Important: Luigi Mangione enters court with a clean shave before waiving extradition and making his New York return

Let us start, unusually, with all jokes aside: Luigi Mangione’s fresh haircut and cleanly shaven face is not what’s most important to take away from his over-the-top perp walk during his extradition from Pennsylvania to New York. Although, admittedly, as a woman in her 20s objectively (and respectfully) appraising a man in his 20s, the suspected United Healthcare CEO shooter is looking crisp.

Also as a woman, I would put my finger on the fact that Karen Friedman Agnifilo, the veteran attorney who’s taking on the defense of her client’s New York charges, could have been the one to come up with the clever idea of giving the suspected gunman a makeover – we’ve seen similar subliminal defense strategies with the Menendez brothers and many other accused criminals since.

This “Mangione fever” has gotten to the point that even the police officer in the clip above wanted to get some photographic souvenirs of the suspect as he was being taken away – in order to proudly show his (in an imagined scenario) teenage daughter once he got home, I would reckon.

It’s not just good looks that’s making a lot of people swoon. It’s also the confidence with which the alleged perpetrator behind Brian Thompson’s death carries himself. It starkly contrasts with the laid-back, wide-smiling Mangione countless netizens have surely come across online. But, arguably, the cryptic duality may add to the appeal.

American Government: “We have an army.” Everyday American People: “We have a Luigi.”

It was not only the media that managed to snap multiple shots of Luigi Mangione as he was paraded through the streets escorted by what could well be considered an entire army – to make everyday citizens feel safe or to underscore a point, I’ll leave the interpretation up to you.

As the video taken by Cheyenne Tee and posted on her TikTok account indicates, regular people also managed to catch glimpses of Mangione as he was being ostentatiously perp-walked. In a subsequent TikTok, Cheyenne answers some users’ questions, explaining that unlike some may have expected, there was no cheering or shouting, on the contrary, the streets were quiet, which made the scene even “more eerie.” “Scene” is a purposefully used word, as even some netizens had to comment: “It looks like they’re filming a movie.”

This is the point where, instead of laying out a lengthy subjective analysis, I would suggest that anyone taking an interest in the social phenomenon manifesting in the wake of Mangione’s alleged crime should find Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison an insightful read. Although written in the 1970s, many of its key takeaways have not lost meaning with time, if anything, time has enhanced Foucault’s “Panopticism” theory and his analysis of surveillance society.

Evidently, it must be the goal of some individuals to break apart any and all solidarity for what many people have recognized as Mangione’s motives. However, in this overblown show of implicit force, in this energetic insistence in throwing the book at the accused – who’s now facing charges at the federal level – those whose aim is to portray Mangione as nothing more than a cold-blooded, dangerous killer may, in fact, be eliciting the opposite public reaction than intended.