Tag: 2.04

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: We Want More Ricky Martin & Dascha Polanco

Much like last week’s episode, “House By The Lake” leaves Gianni and Donatella Versace behind to give us more insight into the events that led to the moment that gives this show its name. We keep moving back in time, before Andrew (Darren Criss) shot Versace outside his Miami home in 1997; before he tortured and killed Chicago tycoon Ed Miglin. We meet him here, months before, when he was just a guy that David Madson (Cody Fern) and his erstwhile lover Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) found rather creepy and hoped wouldn’t flip out when he found out about them. This being a show with “assassination” in the title and us knowing that Cunanan had already killed several men by the time he showed up in Miami, we know where this is headed. But that doesn’t make the brutal violence — amidst Madson’s minimalist and industrial apartment — any less shocking.

The entire episode is an exercise in eeriness. Cunanan’s calm approach to his latest killing is all the more shocking as it’s laced with the inherent threat that only his love of David will stop him from causing more havoc. And so the two men flee Minneapolis to potentially start anew, with the young architect vacillating between fearing for his life and fearing having to face the life he’s just left behind.

As he did with Miglin, Cunanan talks with David about the homophobia that riddles their lives. “They’ve always hated us. You’re. A. FAG,” he spews at the man he professes to love, all the while blackmailing him into running away with him to Mexico where they’ll start a new life together. The delusion of normalcy would be hilarious were it not also so terrifying. In Cunanan’s worldview, killing for love and besmirching a world that already hates you for who you are is the only way to move forward.

“All you need is love” is turned into a serial killer-in-the-making’s motto. Except, as he finds out while out on the road with David, it’s hard to earn that love, even from a young man who’s had to wrestle with his own shameful demons. Echoing the question Cunanan asked Miglin before he killed him (is he more scared of death than of the scandal that was sure to erupt when they found him next to gay porn mags?), David asks himself whether he was afraid of the disgrace, the shame of the messy, bloody scene he’d left behind in his apartment. For a show driven by murder, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is squarely focused on the way dirty secrets and shameful desires fuel the deadliest of American crimes.

This Week’s MVP:

Cody Fern as David Madson in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.’ Photo by Ray Mickshaw. Courtesy of FX

Fern as David Madson is a revelation. Where the show has done well by showcasing A-list talent hitting it out of the park — Penelope Cruz as Donatella! Ricky Martin as Antonio! Edgar Ramirez as Gianni Versace! Judith Light as Marilyn Miglin! — I was happily surprised to see producer Ryan Murphy go with this mostly unknown Aussie actor for such a pivotal role. Madson is, at this point in the story, the key to Cunanan’s violence and you can see the exact moment when whatever love Cunanan had for the wealthy, beautiful architect sours enough for him to pull the trigger.

Where these past two episodes (the best of the series so far) have plunged us deeper into Cunanan’s psyche, giving us a fuller picture of what drove him to such barbaric violence, I can’t wait back to dive back into the world of Versace next week. I miss its gaudy style, its popping colors, its delicious accents, and its speedo-clad men. I need more Edgar! I need more Penelope! I need more Ricky! I especially want more of Orange is the New Black’s Dascha Polanco’s no-nonsense Miami cop.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: We Want More Ricky Martin & Dascha Polanco

The Fourth Episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Isn’t as Legit as It Seems

Here’s what we know about David Madson’s life in the days leading up to his murder: On Friday, April 25, 1997, Andrew Cunanan took a one-way flight from his home in San Diego to Minneapolis to visit his old friend Jeff Trail and former boyfriend Madson. Although Madson wasn’t thrilled to see Cunanan, the young architect did reluctantly host his ex at his loft.

They were spotted at restaurants, bars, and clubs, but after dinner on Saturday, they parted ways. Trail, who had no desire to spend time with Cunanan, had left town with his boyfriend and invited Cunanan to stay in his empty room Saturday night. While it’s not clear whether Cunanan slept at Trail’s place, he was there Sunday morning and back at Madson’s the same evening. At nine that night, Trail got in his car to meet Cunanan at a coffee shop. By 10 PM, Trail was dead.

The coffee shop meetup hadn’t happened, so Trail had come to Madson’s building. Evidence suggests Cunanan killed his friend almost immediately after his arrival, landing his first blow with the door open. It’s possible Madson was home at the time, but in Vulgar Favors, the book this season of American Crime Story is based on, author Maureen Orth judges it “unlikely.” He didn’t show up for work Monday; a neighbor saw two men, one of whom appeared to be Madson, walking a dog that could have been Madson’s on Tuesday morning. The same day, concerned that he’d neither come in to the office nor called in sick, two women Madson knew through work knocked on his door. One thought she heard whispers.

