Nobody needs a Luigi Mangione show

Earlier this week, Feeling somewhat inundated with memes and social media posts about Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I emailed Simone Driessen. She is a professor of media and popular culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam and often has smart ideas about the ways online comments and real-world issues intersect. Mainly I wanted to know: What was happening? Why had the Internet anointed Mangione as people’s hero?

Driessen’s response was one that many people have come to: People in America are frustrated with the health insurance industry, and posting responses about Thompson’s murder is a way to vent that frustration. The interest in the person behind that death, even before the suspect was arrested or named, reflected not necessarily support for the suspect or the act, but rather the idea of ​​“someone trying to take over (or tear 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 Mangione’s thirsty crowd once he was identified as the alleged shooter. This, he wrote, “somewhat fits with a social or media entertainment trend where we have this general idealized representation of criminals” thanks to the recent popularity of true crime series.

It is not surprising, then, that more than to few people online They’ve been suggesting that the Mangione case could be material for Ryan Murphy’s upcoming Netflix series as Dahmer either Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez. Some also suggest that Dave Franco, who bears a striking resemblance to the suspect, could play Mangione.

yes, that does It makes sense, but does anyone need it? Fascination with the case, and with Mangione as a person, has reached a fever pitch, and while that may make a Hollywood dramatization an interesting prospect, it’s an idea that is better to leave it alone.

While there are already those who have qualms about turning the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer or the Menendez brothers into miniseries, there is also the fact that it has been a while since those cases took hold in the United States. Dahmer was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1992, in connection with the deaths 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 murder of their parents in 1996. The Netflix series about the two came decades after those cases were essentially closed. bonnie and clyde came out in 1967; The duo went on their crime spree in the 1930s.