Well, as we suspected last week, this mini-series is really becoming The Andrew Cunanan Story dressed up as a high-fashion murder. And the thing is, that’s okay: As true crime goes, it’s fascinating stuff. Cunanan’s spree is a solved crime that’s also forever an unsolved mystery. We know who did it, but we can only ever grasp at why. There are so many blanks to fill in with reporting and analysis and extrapolation, but in the end, the only way to finish the puzzle is to guess. And while Versace was Cunanan’s flashiest victim, the story didn’t begin or even end there, and American Crime Story is doing an admirable job trying to make sense of the insensible. Here, it outlines all we know and the best anyone can guess about his first and second victims, who were connected and in quick succession.
Sometimes, of course, that means trying to find something sympathetic in the guilty. It’s almost like we can’t possibly believe that anyone is just simply a psychopath, so we reach and dig and scrape for something to latch onto that makes the person relatably human. Maybe in Cunanan’s case, he was. Or maybe he was just insane.
This episode almost toes both lines. I had just read Maureen Orth’s Vanity Fair piece — dated 2008, but it reads like she wrote it much closer to 1997 — about Cunanan’s spree, which draws in particular detail the deaths of Jeffrey Trail and David Madson. It begins with Cunanan’s flashy days in San Diego as a gigolo and a kept man of sorts with a rich sugar daddy, which is where he met Trail and Madson, both ultimately Minneapolis-based. The show does not clarify Cunanan’s relationships with them, but the article does: Trail was a man Cunanan considered a best friend, and Madson was the love of his life, and both of them — Trail first, then Madson — slowly began to see through Cunanan’s lies and eventually stopped even feeling sorry for all the reasons he might’ve been telling them.
The facts, as Pushing Daisies would say, are these: Trail died in Madson’s apartment by Cunanan’s hand, but remained there for days before he was discovered. Eyewitnesses saw Cunanan walking Madson’s dog with him on what would be the day after the murder, before they dropped out of sight and out of touch. A panicked Madson coworker finally convinced the landlord to let her into David’s apartment to check on him, which is how they discovered both the body rolled up in a rug, and energetic blood spatter. Cunanan had created enough confusion that the cops mistakenly believed he was David Madson’s victim; by the time the coroner identified Jeff Trail’s body, Cunanan and Madson were long gone.
History does not seem to connect Trail and Madson romantically, but the show gives them a scene together in an elevator that hints to a crime of passion or at least of betrayal on Cunanan’s part. It’s not disputed that he loved Madson, and the show alleges he proposed, and that Madson had only stayed in Cunanan’s life because he was still in the stage where he thought hurting Andrew was like kicking a puppy. Trail had hardened to Andrew. Given that Cunanan eventually used Trail’s gun to kill Madson, the theory presented here is that he stole Trail’s weapon as a way of luring Trail to Madson’s apartment, so he could kill him in full view of Madson and thus create a situation in which Madson had no choice but to leave with him. A forced happy ending by homicide.
Considering we know the outcome, the show is really adept at replacing “what will happen” with a palpable sense of dread about when and how. For example, the second Trail enters the apartment, Andrew flies at him so fast with a hammer and bashes his brains in so repeatedly and violently that the viewer wants to scramble away almost as fast as poor Madson does. That one is fast; Madson’s march to death is much slower and more agonizing, even though we know where it’s going. No one really knows how Cunanan worked over Madson. The show posits that he expertly manipulated him, first by claiming he simply lost control of himself, then by nursing him through shock gently enough that he had time to plan his next step. Which was, calmly, coolly elucidating all the reasons why not to call the cops, including telling Madson the cops hate gay people and pretending flight was an act of love: “I’ll get 30 years, but you’ll get 10 years. I can’t let you ruin your life,” this Cunanan tells Madson. He also dissuades Madson from calling his father, claiming it would ruin his life as well. Their final joint escape, the show suggests, was prompted by being afraid the landlord would enter and discover the body with Madson still there looking guilty as sin.
The road trip is all Andrew being completely deluded — cranking “Pump Up The Jam” and eating burritos from the back of Madson’s car — and David looking bummed and scared. Cunanan is shown telling one puffy lie about how they can stop in Chicago and get some money from a business associate, the unknowingly doomed Lee Miglin, and how his business in Mexico will boom and they can live a rich life there together. He goes on and on about how it’s okay if David wants to leave him down there, of course, “and I respect that,” but they wouldn’t have anyone else but each other. “You should really start thinking about your new life. What you want to do with it,” he says. A metastatement about Andrew Cunanan if ever there was one, as this is a man who created tens of new lives for himself, often at the same time.
David is portrayed as being in utter disbelief the entire time, visibly afraid Andrew will kill him despite Andrew’s assurances that he loves him too much to cause him harm. At one point, he rambles about being scared of what the cops will dig up about him, and how it will affect his parents’ lives in his small hometown: “Who’s going to buy anything from my dad’s shop?” he murmurs.