An hour after another neighbor spotted Cunanan and a distraught-looking Madson approaching the building, the women returned with the lofts’ caretaker, opened the door, found the body, saw that the apartment was empty, and called the police. Because his acquaintances knew Madson was gay—and because Cunanan had left a bag containing gay porn videos, steroids, and bullets—Sergeant Bob Tichich’s first guess was that Madson was the victim, and the crime was “a gay thing.”

As Trail’s parents learned of his death (and, then, his homosexuality), Cunanan and Madson were on the run. On May 3, two fisherman in rural Chisago County, Minnesota, found Madson’s body near East Rush Lake. He’d been shot three times with a gun Cunanan had stolen from Trail, and sustained defensive wounds. It’s unclear how long Madson lived; Orth pokes holes in a coroner’s report that puts his date of death at May 2 and debunks a bar owner’s claim to have served Madson and Cunanan that afternoon. The sighting turned out to have happened on April 27, and the two men who visited the bar were, in all likelihood, an entirely different gay couple.

All of which is to say that most of last night’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode, “House by the Lake,” was invented by writer Tom Rob Smith. Which is fine! There’s nothing wrong with a docudrama using some artistic license. And in the case of this episode, many of the choices must have been made out of necessity—much of the hour finds Andrew and David alone, and two dead men can’t exactly go on record about their road trip.

So: Did Andrew purposely leave his porn stash at David’s loft? Were they on the road together for several days? Once they left Minneapolis, did Andrew intend for them to go to Chicago and then Mexico together? Did the plan unravel when David started poking holes in Andrew’s Natural Born Killers fantasy? The answer to all of these questions—not to mention the one about the scene where Aimee Mann covers The Cars’ “Drive” at a roadhouse—is “We don’t have the faintest clue.”

In keeping with the show’s running theme, Smith constructs a story about homophobia and the way Andrew uses it to manipulate another gay man. When David tries to call the police, Andrew convinces him that they’d see him as a perpetrator, too. “They hate us, David,” he says. “You’re a fag.” He’s not entirely wrong: the cops really do assume David’s queerness has something to do with the murder, and that Jeff’s body is initially presumed to be David’s and that David, not Andrew, becomes a suspect when police see he’s not the corpse—both of which really happened—imply that the straight world saw these gay men as virtually interchangeable.

The line between the crime of murder and the crime of homosexuality (sodomy didn’t become legal across the United States until 2003) blurs. When the fugitives leave a rest stop, with Andrew’s arm slung over David’s shoulder, a woman gives them a dirty look. David is convinced that she recognizes them as wanted criminals, but the implication is that she was simply revolted to see two gay men. Before and after that encounter, David has plenty of opportunities to escape. He and Andrew walk the dog together before leaving Minneapolis. They stop at restaurants. But David only tries to bolt when he’s alone, by the side of the highway or in the bathroom of the roadhouse, even when Andrew’s behavior becomes more threatening. The big question surrounding Madson’s murder is: Why didn’t he run? As Smith imagines it, he was more afraid of putting himself at the mercy of a homophobic world than he was of a known killer.

David’s fear of his own difference is echoed in the moment when he comes out to his father. He can only summon the courage to do it after winning a prestigious academic award, and though his dad tells David, “I love you more than I love my own life,” he also reiterates that his son’s lifestyle doesn’t jibe with his own beliefs and that the revelation does, in fact, change something about their relationship. (The stuff about David’s close relationship with his family is true, by the way.) You can imagine a lifetime of interactions like this convincing someone that, if even his adoring family sees him as somehow “other,” he had no chance pleading his case to police.

It’s a well-constructed episode. The conversations between Andrew and David are rich with psychological subtext, and even if Smith sometimes states the obvious, he’s careful not to repeat it too often. Actor Cody Fern plays David, by all accounts a kind, talented, and hardworking guy, with heartbreaking sensitivity. Each episode of Versace has had a slightly different feel, and this one was a psychological thriller. From the claustrophobic shots of hallways to the bleak, low-lit, industrial interiors of David’s loft to multiple scenes where Andrew startles him—and us—by appearing as if out of nowhere, it’s eerie from beginning to end.

But I’m kind of frustrated by the liberties it takes with David Madson’s life. He’s painted as a sympathetic character, sure, but is placing him in the loft at the time of Jeff Trail’s murder, when he most likely was not there, absolutely necessary? How about framing him as stupid enough to get back in the car, after the ill-fated diner pit stop, with a killer he’d just read as hard as Jeff once had? What was the point of that moment, in the elevator, when David nervously tells Jeff (who, in real life, spent most of the weekend with his boyfriend), “He knows about us”?

