The Long Take: Using Art to Rationalize Your Idiotic Politics
Or why Luigi Mancione is no Arthur Fleck or a Walter White.
Around January 2017, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Richard Spencer, the white nationalist, as he was in Washington DC to celebrate the beginning of the first Trump administration. Midway through the interview, Spencer was knocked out by an ANTIFA activist, and the reaction was significantly split between common sense and fantasy. The common sense response was to condemn the attack, because it would embolden Spencer (his irrelevance withered dramatically following the Charlottesville riots later that year), but the idealist answer had been to celebrate the attack, because he is formally a part of the alt-right. This allows licence those who call themselves “anti-fascists” to target anyone of the centre-right as an extremist.
I remembered that praise of the attack was sometimes littered with pop culture references. The most prominent of which was an image of Indiana Jones punching a Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark or Captain America doing the same in the comics. It has now infested in response to the assassination of a CEO of the United Healthcare named Brian Thompson. Like with the knock on Spencer, social media users and pundits were giddy about the man, who looks after thousands of insured families, being shot dead via CCTV footage. It not only looked like a scene out of a crime drama, but it also has characters you could quickly identify with. The alleged shooter involved (who is identified as Luigi Mancione) is fetishized by his looks, his book reviews, and is considered a hero for shooting a nobody that happens to be the head of a health insurance provider. Anyone else, who would cooperate with the police in finding him, is a corporate bootlicker.
I’m not going to go into the topic of American Healthcare, which is a can of worms itself. I live in a country, where single payer healthcare reigns supreme, while private healthcare is just only on the fringes. (In other words, I believe mine is better than yours). What I am going to talk about is how the reliance of pop culture in our discourse, is pretty much dumbing down any possibility of seriousness. Not just on the topic of an assassination of a rich guy, but almost everything in politics.
There were many films and TV shows I’ve seen referenced by social media users to justify the killing, and some of them include:
The Batman, due to the Riddler killing elite figures and receiving a cult fanbase, as he’s exposing corruption to Gotham. He also becomes a cult figure among a few Internet commenters.
Joker, because it involves a guy killing three wealthy men while they were out and about. Also, the guy’s welfare checks are going to be cut. He also becomes a cult figure after killing several elite figures in Gotham, including a talk show host.
Breaking Bad, because Walter White’s lung cancer could have been solved if it wasn’t for the fact that the US doesn’t have the world’s best healthcare system.
There’s a plethora of pop culture that relies on scarcity to justify the immoral, if not irrational actions of their “heroes”. But there is one problem. The Riddler in The Batman, did not earn any social justice points, because he then flooded Gotham, as the city is about to vote for its most progressive mayor yet. He was adored for his disturbed personality that was masquerading as a “voice of the people” kind. As with Joker, that would take up an entire essay. As with Breaking Bad, the premise is that Walter White had chosen to become a drug lord, and not to take generous money from former colleagues to treat his lung cancer, because of his ego that he’s a misunderstood genius. It has nothing to do with the lack of health insurance (although it certainly helps if he did, based on this one meme I saw where the show is set in Canada).
I have previously spoken about the politicization of the arts and why I strongly object to application by its proponents. Now let’s talk about using art to justify extreme politics. It often come with the misuse of “media literacy” to ideologically gatekeep any interpretations of the media from audience members who would be too gullible to understand the characters and their manifesting anxieties. The “you’re missing the point if you idolize these characters” starter pack, which includes Joker, Rick from Rick and Morty, Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman.
But these people who make these arguments certainly rely on the same characters and pretending that their anxieties are not just rationalized, but are useful for desperate and ideological ends. Popular culture is no longer a reflection of the trends and shifts in societal norms. For entry-level activists, society should make it an active part of our lives, informing both our tastes and politics.
This also occurs on the other side as well. My social media feeds are saturated with Donald Trump’s picks for his administration, and dressing them up either like the Justice League or The Avengers. Douglas Murray, an author who I like to read, had a piece that did the exact thing I described. MAGA fans who photoshop Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard as Superman, Batman, Cyborg, The Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman is akin to an eight year old who spends way too much time playing with his toys.
Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, wrote a piece about Trump players using Dredd and The Sopranos to embolden their agenda. For as much as I despise his writing (he’s the guy who first made the argument about Trump voters, which is “the cruelty is the point”), I agree with him on the following:
The collapse of trust in institutions is one of the stories of the past decade or so. But so is this moral degeneracy, motivated by the need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian strongman in the most powerful government in the world. What looks like declining media literacy may be something much worse—an affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that inevitably lead to the dystopia itself.
I do want to add that this has less to do with improving media literacy, a phrase that used to be spoken about in quasi-academic circles and is now uttered by the gutters of social media to scold other people. It has more to do with our relationships with the movies and TV you watch, record the music you listen to, or the podcasts you enjoy. But more importantly, it’s up to the consumer to decide what to do.
When I spoke with Matt Labash, one of the best points he made is that everyone wants to be a rebel. This forms a weird paradox. Agree or disagree with Labash on his politics, you can’t deny that if you think you are a rebel, you wouldn’t be relying that much on the mainstream institutions. But just the ones that are big and heterodox enough to make you think you are one. Which is why Joe Rogan, to his followers, is a common man, despite living on a $140 million contract and shooting the shit. And a rich guy, like Luigi Mancione, is basically Arthur Fleck who, despite his immense levels of privileges, can be a folk hero. It’s also why the movies and TV you watch, the music you listen to and the books you read are entrenched with a centre-left-liberal orthodoxy that permits you to think of the ideal and “correct” way of thinking.
Although it helps to call it out, the solution to this dumb state of play, however, is not to scold people for not getting the thing they’re citing. People will always misunderstand the things they enjoy and citing poor standards of media literacy and telling them to increase it reeks of smugness that you’re better than everybody else. I would say the power is on you. I understand that politics is really difficult and pop culture is the most accessible way to comprehend complex ideas. But the nuances begins with you, and without applying them, you become susceptible to the dumbest ideologies imaginable, specifically made for a low-brow audiences, who are the elite equivalent of that guy who thinks he’s a free thinker after listening to Russell Brand’s podcasts.
The influencers who rely on pop culture references to push forward their ideology are too stupid to be called propagandists. We’ve seen people rely on art, so they can ban them. But we now see pop culture used to spearhead a political agenda, where potentially, we could see more copycats. And none of them (*cough* Taylor Lorenz *cough*) have the willpower to do the thing Luigi did. It will inevitably embolden him, and the people who cheerlead him are as morally bankrupt.
On a last note, Luigi Mancione happens to be a guy whose family had started a healthcare provider, had a building in their surname, so this feels more like a turf war than a traditional class conflict. I’ve seen people appropriate the image of Tony Soprano saying that he’s a hero. If we want to get specific with a Sopranos analogy, I’d say it’s like if AJ Soprano succeeded in killing Junior Soprano for shooting his nephew. Except AJ does not have pretty privilege.