Straight Outta Crouch End

The Luigi Mangione thinkpieces have begun and most of them sound so lamentable and out of touch to anybody who has followed his story without immediately pursing their lips, uttering ten Hail Marys and shielding their children’s eyes, as to be practically laughable. For the Evening Standard, Mangione stands for a divided America; a thinkpiece in the Independent considers the online comments “less helpful than salacious”; France’s traditionally leftwing paper Libé published an op-ed calling for an end to the hero worship of Mangione.  On Instagram, the comments under this article immediately went hog-wild: “How legitimate is it for bourgeois newspapers to take part in this debate when they spend their time legitimising social violence?”; “Lol, Luigi rid us of a deadweight. While income gaps keep widening, you should expect us to revolt against those who benefit from the system”; “Good evening - no.” You can’t understand the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione if you aren’t online; indeed, ...

It starts as a fairytale. Tall gates rise up, melting into a strange cage where monkeys roam, before we see the grounds of Xanadu, shrouded in mist, and the great house looming overhead with its sinister gothic windows; a mysteriously ominous music plays. These are the opening scenes of Citizen Kane before we see the protagonist, a dying man, utter his last word: "Rosebud." And with this, the tyrant mogul Charles Foster Kane sends us scurrying back into his hinterland, in a story told almost entirely in flashbacks, to work out how he ever became the "Citizen" Kane of the film's title. The movie's last reel gives us - and only us, in an act of blackest irony - something of an answer, but not before we have been warned by a character, giving up on ever finding the meaning of 'Rosebud', that no one thing could ever explain how somebody became as they are.  Citizen Kane (1941) may offer up a template for the origin story with which we now find ourselv...