“Kitsch,” Milan Kundera once wrote, “is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word.” Unconcerned with hiding the figurative shit, and instead content to thrust it onto the viewer within the first minute, the second installment of American Crime Story starts with Gianni Versace in the hospital, being treated for what we are led to assume is HIV. Shit happens, then you die; a lot of this shit is unearned, unfair and brutal. A lot of this shit is painful and undignified, and it kills. For a show that has—as Penelope-as-Donatella says to Ricky-as-Antonio, Gianni’s partner, of her brother—“a weakness for beauty,” The Assassination of Gianni Versace is, in this brief scene at least, extremely frank.
This frankness has not thrilled the Versace family, who released a public statement earlier this month disputing the idea that Gianni had AIDS: “The company producing the series claims it is relying on a book by Maureen Orth,” it reads (referring to Orth’s Vulgar Favors, published in 2000), “but the Orth book itself is full of gossip and speculation. As just one example, Orth makes assertions about Gianni Versace’s medical condition based on a person who claims he reviewed a post-mortem test result, but she admits it would have been illegal for the person to have reviewed the report in the first place (if it existed at all).”
Last week, on a podcast based entirely around the show (made—in a fit of content and creator every bit as snug as that of Cunanan’s red Speedo—by the team atVanity Fair), Tom Robert Smith, a writer on the series and a firm believer in Orth’s version of events, offered a rebuttal. “Andrew [Cunanan, the killer], this destroyer of life, did not have AIDS,” said Smith. “And the person who did have HIV was this great creator and celebrator of life.”
Narratively, this can’t help but seem convenient, given that we see Gianni literally proclaim his lust for living in a scene that falls between his treatment and his murder. The Assassination lays on its dramatic irony, at times, less like a layer of gossamer than a sheet of lead: a dead man’s shroud. Unlike the chainmail fabric Cunanan is seen to rhapsodize about like a fetish object (“The man invented his own fabrics! Ever heard of Oroton?”), it does not wear it lightly, nor with enviable ease.
All the other things that happen in the episode are minor enough that I can lay them out succinctly: Donatella argues with Versace’s live-in lover, the sweet but minimally-used Antonio, played by Ricky Martin, over whether it’s his fault that Gianni has contracted H.I.V. from a three-way fling. The killer drives into Miami playing Laura Branigan’s Gloria, making this the second filmed depiction of true violence in six months to use the track as a doomy gag. We are treated to a recreation of Versace’s final show which, ludicrously, does not have Naomi Campbell play herself despite the fact she’s aged like a bona fide artwork. Cunanan turns tricks on the beach, and then almost suffocates an older man with duct tape in a hotel room that looks like Barbie’s Porno Dream House, to the very un-hot and unsophisticated soundtrack of Phil Collins’ Easy Lover. If this does not sound like high art, understand that it isn’t. If it does not sound like entertainment, you might be—like Cunanan’s new beachside hustler friend—on crack.
Kundera also said about kitsch that “it causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear,” he explained, “says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch ‘kitsch.’” When Andrew Cunanan arrives at the Normandy Plaza hotel in Miami, he is momentarily transfixed by a bad, gray painting of Marilyn; and how nice it is to be moved, along with all mankind, by reminders of Marilyn’s face. How nice to be moved, along with all mankind, by images that necessarily remind us of her death in the décor of a crumbling Deco-era hotel: death made spectacular enough that it’s pure public spectacle, pure pulpy, campy entertainment. “I’m the one least likely to be forgotten,” Cunanan later says to a guy in a club. It does not sound exactly like a lie, since the next best thing to being a star is killing one.
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace”: The Next Best Thing to Being a Star is Killing One
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