The Battle to Define Luigi Mangione Takes Center Stage

New York Times

21 hours ago

On a recent Friday evening in San Francisco, I attended a live musical staging of an internet spectacle I had experienced seven months before. As I entered the 60-seat black box theater, a security guard scanned me with a wand. An attendant sealed my phone into a plastic pouch. The program began with a disclaimer.
The show I was about to watch was 'a satirical work of fiction,' which 'falls under the legal protections afforded to parody and satire under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,' it said. I had read the same disclosure on the website where I secured my ticket, and just before the show began, I heard it repeated once more — this time over a loudspeaker in the rapid-fire style of pharmaceutical legalese.
The little production with the security protocol and the preshow legal defense is 'Luigi: The Musical.' It's a comedy that imagines the days following the arrest of Luigi Mangione — the man accused of assassinating the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, last December, setting off a five-day manhunt and inspiring more than 70,000 Facebook users to apply a laughing emoji to a somber UnitedHealth tribute to Mr. Thompson.
The shooting itself had been staged like a performance, with a message etched on bullet casings and a backpack of Monopoly money left near the scene. As the police pursued their suspect, they released surveillance images to aid in his capture — and instead provoked an internet-wide investigation into whether the shooter might be righteous, cool, hot, tall, straight, bisexual, single or taken. By the time the cops apprehended the 26-year-old Mangione inside a Pennsylvania McDonalds, he had a fandom ready to hail him as an outlaw hero for the internet age.
If previous American outlaws — Jesse James, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde — were constructed through dime novels, ballads and films, Mr. Mangione's persona was built by and for social media. He's a software engineer with a face for the internet's hard turn from text to image. As TikTokers of increasingly obscure expertise weighed in on his arrest — astrologer, physiognomist, brow groomer, certified color analyst — they sent a message that Mr. Mangione's moon sign and his color story were of greater public interest than the murder he was accused of committing.
The phenomenon inspired 'Saturday Night Live' bits, stand-up routines and academic inquiries into the regulation of health care algorithms and the psychosocial effects of chronic pain. Also, a counter movement of outraged commentators arose, ready to scold anyone who would make light of a killing. Mr. Mangione's court dates have drawn supportive crowds with placards reading 'Free Luigi,' but also the artist Scott LoBaido, who has hauled with him a skeleton in a Nintendo costume strapped to an electric chair that he calls 'Deep Fried Luigi.'
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