Yesterday, the New York Police Department released photos of Luigi Mangione’s extradition to New York City. The accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson appears in an orange prison jumpsuit, a splash of color surrounded by a phalanx of gray-clad and grim-looking police officers brandishing semi-automatic weapons. Behind him, no doubt excited about the photo, stands indicted Mayor Eric Adams. The intention behind the photo seems clear: any violence against the corporate state will be met with overwhelming force, and Mangione – a man with no history of previous violence or a single criminal conviction – is so dangerous that he needs a real army to keep him in check to keep. it.
The image failed spectacularly. The officers are wearing Kevlar, but only a thin red T-shirt and an oversized jumpsuit protect Mangione from the bitter December cold. The police have weapons and the suspect is handcuffed. For many perceptive Internet commentators better educated in Western art history and visual rhetoric than the NYPD, one comparison in particular stood out. Replace the orange prison garb with an orange robe, the guns with spears, and you’ll clearly see that the authorities accidentally turned a perp walking photo of Mangione into a Renaissance painting of Christ’s arrest. Writer Rebecca Solnit used the initials denoting Roman imperial authority and noted on Facebook that the photo depicted ‘SPQR and NYPD, finally together.” That the blessed and darkly curled Mangione is, as many have notedunusually clever, only underlines how difficult it is to produce propaganda that portrays him as a villain.
The photos are indeed eerily reminiscent of paintings such as ‘Arrest of Christ’ from 1858 by the German religious portraitist Heinrich Hofmann. The visual perspective is the same, centered on a defenseless figure without weapons, surrounded by heavily armed representatives of the state. The attitude of legionaries about Christ seems almost identical to that of NYPD officers about Mangione. The two even wear the same color.
There is a venerable history of depictions of Jesus’ arrest by the authorities in Gethsemane, drawn from the Gospel accounts, dating back to the Middle Ages. A medieval altarpiece from the late 15th century, owned by the Walters Museum in Baltimore shows a similar prisoner with dark skin and curly hair being abused by a group of guards. A century later, the Spanish painter Juan Correa de Vivar published 1566 “The arrest of Christ” similarly depicts the state’s brutality against the would-be martyr. Such depictions of Christ have produced a visual vocabulary that is evident in the works of artists Giotto Unpleasant Caravaggiocreating an archetype that led someone on X to post that Mangione “a bit like a more beautiful Jesus.” It’s a comparison that would be offensive to many, not least because Jesus Christ did not kill a healthcare CEO. Yet Christ’s own feelings about the rich, as evidenced by his claim that the rich enter heaven just as easily, are equally a camel through the eye of a needlesuggest what a genuinely Christian response to predatory health insurance might look like.
One only has to read the comments below the articles and editorials about Mangione’s alleged crime to see the difference between official disapproval and public opinion. From the comment sections of Reddit Unpleasant Facebook Unpleasant Blue sky Unpleasant XThere has been a stunning (and for many, troubling) response to the killing that seems to unite left and right, socialists and true Trump believers: that the shooting was on some level understandable, if not justified. Many in the media and government responded to that sentiment with outrage and defamation, which in turn was largely ignored or mocked by the public. Then a columnist New York Magazine opined that while the shooting was a tragedy, health care inequities in the United States made it “inevitable,” according to Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman (once hailed as a champion of the working class) called it a “take it pitifully.” And yet almost 41% of voters in their 20s see Mangione’s actions as justified.
Meanwhile, Bret Stephens, a columnist at the new york times, argued in one ridiculous editorial that Thompson was “the true hero of the working class,” and that the slain executive is a “model of how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of the business world.” You don’t have to tolerate political assassination to correctly interpret Stephens’ argument—that a health care executive who pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to deny legitimate medical claims is a hero – is a spectacular reach. That this practice has undoubtedly increased death and suffering among those UnitedHealthcare ostensibly covers in the service of improving the company’s profit margin only confirms the moral incongruities of Stephens’ claim. That’s certainly what the overwhelming majority of the aforementioned internet commenters noted when heartbreaking stories of denied claims were shared below the main article. After publish an opinion piece by the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, the New York Times received so much setback that it I disabled the comments.
Yesterday’s photos are just the latest in this story of the media’s inability to read the public’s pulse. The political class and media have completely failed to capture the story of Thompson’s shooting. Whatever your views on the intersections of violence and politics, there is no denying that we are currently witnessing the rise of a folkloric figure, an avatar of the anger felt so strongly by so many Americans that it transcends partisanship in this most partisan time. As a result, when columnists try to portray Mangione as a kind of Ted Kaczynski, he looks as romantic as Che Guevara; when the NYPD brings him to the courthouse like he’s Hannibal Lecter, he’s more like Christ. Some artists and meme makers have taken that command literally Newsweek reporting on a pizzeria in Towson, Maryland that hung a photo of Mangione as the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with the suspect wearing the halo holding up two fingers in blessing.
Whatever your position on all this – whether it is a dangerous precedent that normalizes murder or an organic expression of anger from a population abused by the system – is secondary to the fact that there is something evil, vengeful and not without reason about it things are brewing among the American people. that the authorities cannot yet understand. Perhaps art history can provide a clue as to what that might be.