Of course Smith has a right to fictionalize. Even so, Madson wasn’t a public figure like Gianni Versace or Lee Miglin, and I felt sick thinking of how those scenes would look to his family and friends. So I’ll leave you with a quote from Bridget Read’s review of Versace for Vogue, which perfectly sums up my conflicted feelings on “House by the Lake”: “We don’t have to hold all creative works about real-life suffering to the standards of what would hurt or offend surviving family members, but after watching a fictional Cunanan—whose real-life counterpart craved perhaps nothing so much as the type of fame bestowed by a prestige TV series—sadistically torture and humiliate his victims in fine detail, it’s hard not to feel like maybe we should.”

The Fourth Episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Isn’t as Legit as It Seems

AMERICAN CRIME STORY Review: “House By the Lake”

With its fourth episode, entitled “House By the Lake,” this season of American Crime Story is really starting to take shape for me. Off the bat, I was expecting it to go like this: a murder involving a high profile figure happens, a media hoopla ensues, followed by a trial where we get a little more into the head of the accused while simultaneously forcing us to take a look at how we were as a society and culture at the time, the end. That’s more or less how The People Vs. O.J. Simpson went. But I did not know the story around The Assassination of Gianni Versace. I never heard the name Andrew Cunanan before this. And so when the first three episodes were not what I expected them to be, I was a little thrown.

It is apparent now that this series, though we have the bulk of the season still ahead of us, will be most memorably about the killer Andrew Cunanan, and what led him to commit these atrocities. Everyone else thus far has taken a back seat. The last two episodes did not even feature Gianni, his love Antonio D’Amico, or his sister Donatella (played by Ricky Martin and Penelope Cruz respectively, who you would think other networks besides FX would fret over putting on the bench for weeks at a time). Last week’s episode was another jump back in time before the murder of Gianni Versace, which we saw in episode one, that time focusing on the murder of Chicago architect and closeted homosexual Lee Miglin. This week we go back in time not long before those events to Minneapolis, where Cunanan was staying with his boyfriend David Madson (Cody Fern).

It is another eerie opener. We now have a sense of what a simultaneous loose canon and calculating monster Andrew Cunanon can be so almost every scene, every line he delivers, is filled with tension. Nobody is safe around him (that is, if you’re like me and don’t recall the actual events). Living in the warehouse district of Minneapolis, David just lands a big job over the phone and is excited to share with Andrew. Andrew is not so pleased. He’s invited their mutual friend Jeff Trail up to the apartment, which David isn’t happy about. He’s about to get a whole lot less happy.

When Andrew brings Jeff up to the apartment, Andrew immediately besieges him and beats him to a bloody death with a hammer. David sit in shock. If you’re the type that yells at the screen, you would probably do a lot of hollering at David this episode. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t call the police (well, he does once, but hangs up when Andrew passively threatens him with a gun). And that’s exactly why this episode stands out from almost any of the series to date, especially season one. We don’t have any record of what went down between David and Andrew. Why didn’t he run? The writers have to piece things together, and can only go off assumptions, whereas almost every corner of People Vs. O.J had been well laid out for them.

We know that Andrew and David stayed in David’s apartment for two days after the murder of Jeff. We know that they were seen walking David’s dog together the day before they ran off, leaving Jeff’s body wrapped in a rug in the apartment. We do not know for certain whether David was an accomplice or a sort of prisoner of Andrew’s. The writers decide to play him as innocent, too afraid of Andrew to make any big moves, eventually coming along for the ride with him to Chicago to see Lee.

But it’s in this vagueness the writers find some time to insert interesting character studies, even if they are just conjecture. David later in the episode questions if he ran with Andrew because he was afraid of him, because he wanted to avoid jail time, or… was it because he was afraid what the world would inevitably find out about him, i.e. his homosexuality? What does this say about how hostile we were (perhaps still are) as a society towards gays when a man would rather go on the run with a murderer than come out of the closet and face us?

Through an effective series of flashbacks to when David was younger in which he interacts with his blue-collar father, the writers and Fern create a character that feels real and that we are sad to see go by the end. We knew it was coming because we know that David is not present with Cunanan in Chicago when he meets with Lee. In the end, he tries to get away and Cunanan executes him, leaving him in a field off an interstate highway. Another tragic, senseless death under Andrew’s belt.

Next week I assume we will flash back earlier than Minneapolis, though I also understand if the writers take us back to the present to show us what is going on with the Versaces post-death. But I am really digging this criminal profile of Cunanan and how they are unfolding it. I almost would be okay with the rest of the episodes were just surrounding him (Darren Criss is killing it, in more way than one). But I finally get what they are doing and am completely on board after being hesitant the first few weeks.

AMERICAN CRIME STORY Review: “House By the Lake”

How ‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Nails Its Soundtrack

What is it about Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” that seems to inspire crime in pop culture these days? It’s what Nancy Kerrigan whacker Shane Stant gets down to in I, Tonya before doing said whacking. Then, in the second episode of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace, serial killer Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) listens to on the radio as he drives to Miami to commit the titular crime, switching off a news report identifying him as the suspect in another killing and smiling as he hears the disco beat and Branigan’s clear voice.

