Underbellies, Image-Wars, and devouring a symbol before it gets cold.

SAMUEL HYLAND

Few arches take Daylight Savings as seriously as the Riftstone Arch, a pitch-black underpass connecting Central Park West to a world of taxis, trailing phone calls, and terribly slow walkers. This world, sprawling out into 72nd Street, feels distinctly removed from that of the underpass, which becomes barren in December: no moss, no wildlife, no violinist playing Celine Dion. Just brick. Just black. Terrifying, larger-than-life darkness that vindicates children, makes you imagine murderers and monsters in every odd-looking shadow. A friend and I had been trudging aimlessly along a muddy path meant for horses, when he stopped suddenly and said Holy Shit. Behold, a vacuum: a liminal pocket, cloaked by complete dusk and exempted from the rules of the world, 72nd Street and beyond. An “underbelly,” the unpleasant, nocturnal side of a society, functions a lot like this underpass. Look and you risk approaching, approach and you risk being sucked in, be sucked in and you risk being spat out dead. Say Holy Shit from afar. Don’t come any closer.

“A picture is like a blintz. Eat it while it’s hot.”

An unfortunate fact about human eyes: tell them not to go somewhere, and they will take pleasure in going there. Sometimes, they’re lucky. Example number one: My friend and I made it safely, without crying, through the really-scary Riftstone Arch, untouched by assailants both real and imagined. We aren’t the only ones to have trekked that underpass unscathed, nor are we the only ones, lately, to see a societal underbelly without being swallowed. Alas, example number two: a day after our stroll, 26-year-old data scientist Luigi Mangione, who is accused of assassinating United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, would be escorted off a helicopter pad by a phalanx of cops and convicts—each of whom understood him as the hooded subject of America’s number-one snuff film, pored over and studied by millions. In this 30-second snuff film, a suited Thompson struts towards the New York Hilton Midtown, when a stealthy figure emerges from behind and shoots him. Thompson staggers, faces his assailant. Bang, reload. Bang, reload. Thompson is bleeding out; the figure is dashing off-screen. It is 6:45 AM, and the only other human in view is a matronly-looking woman, who takes a moment to realize what has happened then runs for her life.

Mangione, if you haven’t heard, is a physically-fit Ivy-League graduate whose social-media accounts showcase six-packs, toothy grins, and the seeds of discontentment. These are surface-level optics, and yes, they are important: the suspected killer, whose image is supposed to incite mass outrage, just so happens to be sexy. Slightly more sinuous are the symbolic optics—of street justice exacted before sunrise, free from both daylight and the rules of the diurnal world. The moment Thompson’s murder occurred, it stopped being a murder and started becoming a symbol, doomed to be followed by a chain-reaction of counter-symbols. Squint at the spectacle of Mangione’s perp-walk, and you might see a silly parody of postwar New York, an abyss where anarchy ruled by night and cops cleaned up the blood—then posed for pictures—by day. Corpses, corrupt mayors, criminals: each of these things is an allegory, cast as either “good” or “evil” in an epic battle for justice. Justice is a synonym for the final say. And in the image era, the final say is a synonym for the final photo.

“The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back to the [bar] and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldnt be seen from a few feet away.”

It’s true: history tends to rhyme. Long before Luigi Mangione’s image haunted New York City cops, they were routinely upstaged by a photographer dubbed “Weegee,” as in “Ouija Board” — a nod to his ghost-like ability to reach crime scenes before police officers did. Weegee was not, in fact, gifted with the miracle of teleportation; his superpowers were a terrible sleep schedule and access to NYPD radio transmissions. But mundane as his own backstory may have been, there was bleak mysticism in his shots, stone-cold revelations from an underbelly where the blood was still fresh. In 1945, after years of selling yellow-tape photographs to newspapers, he published Naked City, a debut photo-book brimming with corpses, screams, and body-bags. Weegee’s New York, a bipolar metropolis stuck between glamor and gore, was, if anything, a promise—that so long as dusk didn’t bleed into day, the stench of death wouldn’t impede on glistening illusions. Brawl, shoot, kill. Just wrap it up by morning, boys. God damnit, that Weegee: the bloodshed is on the front page of the Daily News.

