Dispatches from the present
At first he was just a series of pixelated images on the screen. A pair of eyebrows, a distinctive smile. He had no name, no true defining characteristics, no online trace beyond the leaked surveillance footage. I found myself addicted to refreshing, obsessing over each new update. The inscriptions on the bullets. The flirtatious smile at the hostel desk. The backpack full of Monopoly money. The escape route via Citi Bike. I was receiving text messages: “He’s hot, right?” “He has to be.” That “hung stance.” That “bone structure.”
It was the makings of a celebrity crush without a celebrity, without a subject. Celebrity crushes have been a ubiquitous coming-of-age experience for young girls. For several generations, they’ve come prepackaged as boy bands. The bands would change, but the archetypes would remain the same: whether their names were Harry or Justin or Tony, the blond one was the shy one, the brunette was the bad boy, the skinny one was pure of heart. The modifiers were meaningless. The choice in crush was arbitrary. But it was still a choice. An act of agency. An expression of personality.
I was around ten years old when I had my first celebrity crush. Almost every other young girl I knew already had one. I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs, a landscape of gas stations, strip malls and highways. Most of life took place internally, in fantasy. It was a place where I had full agency, whereas in the real world, I had basically none. All my decisions were made by other people.
My celebrity crush was not one of the members of the epochal boy band at the time. It was Bob Dylan. The unruly mop of hair, the all-black costume, the nasal voice, the cigarette. He was an exciting promise of another life I could turn to in order to escape my own. A representation of freedom. In some sense, I wanted to become him. I tried to write songs. I changed the way I dressed. For my birthday, I asked for a guitar. I was obsessed with him, and I was obsessed with my obsession with him. In order to fuel the fantasy, I listened to all my dad’s CDs, watched every video I could find on YouTube.
Clinically, I am no longer a young girl in terms of age. I am now 27 years old. But I am still a young girl in terms of agency. I will probably never own a house, and likely no other real significant assets. I will likely never experience job security, let alone any real upward mobility. I don’t know what an HMO does. I don’t have a PCP. I know my voice doesn’t matter. I know my vote doesn’t count. Every day when I wake up, and every night when I go to bed, my face is glued to the phone as the most horrific images flash across the screen. Haunting images which I am powerless to change. But I must continue looking, continue observing. It’s the only thing I can do, the only power I have. To look away is to ignore the truth.
I am still a young girl trapped in the infantilizing space of my childhood bedroom, but there is no longer any fantasy to escape to. We live in an age of constant visibility where everything is true and nothing has meaning. We have killed the celebrity crush, only to replace it with the “influencer,” an item of constant public scrutiny. Forced to reveal themselves as real people, flawed people, sometimes supremely flawed people, with Instagrams, and families, and dumb political ideologies. They are no longer these faraway icons, these empty archetypes, blank screens to project onto, mannequin dolls to be puppeteered by fantasy. They are too close, too reachable. Sometimes they even respond to their DMs.
And then, on December 4th, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was murdered in broad daylight by an anonymous assassin. An assassin without a consistent face, without a name, without any knowable history, without a place. They said he arrived by bus from somewhere and disappeared by bus somewhere else.
Talking about the assassin hit the same dopamine lever as my previous Bob Dylan obsession. I met my friend Sean for coffee, mind spinning from the refresh overdose. I felt like a wide-eyed conspiracist standing at a cork board, pointing at the red thread connecting disparate images. “He represents a change in the landscape of lone wolf violence.” “He is the ideal male form emerging from the crisis of masculinity. An actor in a sea of NPCs.” I rattled on zealously, trying to extend my fantasy by sharing it.
Sean had also been following the news, but the image he had formed was different from mine. He believed that the assassin was someone with training, probably a veteran, wielding his general feelings of powerlessness against the health-care industry. I found myself getting defensive, but I couldn’t really understand why. He couldn’t be a veteran. He bought Kind bars at Starbucks. He carried a flashy-looking tech backpack that he probably stole from REI. He had a sense of humor that bordered on the absurd. I needed to protect my fantasy: the fantasy that this anonymous man could be the absolute expression of myself at my full capacity as an actor rather than a bystander.
A few days later there was a name, and a face that looked like a long-lost Jonas brother. He had a Goodreads, a Twitter, an Instagram, even a Grailed. There was an alleged manifesto, then a second, real manifesto. The reveal didn’t ruin the fantasy, it fueled it further. Maybe this was because of the delay between the obsession and the unveiling of information. Maybe this was just because of the generic and inoffensive nature of his archetype: a young, hot, wealthy Ivy League graduate with what at first seemed to be an incoherent political ideology. Maybe it was a little bit of both and even more. I don’t know. I don’t even know if Luigi is the actual assassin. But I do know he might be the closest thing we have to a unifying symbol in American society today. That man with the fresh fade and orange jumpsuit, shackled and escorted by at least fifteen men, including the mayor of New York. The light hitting just right against the pier, like the painting of the lamb being devoured by wolves.