“I think there is something so liberating about that song,” Versace music supervisor Amanda Krieg Thomas tells GQ. “It just has this energy of letting go and leaving it all behind you, just this energy of devil may care.” The “Gloria” moment exemplifies the unsettling spark of the music in the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise. Paired with Mac Quayle’s ominous score, the occasional bursts of anthemic pop root the show in the the period and community it orbits while also rounding out its character study.

“The bigger picture with music that Ryan really wanted to explore is that we’re in Andrew’s mind,” Thomas says. Four episodes in it’s now clear that’s in keeping with the philosophy of the show at large, which functions as a portrait of Andrew and the homophobic society that shaped him and his misdeeds. Versace and his sister Donatella are entirely secondary characters, sometimes entirely absent from the narrative.

Easily the most intriguing cues find Andrew interacting with the music, like when he belts “Gloria” or dances to the Philip Bailey and Phil Collins team-up “Easy Lover” in a Speedo as a man remains trapped on a bed with his face duct-taped. In Wednesday’s episode, Andrew screams Technotronic’s throbbing dance incantation “Pump Up the Jam,” which implores its listener to “get your booty on the floor tonight,” to his nervous hostage and eventual victim David Madson. Writing for Pitchfork, Judy Berman argues that the show “is using music to frame its subject as an explicitly gay variation on the American Psycho archetype.” Laura Branigan is his Huey Lewis. Thomas sees aspiration in the choices. “I don’t mean to be saying that these songs inspire murder, these artists inspire darkness” she says. “It’s more just about what was surrounding him and as he was growing up and wanting this luxurious life and wanting so much more for himself.”

Thomas is a veteran of the Murphy-verse and is even doing double duty on his Fox procedural 9-1-1. As she describes it, the musical ideas often start with Murphy and executive producer Alexis Martin Woodall. The prolific creator, she says, is a fan of artists Branigan and “This Is The Right Time” singer Lisa Stansfield so they were part of the initial conversations. He was also an early advocate for Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life,” which soundtracks Cunanan’s fateful meeting with Gianni Versace in the pilot.

Unlike its predecessor The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Versace spans a broader time frame, yielding more material. Thomas hunted through Billboard charts from the era and sought out playlists people had posted online to figure out what would have been echoing through gay clubs during the era. The goal was to find songs that are recognizable but not too obvious. “Finding that line between huge hits that people have over-heard and then just those songs that make people go: ‘Oh, right that song, what a great song,’” she says. “That was sort of in the pocket that we were going for researching.”

The series doesn’t stay entirely lodged in Andrew’s brain. This week’s hour turns its attention to David and the fear Andrew instills in him after bludgeoning their mutual friend Jeffrey Trail to death. David’s initial reaction is to call the police; Andrew convinces him he’ll be a suspect because he’s gay. Fleeing, they end up in a dive bar, where a singer played anonymously by Aimee Mann performs a sensitive cover of the Cars’ “Drive.” David attempts to escape, but realizes his efforts might be futile. “The cover of the Cars works so well because it speaks to David and his wondering, who’s going to be there for me and where else do I have in this movement?” Thomas says. And, as Mann strums, Andrew breaks down.

The producers had always intended the sequence to feature a spin on an ’80s pop song, and Murphy, as a fan of Mann’s, wanted her for the job. Settling on the Cars’ tune was a collaborative effort. “The priority was obviously we wanted something that fit the story and fit the moment but is something that Aimee felt that she could really nail on camera, the acting, singing and everything,” Thomas adds. “That was one of the ones that everybody agreed on.” It’s a mournful companion to “Pump Up The Jam” earlier in the episode, sadly in harmony with the circumstances instead of discordant. “Pump Up The Jam” echoes “Gloria” in its mix of mania and exuberance. When Andrew finds a tune to drive to he almost attacks it. It fuels his escape from his circumstances and himself.

Thomas is aware that Versace wasn’t alone in finding a home for Branigan’s famous interpretation of Umberto Tozzi’s Italian track, and it’s equally at home in I, Tonya’s sonic pastiche. Craig Gillespie, the director of that film, said in an email he chose it because of the “perfect oddness” that manifested when the dopey louts are entranced by it. That phrase applies to its use in Versace too, but there’s something else there. Listen closely and you’ll notice how it is sinister when Andrew, being pursued by law enforcement, sings, “If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody calling?” The lyrics are surprisingly paranoid. Gloria, if you’ll recall, hears voices in her head. Then again, if you don’t think too hard, it’s just infectious. “It called for a song that someone would sing along to,” Thomas says. “Not every song fits that bill and ‘Gloria’ you just want to belt it out.”

How ‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Nails Its Soundtrack

My plea to Ryan Murphy: Please ditch ‘Horror Story’ for ‘Crime Story’

In Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, author Maureen Orth recounts a brief memory from Howard Madson — father of Andrew Cunanan’s second victim, David Madson — about the time he took his son duck hunting. “We shot this duck, and he cried so bad I finally hid the thing over by the tree,” he recalled. “David was just beside himself.” This week’s fourth episode of American Crime Story takes this tiny, poignant detail from the book and expands on it artfully, creating a scene that might be even more heartbreaking than Jack’s death on This is Us.

The episode tells the story of David Madson (Australian actor Cody Fern, in a star-making performance), who is forced to go on the run with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). Shortly after a flashback to David’s hunting trip with his dad, he tries to flee during an argument with Andrew by a secluded lake. Cunanan shoots him in the back, and as he’s dying, David has a dream-like vision: He escapes into an abandoned trailer home nearby, where he finds his father, dressed in his camo hunting vest, patiently waiting to share a cup of coffee with his son.

The moment is absolutely gutting, and it exemplifies why true crime is such a perfect genre for American Crime Story megaproducer/mastermind Ryan Murphy. Adapting true stories allows Murphy to create the vivid characters and captivating, socially-relevant narratives he and his team are so known for — but the iron framework of facts surrounding true-to-life subjects forces Murphy to apply a discipline to his storytelling.

In contrast, American Horror Story plays to Team Murphy’s worst instincts – the temptation to shock, terrify and titillate (usually all at once) at the expense of story, and the need to go bigger and more “bats**t” each successive season. And so a legless, syphilis-ridden Chloe Sevigny crawling out of school stairwell in season 2 leads to a frightened Gabourey Sidibe masturbating in front of a minotaur in Season 3… which leads to Max Greenfield getting raped by a drill-bit dildo in season 5… which leads to Sarah Paulson and Angela Bassett being force-fed the flesh of Adina Porter’s leg in season 6… need I go on? (Maybe not, but I will: Season 7 featured a masked clown murderer with three penis noses.)

Both seasons of American Crime Story, though, have brimmed with humanity. The People vs. OJ Simpson completely rehabbed the public image of Marcia Clark — a woman who had been maligned, mocked, and sentenced to punch line status by the court of public opinion. By taking the time to tell Clark’s story through the lens of the challenges she faced as a working single mom, People vs. OJ (and Sarah Paulson’s Emmy-winning performance) gave a voice to a woman, and a population, that is more often silenced than heard. And with Versace, Murphy and his writers have pulled back the layers of a sensational crime to show us the lives and loves of the men who were overlooked: Cunanan’s first four victims, Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, and William Reese. The show uses the stories of Trail, a gay former Marine, and Madson to illuminate the very real, very relatable fear many young gay men and women still face. “I’m playing over everything the police are gonna find out about me,” muses Madson, before his forced road-trip with Cunanan comes to a violent end. “And I realize, I’ve been doing this my whole life — playing over and over the moment people find out about me.”

Moving away from the Horror franchise would allow Team Murphy to free up time and creative energy for their myriad of other — less nihilistic — projects, which range from anthologies (Emmy magnets Crime and Feud) to a prequel (Netflix’s Ratched, starring Sarah Paulson) to a groundbreaking dance musical (Pose) to what may just be the best gay fever dream ever conceived (the Barbra Streisand, Gwyneth Paltrow-starring The Politician). As Murphy himself has proven again and again, TV is a medium that can move, delight, and scare us immensely — and you really don’t need a killer clown to do it.

My plea to Ryan Murphy: Please ditch ‘Horror Story’ for ‘Crime Story’

Versace Recap: We Go Back To The Start Of Cunanan’s Murder Spree In “House By The Lake”

Emmy is out this week so you are stuck with me as your recapper. Luckily for you all, she’ll be back next week.

Last week we delved further into the state of mind our killer Andrew Cunanan was in in the lead up to his final murder, that of Gianni Versace in July 1997. We met his third and fourth victims, Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin and New Jersey cemetery caretaker William Reese and saw just a few of the mistakes the FBI and local law enforcement made that could have stopped Cunanan before he hit Miami and murdered Versace, and possibly even spared William Reese. This week we move back to the start of his killing spree, heading to Minnesota and the “House by the Lake”.

The First Murder: Following a tourist bureau ad for Minneapolis, we discover that it’s April 27, 1997 and a week before the murder of Lee Miglin. Andrew is visiting for the weekend with his friend David Madson (Cody Fern). Things are a bit tense between the pair as Andrew has asked David to marry him, telling him that he is the love of his life. David refused using the fact that same-sex marriage was not legal in the US to get out of truly answering him. However, it is implied that David has actually started up a relationship with Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) and that is the real reason for his refusal, well among other things.

