Mr. 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.