“Naked City” denotes an ugly abyss stripped of its varnish, captured before cops could come and clean the filth. In “Dead on Arrival,” one of the book’s most haunting shots, the titular corpse is smeared in a pool of its own blood, sprawled across the pavement with a toe-tag tied innocently to its wrist. Seeing similar spectacles, even if second-hand, was tantamount to sowing seeds of skepticism—a creeping feeling that maybe, just maybe, the reality you were advertised wasn’t the reality you were living in. And by the mid-2020s, a strange moment in which skepticism is a means of survival, the return of such snapshots is something of an A-ha: evidence that not only is there an underbelly, but one teeming with symbolic potential, every carcass proof that something, anything, is shifting. Mangione’s legal proceedings, at times, have scanned as a never-ending soap opera, renewed for an umpteenth season by cash-hungry showrunners. This is annoying, but in our visual era, it’s gravely necessary, maybe more so than any federal trial. Wherever there is a symbol, there is an urgent need to determine what it should represent, how it should be remembered. Mangione’s image is coveted real-estate among two competing camps: those vindicated by Thompson’s death, and those threatened by it. Until there is a final, damning response to the spectacle of the 30-second snuff film, rivaling shots are doomed to glare at one another, nuclear missiles in a cultural Cold War. For every perp walk, there is a Pop Crave spinoff; for every WANTED: Have you seen this man, there is a WANTED: Luigi Mangione lookalike in my bedroom tonight. “A picture is like a blintz,” Weegee once said. “Eat it while it’s hot.” The morsel is on the table; before it gets cold, it had better mean something.

“I wanted to look him in the eye and state that You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that the people of New York love. And I wanted to be there to show the symbolism of that.”

A beautiful truth of documentation: pictures, whether hot blintzes or cold blood, aren’t exclusive to people who own cameras. Not long after my friend and I’s trudge beneath the Riftstone Arch, I picked up a copy of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, a bleak book in which Weegee’s typical subjects—scattered brains, bullet-riddled bodies, anguished faces—instead bookend sinister stories, crudely written as if overheard at a busy bar. In one such tale, a gaggle of hoodlums gets into a gruesome brawl with Army soldiers on leave; by the time cops arrive, blood, tears, and vomit flow freely down the sidewalk. “The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows,” Selby writes of the wind-down, lawful order returning with the rising Sun. “The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back to the [bar] and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldnt be seen from a few feet away.”

In one reading, Last Exit to Brooklyn is a vengeful text: a bedridden man, inflicting his physical entrapment upon hopeless characters trapped in a hellscape. (While Weegee was proffering white-hot snuff footage to the shocked souls of sunrise, Selby was rotting in hospice, riddled with complications from a series of botched lung surgeries.) In another, it’s no different, really, from Weegee’s work—unflinchingly honest, even if the truth is so unflinching that it’s frightening. By 2024, Selby scans as a forebear to the likes of Kathy Acker and Bret Easton Ellis, controversial writers who made “unspeakable violence” quite speakable indeed. Part of their impact, in retrospect, lies in the fact that 20th-Century shockers have largely become 21st-Century symbols. Violence, murder, and societal “underbellies” aren’t taboo things anymore, nor are they things we squint at: they’re aesthetic cudgels, weapons to be seen, shared, and wielded by any curator, for any purpose. It isn’t the postwar period anymore—a shooting is no surprise. A documented shooting is even less of a surprise. A perp-walk can no longer invent a villain. Reality is made of symbols, and only the most convincing ones survive. “I wanted to send a strong message,” Mayor Eric Adams, a convicted felon, said of his decision to appear at Mangione’s extradition to New York. “I wanted to look him in the eye and state that You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that the people of New York love. And I wanted to be there to show the symbolism of that.” Bad actors don’t matter. Actors do.

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“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation. The intent was to sow terror.”

A half-century after Naked City (book) rattled innocent readers, Naked City (short-lived avant-garde band) released Naked City Live, a wriggling snapshot of a 1989 show at The Knitting Factory. All throughout Last Exit to Brooklyn, jazz music is wielded as an eerie leitmotif, blaring in bars and wailing over bloody beatdowns. Naked City Live sounds the way many of those violent outbursts read: spontaneous and guttural, like the startling jolt of seeing someone alive one second and dead in the next. One particular four-track stretch—“Igneous Ejaculation,” “Ujaku,” “Blood Duster,” “Hammerhead”—spasms like a series of retches and shrieks, captured by a tape recorder at the scene of a gruesome incident. This is a different kind of snuff flick: not a film, per se, but a just-as-deathly dispatch from an underbelly that swallows people whole. The four-track run feels like a grainy surveillance video, and it lasts as long as one, too: less than a minute.