Andrew has somehow cotton-on to the fact that there’s something between David and Jeff and has invited Jeff over. Jeff arrives and Andrew tells David to go and bring him up to the loft spitting out that it will “Give you a chance to talk about me”. Which they do, light-heartedly laughing about how strange Andrew is, but that they know he’s a liar. They enter the loft and see David’s dog whining, tied up to a table. David rushes over to the dog. Meanwhile Andrew has come up behind them, slams the door shut and then proceeds to bludgeon Jeff to death with a hammer, striking him 27 times in the head (and yes I screamed at the TV in shock and horror again, thank you very much Darren Criss).

Needless to say it’s a bit of a bloodbath in the loft, so Andrew takes David into the bathroom to clean them both up. After the shower, he gets out David’s collection of porno mags and sex toys, leaving them scattered over David’s bed. He also cleans up the murder scene a bit – rolling Jeff’s body up in a rug and hiding it behind a table.

Using his charm and a gun tucked into his waistband, Andrew manages to convince David not to call the cops, telling him “When the police open the door, they’ll see two suspects, not two victims,” that they’ll lock him up too, he’ll be hated for being gay, and that he can’t tell his Dad because then he’ll have to turn David in and you don’t want your Dad to have to do that. Cunanan does promise though that “No one else will get hurt as long as you’re by my side.”

The cops arrive: When David fails to show up at work the next day, they become concerned, as he never misses a day of work. A co-worker and David’s building manager knocks on his door but only hear his dog barking. Andrew and David, hearing the couple leave to go get keys to get into the loft, make a run for it. The couple come back and find the loft empty and the dead body. The cops arrive, find out David was gay, see the sex paraphernalia and make the assumption it was sex play gone wrong. It’s only on discovering that David was blonde and the murder victim was black-haired that they believe Andrew had been murdered and that David had fled. Realising they are now in the home of a suspect not a victim and without search warrants or permission to be there, the cops make a hasty retreat wanting to ensure the investigation is “by the book”, waiting for the proper paperwork and clearance to come back.

Men on the run: Having oh so calmly escaped, Andrew informs David of his plan for them to be together. He has a good friend in Chicago, Lee Miglin, who’s rich and owes Andrew some favours so would be willing to help out. They can then escape to Mexico and live the life he’s always dreamed of for them together. David meanwhile is in an obvious state of shock and fear for his life and merely acting on autopilot.

They’ve got the wrong man: The cops are back at David’s apartment and searching for clues. Jeff’s body has been taken away and they are beginning the autopsy on him when they discover that the body does not belong to Andrew Cunanan, but to Jeffrey Trail. They still believe that David is the killer and pay his parent’s a particularly hard visit, questioning them on how well do they truly know their son.

A chance for escape: Andrew continues on, apparently completely unaffected by the whole thing, planning this wonderful life with just him and David and no one else to bother them. David is starting to lose it though, fearing people are looking at him suspecting him of murder, when really its just their homophobia surfacing as the murder has not hit the news yet. They pull into bar (with a lovely cameo by Aimee Mann) and David excuses himself to the bathroom. Seeing an opportunity to escape, he smashes the bathroom window.

Back at the table Andrew is listening intently to the cover of “Drive” when he finally drops his façade and breaks down. It is such an intense moment of vulnerability from Andrew (and Criss) where you start to feel the beginning of sympathy for him. He really is just a little lost boy, wanting to be loved and thought of as someone special and extraordinary. In one of the many big mistakes David makes, instead of jumping out the window to freedom, he returns to Andrew and the table. The next morning marks another possibility of escape when David wakes alone in the car in the middle of wooded area. He jumps out and starts walking trying to make his escape, only to come across Andrew wielding his gun – if only he went in the opposite direction from the car.

The truth comes out: Later that day, Andrew and David are in a diner reminiscing about the night they met. David talks about how he so wanted to be just like Andrew: rich, suave, popular, charming, the whole world at his feet. However, he also reveals that he knows that that whole of his is all a lie. That Andrew is a master manipulator and that he just can’t stop lying. He accuses Andrew of killing Jeff because he was in love with Jeff but that not only did Jeff not return his feelings, but he had discovered just who Andrew was: a fraud.

The second murder: Following a tense car ride in which Andrew doesn’t want to talk about anything, David tries to veer them off the road and make an escape that way. He fails. He ends up off road, next to a lake pleading with Andrew for his life and a life for them together. He doesn’t succeed. Reminiscent of an earlier flashback scene where he remembers sitting in a house by the lake with his father drinking coffee after a failed hunting expedition, David dreams of opening the house door and finding his father offering him coffee once again. Instead, he’s outside the house bleeding out after Andrew shot him.