Eventually David appears to realize he can’t win, so he starts challenging Cunanan about his lies — both in Minnesota and in his flashy life in San Diego. “You never worked for anything. It was an act… You loved [Jeff]. It was so obvious. But he figured you out in the end. It took him a few years, but he finally saw the real you, and you killed him for it.” Andrew blinks a few times and the brightly insists they can have that life again in Mexico, but ten times better, thanks to all his fancy business deals. “You can’t do it, can you?” David marvels. “[You can’t] stop.”
And when David finally realizes Andrew planned killing Jeff in front of him all along, he signs his own death warrant. Andrew, the very picture of agony and disillusionment, shoots his former lover in the back as he tries to run for his life.
Is that how it went down? Who knows. They had the bodies, they had the weapons, but they never got to ask the killer any questions. And so he moved on to richer pastures, and bigger murders.
The loft set they made for David Madson’s loft already looks like a place where a serial murderer might be. I can’t recall them addressing why there is plastic sheeting hanging up or whether he had recently moved in, or what.
This shot started with David working, and we saw Cunanan enter and walk toward him. Simple blocking, except that the way Darren Criss holds his body while walking as Cunanan is amazing. He glides, but so precisely, as if he’s a tightly coiled snake.
Finn Wittrock plays Jeff Trail, and gets only one scene and like a minute of face time, max. Of course, that’s partly because in the NEXT minute he will no longer HAVE a face.
Afterward, while David cowers in horror on the couch, Cunanan walks to him while still holding the bloody hammer and puts it on David’s cheek, while acting like he’s sharing in David’s grief. It’s well-constructed manipulation.
As is the whole ensuing bit, where Cunanan takes a shocked David and gently leads him to the shower, and almost tenderly helps him rinse himself clean of the blood spatter. By acting so caring, he got a dazed and confused David to go along with him immediately, which is the beginning of explaining why David never did call the cops.
Another subtle power play: leaving Jeff’s body lying uncovered in the hallway. David would’ve had to flee OVER it, and when they do decide to go walk the dog – Andrew, obviously, does not let David go anywhere alone – they have to cover the body up together, which then makes David more of an accomplice while also continuing to drive home the horror of what happened and keep the vaguest notion that it might be David’s fate no matter how much Andrew placates him.
Seriously, the set designers were either DELIGHTED to have very little to do, or bored out of their skulls.
Andrew leaves a bunch of S&M porn and supplies on David’s bed, as a way of helping create suspicion that this might have been a sex game gone wrong.
And here, we have David’s family’s very sedate living room. My favorite little touch are the greeting cards lined up on the mantel.
We pause for Aimee Mann – traveling through space and time to play as her current self but in 1997 – to show up and perform a plaintive cover of “Drive” by The Cars, pregnant with meaning for Andrew.
The camera is on Criss as Andrew lets the words sink in and starts to cry. It’s open to interpretation what he’s crying about; it could be that he’s coping with the fact that he’s just committed murder, that he’s made a prison for himself, or that he is realizing that this delusion of a life – much less a life with David – is not going to hold. Probably all three. It’s very well done, and also TENSE AS HELL, because during this David is in the bathroom punching out a window and hoping to escape so we keep expecting Andrew to get up and find him in there and kill him. (He doesn’t.)(Yet.)
This diner scene is where the shine starts t come off: Here is the first exposition that clarifies how these two even know each other, and it’s David drawing Andrew into a conversation about the glory days of when they met in San Francisco… before turning sour and hissing that it was all A LIE because Andrew is a big fake faker.
Naturally, this doesn’t end well, although the show posits that Andrew was still trying to play along with his fantasy of a life together in Mexico before David finally snapped and tried to commandeer the car.
David pleads for his life. Then he just gives up and cuts Andrew verbally before turning to run while Andrew is facing the other way. Andrew turns and fires the gun.
There are some flashbacks throughout demonstrating David’s relationship with his father..
… to a point. David came out to him after he had won an award (“good news, bad news”), and his father took a moment to compose his words and then finally said he can’t change what he believes or pretend that he supports that lifestyle, but “I love you more than my own life.” So after Andrew fires the gun, David seems to make it to a nearby trailer… but then he turns and sees his father, pouring soup from a Thermos and offering him some, and poor David sits down and shares an imaginary happy reconciliation with his father…
… as it’s revealed that he did indeed get felled by a bullet and tried to plead silently one more time before Andrew shot him in the face. We end with Andrew curled up next to David’s dead body, head on David’s chest, efore getting up and taking the Jeep straight to Lee and Marilyn Miglin’s personal hell. It’s a really stirringly shot piece.
Turns Out Versace Is Tangential To ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’
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