Earlier this week, feeling somewhat inundated with memes and social media posts about Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I emailed Simone Driessen. She’s a professor of media and popular culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam and often has smart insights on the ways online commentary and real-world issues intersect. Mostly, I wanted to know: What was going on? Why had the internet anointed Mangione a folk hero?
Driessen’s answer was the one lots of folks have come to: People in the US are frustrated with the health insurance industry, and posting responses about Thompson’s killing is a way to vent that frustration. Interest in the person behind that death, even before a suspect had been apprehended or named, reflected not necessarily support of the suspect or the act, but the idea of “someone trying to take on (or take down) the health care system,” she wrote. Memes help people make sense of that feeling.
Still, Dreissen added, that didn’t necessarily explain all of the people thirsting after Mangione once he’d been identified as the alleged shooter. That, she wrote, “fits somewhat of a societal trend or media entertainment trend where we have this overall romanticized depiction of criminals” thanks to the recent popularity of true-crime series.
It’s no surprise, then, that more than a few people online have been suggesting that the Mangione case could be the fodder for the next Ryan Murphy Netflix series like Dahmer or Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Some also suggest Dave Franco, who bears a striking resemblance to the suspect, could play Mangione.
Yes, that does make sense, but does anyone need it? Fascination around the case, and Mangione as a person, has hit fever pitch, and while that may make a Hollywood dramatization an interesting prospect, it’s an idea that’s better left alone.
While there are already those who have qualms about turning the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer or the Menendez brothers into miniseries, there’s also the fact that time has passed since those cases gripped America. Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 in connection with the death of 15 people in Wisconsin; he was then extradited to Ohio where he was convicted of another murder. A jury convicted Lyle and Erik Menendez in the killing of their parents in 1996. Netflix’s series about them both came decades after those cases were essentially closed. Bonnie & Clyde came out in 1967; the duo went on their crime spree in the 1930s.