On the run again: Having spent some time cuddled up with David’s dead body, Andrew gets up, gets back in the car and heads off – presumably to Chicago and Lee Miglin.

Instant Reactions:

Where the hell is the Darren Criss I know and love??!!! He is unbelievable in embodying Cunanan. He’s charming, he’s creepy, he’s sinister, and yet he’s also oh so tragic and this episode more than any before it showed a real vulnerability and a sense that even he can see things are starting to spiral out of control. Week after week Criss blows me away with his performance and this week’s ep just had everything.

OMG David, why didn’t you escape?? There were so many opportunities – at least how it was portrayed here and given both David and Andrew are dead, we’ll never know exactly what took place over the period of time leading up to Jeff’s death to David’s death – and yet he kept going back to Andrew. Cody Fern was amazing and another great Ryan Murphy find. His ability to shut down and still be completely present in his scenes was so painful, yet great to watch.

I need more Finn Wittrock. We can’t just have that short opening scene! Luckily the preview for next week’s ep guarantees us more Jeff.

Wow another ep without the Versace’s and their storyline – I have to admit, I didn’t even realise they were missing until well after watching the ep, I was that caught up in the drama of Andrew’s story. They do return next week though.

Versace Recap: We Go Back To The Start Of Cunanan’s Murder Spree In “House By The Lake”

Recapping ‘Versace’: Episode 4, ‘House by the Lake’

We go further back in time with the fourth episode in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” “House by the Lake,” written by Tom Rob Smith and directed by Dan Minahan. Specifically, a week before Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) murdered Chicago real estate mogul Lee Milgin in last week’s fantastic episode.

The episode focuses on Andrew’s first two murders – his friend Jeff Trail, a former U.S. naval officer and propane salesman, and David Madson, Andrew’s friend and former lover. This is also the second episode in a row not to feature the show’s main crew Edgar Ramirez, who plays the titular Versace, Ricky Martin, as the designer’s partner Antonio D’Amico, and Penelope Cruz, as Versace’s sister Donatella.

“House by the Lake” opens with Andrew staying with David, a rising architect, (played by Australian actor Cody Fern) at his Minneapolis loft. In the tense opening scene, Andrew invites their mutual friend Jeff (Ryan Murphy regular, Finn Wittrock) over unbeknownst to David. “It’ll give you two a chance to talk about me,” Andrew says.

When David goes to the apartment lobby to let Jeff in, he tells Jeff Andrew proposed to him, saying he was “His last chance at happiness.”

“How did you get out of it?” Jeff asks.

“I told him it was illegal for us to get married,” David replies, adding Andrew believes he’s in love with Jeff.

“He knows about us,” David tells Jeff. “He has this feline intuition.”

As the men enter David’s loft, Andrew is waiting by the door and strikes Jeff, his first victim in what would become a murdering spree, in the head several times with a hammer in front of David.

After the murder, Andrew uses it as leverage to convince David they should be together. Understandably David is freaking out, and though Andrew isn’t locking him in the apartment, a sort of Stockholm syndrome takes over David and he rationalizes the murder.

Andrew cleans up the body and the two men talk about running away together – exactly what Andrew wants. As they’re packing up, David’s coworker Linda stops by his home to check in on him since he didn’t show up to work. As the apartment manager gets the keys to his home, David and Andrew escape and his coworker and the manager discover Jeff’s body, rolled up in a rug – except they believe it’s David’s body.

Once Minneapolis police are involved, the episode highlights the authorities’ views on the LGBTQ community in the 90s.

“Does he have a girlfriend, a wife?” a detective asks Linda.

“No, he’s gay,” she says. He response sparks the two detectives to give each other a disconcerting look.

As the detective search David’s home, they come across some porn left on the bed.

“It’s a gay thing,” one of them says and then starts to put together a scenario that couldn’t be further away from the events that took place.

“A guy shows up. They did what they do…all this "extreme” stuff. It goes wrong. David ends up in a rug; the other guy runs – doesn’t steal a thing,“ he says.

Linda later tells one of the detectives about Andrew staying with David, saying something seemed off about him as he described himself as a "Jewish millionaire New Yorker” and that he was building sets for the “Titanic” in Mexico. She also tells the authorities David has blond hair – different from the body in the rug. Now they believe the body is Andrew and since they believe David is still alive, they realized they’ve entered his home without a search warrant and illegally.

The authorities pack up and tell Linda David is the killer.

The episode later cuts to David and Andrew on the run – Andrew couldn’t be happier as David is sick to his stomach.

“I’m so glad you decided to come with me,” Andrew tells David, who can’t stop thinking about his situation. He’s also concerned about the world finding out he’s gay, especially those in his small hometown in the midwest.