“(…) codified, made comprehensible, rendered at once public property and profitable merchandise.”

The musical answer to an “underbelly” is an “underground,” which makes it fitting for Naked City, a shocking fringe band, to take its name from Naked City, a shocking fringe document. Gracing the cover of Naked City Live is “Corpse with a revolver,” a 1936 Weegee shot of a suited man who could be sleeping—that is, until you spot the blood on the sidewalk, the gun on the periphery, and the upended bowler hat a foot or so away, blown off of its wearer like something out of Tom & Jerry. (“I take corpses from an angle that makes ’em look comfortable,” Weegee told the New York Times in 1968.) In an era so deeply steeped in aesthetics, both undergrounds and underbellies seem to share a certain fate: that in losing their shock value, they’ve stopped being subversive and simply become symbolic, free for co-option by anyone who desires grisly aesthetics without grisly consequences. Similar things have long been true of subcultural traditions, appropriated by mass-market systems as a reward for outliving initial outrage. Unable to remain radical forever, a symbol, Dick Hebdige once wrote, is “codified, made comprehensible, rendered at once public property and profitable merchandise.” It’s why you can find Arca on Katy Perry’s moodboard, Goth calendars in shopping malls, or a Nirvana shirt on sale from Yves Saint Laurent for $4,000. An image, born in a backstreet, is laid to rest in a clearance bin.

These factors, in part, make Mangione’s case fitting for our fast times: his symbolic lifespan, like a split-second snuff film, has been a dizzying speedrun, creation and appropriation happening everywhere all at once. Long before he was apprehended in Pennsylvania, images of masked men with defined eyebrows ravaged the country; shortly after he was named a suspect, his likeness graced shrines, Soundcloud one-offs, and an alarming number of mugshots. On the day of his spectacular perp walk, the NYPD’s Twitter account posted a series of captionless victory-lap photos, each containing a cuffed Mangione being led towards a private police aircraft. All the while, in what might be his strongest claim to subculture, T-Shirt bootleggers wasted little time producing models: “FREE LUIGI MANGIONE,” the shirts often read, photoshopped upon AI-generated men with selfies from the suspect’s Instagram.

Two things are happening simultaneously, and both are important: (1) an image is being bludgeoned, and (2) in being bludgeoned, the image is being buoyed. Understood as a saga, it’s instructive to read Mangione’s case as a series of births and rebirths, no different from the highs and lows of a soap opera. A television show isn’t doomed by the death of a plot point—it’s given reason to continue, a promise that by the next episode, something new will emerge in its wake. All the same, for every moment Mangione appears in court, there is a scramble to squeeze its talking points to death, drain it of all potential substance. This doesn’t mean that the saga is over; it only means that the next installment will carry more symbolic weight. The rasping man in the orange jump-suit is dead; the pixelated man holding a McDonald’s hash brown is dead; the clean-cut college graduate in the courtroom is dead; the stone-cold stalker in the snuff film is dead. Let’s meet tomorrow, same time, same place. A fresh image will be in the news by noon.

The ultimate symbols are corpses, and corpses tend to result from capital punishment, the sentence made possible—and perhaps likely—by Mangione’s federal indictment on charges of murder and stalking. “This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan, said in a press conference. “The intent was to sow terror.” Though Bragg’s terrorism charge comes at the state level, its implications feel apt for the symbolism of the shooting: visual proof that not only is Thompson dead, but you, a wealthy beneficiary of the American system, could be next. The only answer to a symbol is another symbol; the most convincing thing you can do to a symbol is kill it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it dies—quite the opposite. A dead symbol is a martyr, and a martyr is immortal.

