Francesc Soler: "Attractive people have better jobs, earn more money and if they commit a crime the sentences are lower"

BarcelonaWhat makes some murderers and criminals end up fascinating us? This is one of the questions that journalist Francesc Soler (Roda de Ter, 1976) tries to solve in The Handsome Assassins (Alrevés Editorial), a book in which he analyzes, among other cases, the phenomenon generated around Luigi Magione, the 28-year-old man accused of the murder of the chief executive officer of the medical insurance company UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson. His physical attractiveness has turned him into a sex symbol and has caused the crime to take a backseat.

In recent years, the concept of pretty privilege has become popular. Is Luigi Mangione an example of pretty privilege? How is it manifested?

— Absolutely. It is one of the things I have discovered by pulling strings and trying to answer the question of how we have been able to turn Luigi Mangione and so many others into pop culture icons. And this is based on something called the halo effect, which psychology has perfectly described: our brain needs to take shortcuts to save energy and, therefore, in the face of a stimulus, such as seeing a person, we have an immediate response. And this immediate response is to associate beauty with goodness, with reliability, and with virtue. That is to say, when we see someone attractive, our brain is incapable of being on guard, quite the opposite. It thinks that person is a good person. And here come some of the problems with murderers but also with con artists, for example. The best weapon of the love scammer is beauty. That is to say, when it is said that the face is the reflection of the soul, deep down we are saying that a beautiful face must belong to a beautiful soul. And this is part of the problem when it comes to understanding how we end up celebrating murderers based on their appearance: in the face of the same actions, if the person carrying them out is attractive, the way we judge them changes towards the positive.

But since we were little, we have been told that beauty is on the inside. Rationally, we understand it, but instinctively, do we ignore it?

— Our instinct, which is dopamine and reward circuits, is activated by a beautiful face. One of the things I have discovered is that there is an objective beauty for our brain. There is a series of features and harmony –the shape of the eyebrows, the jaw, the eyes and the lips– that make our brain decode them as an attractive and trustworthy person. And this, obviously, also serves in a selection process, and also serves when attractive or good-looking people sit in the defendant's chair. There is data showing that attractive people have better jobs, earn more money, and that when they commit a crime the sentences are lower. I thought this was crazy. Because, obviously, having an attractive face is not a moral characteristic.

What was the first thing you thought when you saw images of Luigi Mangione?

— The first thing I thought, obviously, was "what a handsome guy", I think like everyone else. And the second thing I thought is that I didn't have the feeling of seeing a criminal facing justice, but rather an actor playing a criminal facing justice. I had the feeling that he was playing himself. His appearances are very studied. There is an iconic image of him in a burgundy sweater, just like his lawyer. That sweater sold out in stores. He plays a lot with that. I am the first one who is training at the gym listening to true crime and, sometimes I think "really, am I listening to someone who has murdered another person while I exercise? Maybe I should put on Madonna or something more uplifting". We are this society, we escape in this way, perhaps because we have turned everything into entertainment, and crimes, too. The intention of the book is to hold up a mirror to us all, to me as well. That is to say, deep down, much as it pains me, this book also contributes to the myth of Luigi Mangione as a figure or as an icon of popular culture.

You said that there are certain traits that define what objective beauty is. Does Mangione meet these traits?

— Yes, that is why I say he is the prince of handsome assassins. I wanted to be very careful because it is evident that when he commits the murder, in December 2024, he has a political intent and wants it to be read as a hard blow to the United States healthcare industry for its abuses. But after a few hours, the narrative turns against him and the handsome assassin ends up overshadowing the vigilante. The supporters of the more political Mangione are not at all pleased that he is compared to a Hollywood actor or that his abs are talked about. They, obviously, defend this more Robin Hood, more Che Guevara-like Mangione, but what turns him into a global icon for popular culture is, without a doubt, his appearance. If the assassin or the perpetrator of the shots had been, for example, a young African American man from the periphery of a North American city with a record for petty crimes, I highly doubt he would have become a global pop icon. Furthermore, perhaps he would not even be alive, the way things are in the United States.

