Stanya Kahn Turns the Luigi Mangione Tweet Storm into a Film

Artist Stanya Kahn's 30-minute film Deny Defend Depose (2026), which chronicles America's real-time social media response to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, screens at Participant Inc in New York on 13 November, with a further showing at Slash Art in San Francisco on 12 December.

The Los Angeles time-based media artist began the project on 4 December 2024, the morning Thompson was shot in Manhattan. Opening X, she found a torrent of reactions ranging, as she tells The Art Newspaper, "from celebratory snark to unbridled vitriol."

"The compression of anger and joy that I was seeing people write that day was astonishing," Kahn says. "At first I was bookmarking them, and then [screenshotting] them, and fairly quickly my thought was to gather these up because the algorithm might start shutting them down."

Why a film and not a book?

Kahn first considered a coffee-table book — a comic inversion of X's short-form format. She chose film instead, her primary medium, for one concrete reason: in-person screenings transform a solitary scroll into a collective event.

Set to an acid and jungle soundtrack, the film presents the tweets chronologically. Audiences hold their breath as the suspect is revealed as Luigi Mangione, laugh at jokes about his attractiveness and the Monopoly money found in his backpack, and fall silent at statistics on industry salaries and personal anecdotes of life-threatening insurance denials.

The title quotes the words scrawled on three shell casings fired in the shooting — and names the payout-reduction strategy used by major healthcare providers.

What changes with Mangione's plea?

Kahn originally timed the release to the state trial of Mangione, due 9 September in New York. Mangione's 14 August guilty plea — an attempt to avoid double jeopardy — pushed the state hearing to 10 December, with a federal hearing to follow on 18 December. Kahn now plans to keep updating the film with new public responses as the case continues.

The Trump administration's announcement that celebration of the killing could be criminalised added urgency to her archiving.

What does the reaction reveal?

The film's central evidence is the breadth of the response. "The poignancy of such a broad spectrum of the American public responding in kind to what was basically a public political assassination felt like a rupture, especially in party-based politics," Kahn says. "It cut across the entire political spectrum and the common ground that suddenly emerged in this flashpoint seemed like a new beacon for potential mass movement, because it was a unity that emerged spontaneously and instantaneously, it wasn't something that got hammered out in time."

The affection for Mangione has been staggering. "Without blinking," she adds, "people were in full-throat applause of [an alleged] murderer."

Kahn rejects the framing of the responses as fringe radicalism. Reviewing posters' profiles while archiving, she found: "it was literally just 'every man' — people with five followers and five million. It was regular people because they were pissed."

The context, as the source notes: per capita US healthcare spending runs double the average of other wealthy countries and has outpaced inflation for decades. Kahn reads the eruption as evidence of "how deep the pain and anger and frustration is in this country about the evilness of the healthcare system and its inaccessibility."

The story resists a simple tale of righteous vengeance — Mangione's Ivy League education and privileged upbringing complicate the disaffected-radical narrative. With hearings now set for December, the film remains a live document of an unfinished national argument.