This is the dilemma plaguing the defense: that in trying to erect a precedent, they might instead be erecting a far more powerful paragon. But there’s too much momentum to stop now, and while they march their man to the slaughter, they may be marching their cause, of example-making and movement-breaking, to the slaughter, too. Before capital punishment became possible, parallels began to crop up between Mangione’s optics and those of persecuted Christian Saints, sentenced to death and resurrected in stained glass. Mangione, a figure of immense public sympathy, has already notched stained-glass status—Saint Luigi Mangione! The Patron Saint of health care justice, a viral photoshop is captioned—which might be even more terrifying, to some, than the shooting that spawned all of these symbols. Nonetheless, there isn’t any going back: this is a case of an exposed underbelly, lifted from the backstreets and plastered, like Weegee’s snuff scenes, onto the front pages of national newspapers. A certain order needs to be restored—unpleasant scenes sequestered, blood cleaned up—before any fallout can be conceived of, let alone accounted for.

“Saint Luigi Mangione! The Patron Saint of health care justice.”

Done properly, the transition from underbelly to upside is mechanical, like shifting Madison Square Garden from a bull-riding arena to a political convention site. I couldn’t help but notice, while reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, that two contradictory worlds were almost always at play: the world of bloodied bruisers brawling into nightfall, and the world of innocent bystanders, waiting—praying—for dawn from behind locked doors and bedroom windows. There’s a noir-y feel to Selby’s Brooklyn, an insular place where jazz music wails over a rotating cast of characters trapped in a common fate: to kill, fuck, and fight one another until no one is left. Stuck in my head, as I write this sentence, are the opening six seconds of “Skate Key,” a thriller-ready segment from Naked City Live. Saxophone shrill, guttural thump; saxophone shrill, guttural thump. You get the sense that they’re chasing one another, the footsteps of the underbelly fee-fi-fo-fum-ing towards the shrieking souls of daylight. Eventually, the two sides marry, melding with brass instruments and electric guitars to form something closer, in spirit, to jazz-fusion or lounge-rock. But this melding isn’t so much a marriage, per se, as a bleeding-into; the result is unsteady, the sound of violent schizophrenia.

The most harrowing story in Last Exit to Brooklyn is “The Queen is Dead,” a lengthy narrative in which Georgette, a transfeminine prostitute, yearns for lasting connection—beyond transactional sex—with Vinnie, a violent ex-con and consistent client. Vinnie, who reveres savagery and hangs out with savages, “(gets) kicks from refusing Georgette,” from “patting her on the ass and telling her not now sweetheart. Maybe later.” He likes being desired—being seen being desired—which sends Georgette, his admirer, into desperate mania. Yes, they can be together, but only in private, which doesn’t count. In public, Vinnie is a gangster among other gangsters who would like to be seen doing gangsterly things. It wasn’t particularly gangsterly, in the postwar period, to be in a loving relationship with a sex worker. More gangsterly was the “fun” activity of throwing knives at their feet, commanding, between laughs, “Dance, ballerina, dance!” Vinnie does this; Georgette lands in the hospital, one shoe sopping with blood.

“The sun was hot and bright, and light rammed and slashed her from windows, windshields, hoods of cars, from tin signs, shirt buttons, bottle caps and slips of paper lying in the street.”

This occurs, of course, at dusk, when underbellies grumble for kill. Wary of being watched over by an abusive brother, Georgette escapes into the dead of night, limping towards an apartment—Goldie’s—brimming with supportive sisters. Within these insular walls, Georgette, evidently the most popular, is the titular “Queen,” a despot regaling admirers with tales from yet another wild night. The sisters grow excited with the prospect of Vinnie and his fellow thugs; a phone call is made, and soon enough, the men are sprawled across the room, sexual tension brewing with every downed benzedrine pill. Georgette, now, has two important tasks: to fulfill her wish of being with Vinnie in sight of his friends, and to prove to her own friends that she is powerful, more so than the gash on her leg might suggest. Neither of these things happen. The sun rises and begins to pierce through the blinds, through the illusion. Vinnie sleeps with one of Georgette’s friends; when it’s her turn, he defecates on the bed. Outside she goes, with a lethal dosage of morphine in her blood: the underbelly bleeding into the morning, as garishly and uncomfortably as the spasm of “Skate Key.” “The sun was hot and bright,” Selby writes, “and light rammed and slashed her from windows, windshields, hoods of cars, from tin signs, shirt buttons, bottle caps and slips of paper lying in the street.” By the time The Queen is Dead, her scramble to imbue potential symbols—sex, love, desire—with meaning is dead, too. The morsel was on the table, and “It. Wasn/t. Shit.”