Has the fact that Mangione has a political discourse caused us to overlook his crime and focus on his appearance?

— It has contributed to making it easier for him to be celebrated, reproduced on cakes, nail manicures, t-shirts, and street graffiti without the people doing so feeling guilty. But when Ted Bundy was put on trial, there were also t-shirts with his face on university campuses. And when Charles Manson ends up in prison, he also receives marriage proposals and is also the subject of songs and films. Mangione makes it easier, because he has a cause, but they all end up having a Netflix series that contributes not only to their glamorization and romanticization but also to their sexualization and objectification. For the moment, Mangione has a musical.

Is the fact that murderers receive love letters in prison due to the fact that we still have the romantic ideal of the bad boy that we can change?

— Absolutely. This is called hybristophilia, which is that sexual or romantic paraphilia in which there is an attraction to criminals who have committed violent crimes. It is much more described in women towards men, towards murderers, towards rapists, towards criminals with serious offenses, although there are also some men. And this type of love has different facets. One of them is redemptive love, that is, the desire to explain why the criminal is the way they are –due to a difficult childhood, because society has not invested in them–. The belief that love is above everything else also comes into play. And then there is another part of this hybristophilic love which is associating violence with hypermasculinity, with risk, with adventure. This is dangerous, because, in the most extreme case, it involves sending letters to a murderer in prison, falling in love with them. But it also translates into movies starring Mario Casas and romantic novels aimed at teenagers, where the prototype of a boy is the punishing boy, the bad boy of the class, the boy who is a bit violent, but who deep down also has a tender side. This is dangerous due to the imitation effect for both women and men, because boys see that what succeeds is violence.

Netflix series about real criminals tend to work very well. What does that say about us as viewers? Do the creators have a conscience about the social impact they might have?

— In this type of fiction, the narrative has increasingly pivoted towards the figure of the killer. It is no longer a killer we want to be scary or repulsive, but quite the opposite: we want them to be attractive, to be ambivalent—to be dangerous, but to have a seductive side—like the protagonist of You. When the fiction of Ted Bundy is entrusted to Zac Efron, who is an actor coming from doing High School Musical and Baywatch, this has a clear intention of sexualizing and romanticizing the figure of the killer. Little by little, the victims end up turned into a number or a name. We know nothing about them, but we do know about the killer.

One of the latest installments of Monstruo, the saga of assassins created by Ryan Murphy, is centered on a murderess, Lizzie Borden. Does the reception of these stories change when the protagonist is a woman?

— I think so. Here we have the case of Rosa Peral, which has also made it into fiction. But I think the archetype of the handsome killer doesn't work as well because I have the feeling that in fiction the figure of the woman is still more reduced to a victim. The murderous, dangerous, and even empowered woman, we don't like as much anymore. In these cases, we do judge and go harder against her. It is still heavily penalized.

In the case of female murderers, do they also receive love letters in prison?

— Some do. For example, there is a woman who killed a child in the Canary Islands who has a new partner who is a Catalan woman. They fell in love knowing that she had killed the child and had hidden the corpse.

Do you think that at some point the furor for true crime will subside?

— I, right now, do not see that there should be a crisis or exhaustion of the format. I believe that, fortunately, there is a very diverse range of true crime, out there. It is a genre that was not invented now, it comes from the crime chronicles of a lifetime. It can be done with a certain responsibility and ethical criteria. In true crime the test is whether we feel comfortable when we talk about people close to us. It is very easy to make fiction that takes place in Arkansas, but when it happens close to us and we think that the product might be seen by the victims' children and that everyone will talk about it at school, things change a bit. It is the litmus test. All the crime journalists I have spoken to told me that you must not lose sight of the fact that the victim is the protagonist and that you should not promote products that generate a second trial. They also told me that killers, seen up close, are very tacky. The Hannibal Lecter who listens to opera, goes to Florence and is a very refined person while eating a brain with a silver teaspoon is only seen in the cinema.