There are a few genres of commentary on the Unitedhealthcare CEO’s murder that come across my social feeds with one prominent genre being handwringing about what widespread celebration of the murderer means culturally.
History has a way of soothing some of my cultural anxieties while amplifying others (recently, reading about Weimar era Germany tends to uncomfortably quicken my pulse). I’m sympathetic to the concerns surrounding veneration of this corporate killing but then I think about Jesse James and am reminded we’ve always rooted for rogues in this country.
It’s caused me to reflect on the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,which has stuck with me (as have many films that have Roger Deakins as cinematographer), specifically the miasma of magnetic curiosity and dread Jesse James’s portrayal evokes in the film.
All the tiktok screeds and thirst posts on reels may be different in terms of digital sophistication, but you’d find similar vibes if you perused the microfilms of long closed newspapers from the 1880s.
Somehow we survived the cultural obsessions with Jesse James, or Bonnie and Clyde or other prohibition era figures, or Jeffrey Dahmer. We’ll survive this too.
