As Liza Mandelup was casting her new short documentary about the fans of Luigi Mangione, images of the 27-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson began to infiltrate her algorithms. Then her subconscious.
“I had dream about him!” exclaims the director of Luigi, a new project from Rolling Stone Films that’s now available to watch online. The dream helped Mandelup start to understand the exact phenomenon she wanted to explore in her film: How exactly does someone develop a deep connection with a person they don’t even know — let alone one accused of murder. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty.)
“You’re fed his image all the time, any information about it,” she tells Rolling Stone. “It really helped crystallize how this person was able to rise to pop culture stardom through this combination of a sensational news story, but also people being able to get so many of his images circulating.”
Luigi, which premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival, features candid interviews with some of Mangione’s most ardent devotees. There’s the painter, Boo Patterson, whose portrait, “The People’s Husband,” became a viral merch sensation. The musician Princess Nostalgia offers a glimpse at the creation of her outlaw ode, “Baby I’ll Be Ur Mario,” which plays over the closing credits. A young man wonders if he’s fallen in love with Mangione (“How can you not fall in love with someone who wants to be a voice for the people?”). And a middle-aged woman shares the letter she wrote Mangione, in which she balances certain yearnings for Mangione and a desire to “fix this fucked up world we live in.”
None of this is presented for pure shock value. The interviewees are as sincere in their feelings about Mangione as they are thoughtful about them. “Every single person we spoke to was a character,” Mandelup says. “I really felt like people that gravitated towards this community were very unafraid to speak their mind, and they really had something to say. They were passionate about their support, for very different reasons and very personal reasons, too.”
Artist Boo Patterson with her painting, “The People’s Husband,” in Liza Mandelup’s Luigi.Benjamin WhatleyADVERTISEMENT
Mangione’s stans were an ideal subject for Mandelup, whose past work has explored fan culture, internet celebrity, and ideas of beauty and attraction in a digital world. She was especially drawn to how attachments to Mangione developed at a time when he had allegedly done something very significant and public, but had otherwise spoken very little.
“People have really projected their ideas onto him, and they feel like they have a lot to say to him,” Mandelup says. “[The interviews] almost all felt like diary entries, and that got me thinking, ‘Who is he to these people?’ He’s someone they feel like they can pour their hearts out to.”
Hyper-online parasocial relationships are, of course, nothing new. But where influencers or podcasters foster this connection through a kind of intimate, one-sided dialogue, the Mangione phenomenon feels more distinct. The connection seems to stem from the very nature of his alleged crime: Who hasn’t dealt with — or felt screwed over by — the United States’ broken healthcare system?
“People are very frustrated, they don’t know where to turn, and they don’t know what to do with their frustration,” Mandelup says. “It’s just this perfect storm, where people really wanted to have a vehicle to express this frustration.”
But Luigi also highlights and explores the especially unique tension in this case between the political and sexual. Mandelup says the Mangione fandom “feels very specific to this moment, where people feel like they want to share in someone else’s frustration, as opposed to a conventional pop star, where you share in their fun and their fantasy.” But she also notes how crucial Mangione’s appearance was to juicing the already enormous spectacle.
“We live in an image obsessed world and having his face be part of the story became such a big deal,” she says. “I wanted to film people that were working through those two things: This person is someone that I’m attracted to, but they’re being accused of something. It feels very complex.”
Just like everything else they discuss, the fans in Luigi do not shy away from the severity of the crime he’s accused of committing, or what it might mean if he’s found guilty. But instead of trying to pull answers, the doc sits with these contradictions, reflecting Mandelup’s desire to make something that could respond to and reflect the present.
This was as much a logistical impulse, as it was a creative one. Going into Luigi, Mandelup and her main collaborators — producer Lauren Cioffi, field producer Peter Heres, and director of photography Benjamin Whatley — had all been eager to break out of years-long production cycles inherent to long-form documentary filmmaking. They wanted to find a way to “tell these kinds of stories faster,” Mandelup says, and the Mangione fandom was “the perfect film to do that with, because the community was growing, we were able to cast it online, and people were excited to talk to us.”
This immediacy also strengthens the potency all the thematic threads Luigi explores. “We wanted to make this as a short and put this out now, because it’s a very specific moment where the trial hasn’t happened and [Mangione] hasn’t spoken much,” she says. “People are able to live more in the ‘What if?’ zone.”
She continues: “People had very different ways of expressing why they felt really connected to this person. It is one of those things where, if you talk to someone for a while, it does feel super complicated. They are struggling with some of the actions, but also feel this sense of support at the same time. And I think that’s part of the conversation around him: As a country, what are we about? What are we supporting?”
Luigi credits:
Director & Producer: Liza Mandelup
Producer: Lauren Cioffi
Executive Producers: Ryan Mazie, Alexandra Dale
Director of Photography: Benjamin Whatley
Field Producer: Peter Heres
Made in Association with Rolling Stone Films