“Did you hear? That boy is a suspect – there was always something about him – that boy!” David says, later adding that he’s worried about his parents and how the small community will treat them. “No one will buy from my dad’s shop.”

“Am I afraid of the disgrace? The shame of it all? Is that what I’m running from?” David asks himself.

David also tells Andrew he thought Andrew was going to kill him.

“I told you, I could never hurt you,” Andrew says. “Know that.”

Back with the cops, they finally learn the victim is Jeff Trail. They visit David’s parents and tell them David is the killer.

“We’re telling you, he didn’t do this,” David’s father tells the authorities. The detectives tell them “there’s a lot you don’t know about your son.”

Andrew and David stop by a hole in the wall bar, where a woman is playing an acoustic cover of The Cars’ “Drive,” causing Andrew to burst into tears. Meantime, David attempts to escape by breaking a window in the bathroom but ultimately decides against it, returning to Andrew’s side, where Andrew embraces him. The scene shows Andrew’s loneliness – his misguided perception of love and relationship – he’s willing to kill to get what he wants; it’s a twisted view that “The Assassination of Versace” later digs into.

After that scene, the episode shows David’s flashback where he comes out to his father. He tells his dad he’s graduated college at the top of his class and then blurts out that he’s gay.

“You mind if I take a moment? I don’t want to say the wrong thing,” his father replies. “I won’t lie, saying it won’t make a difference. You know what I believe.”

His father remains honest, saying he doesn’t have a problem with his son’s sexuality but adds, “What I can say is that I love you more than I love my own life.”

Later, at breakfast, Andrew and David reminisce the first time they met – Andrew wined and dined David, pretending to be an affluent socialite.

“It was all a lie,” David tells Andrew, his demeanor souring. “You’ve never worked for anything. It was an act.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Andrew asks.

“Is that why you killed Jeff. You loved him. It was so obvious but he figured you out in the end…he finally saw the real you,” David says.

Andrew completely ignores David, tell him he’s going to have a fabulous life when they go to Mexico.

“You can’t do it can you?” David asks.

“Do what?” Andrew asks back.

“Stop,” David replies.

Back on the run, David questions Andrew about the murder – how Andrew planned Jeff’s murder and wanted David to see the killing.

“I don’t want to talk about it, David!” Andrew yells.

“I’m nothing like you,” David says, before taking the wheel from Andrew.

A delusional Andrew then pulls his gun out and, yelling at David they “had a future” together over and over. He pulls the car over by a lake house, drags David out and points the gun at him, execution style.

“We still have a plan!” David pleads. Andrew demands he convinces him.

“We’ll visit Lee Miglin in Chicago and he’ll give us some money, then we’ll drive across the country; it’ll be an adventure!… We’ll find a place to live!” David says while he’s kneeling on the ground, gun pointed to his head.

“You don’t believe that,” Andrew says.

As David is nervously planning their life together, but Andrew isn’t buying it.

“Why couldn’t you run away with me? If it was Jeff you would have run away with him. You would have gone to prison,” Andrew says.

“It’s not real,” David says.

“It could have been,” Andrew says.

“No, it couldn’t,” David says as Andrew turns his back away from him.

David attempts to run away, hiding in an abandoned lake house. There, he sees a vision of his father who hands him a cup of coffee and the two sit in a warm silence. The episode flashes back to show that David never really made it inside the lake house, and Andrew shot and killed him as he ran away.

The final eerie moments of the episode show Andrew cuddling with David’s body, who has a large bullet wound in his head. Andrew then gets up, calmly walks back to the car and drives away.

Recapping ‘Versace’: Episode 4, ‘House by the Lake’

‘American Crime Story’ Review: ‘House By the Lake’ Tells a Tragic Tale

The Victims

Welcome to April 27 1997, one week before the murder of Lee Miglin, the victim of last week’s episode. With episode four of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “House By The Lake”, we witness the beginning of Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree. This is where it all started – this is the moment that would eventually bring Cunanan right up to Gianni Versace’s doorstep.

Like last week’s episode, though, Versace is nowhere to be see in “House By The Lake.” Versace’s death was merely the rocket fuel to launch this season of American Crime Story into orbit. Ever since this season began its grim backwards march, it’s been moving further and further away from the overlit world of Miami Beach to show us the deceptive, manipulative reality of Andrew Cunanan.

“House By The Lake” begins in Minneapolis, with Andrew staying at the spacious loft apartment of friend and former lover David Madson. Clearly, something awkward has occurred between these two men right before this episode begins. The air in the room is thick with tension. “We both said some things we regret,” David says, trying to make peace. “I don’t regret anything I said,” Andrew replies, each word deliberate and meticulous as he utters it.

This passive aggressive mood seems almost unbearable, but things get a lot worse, fast. Andrew and David’s friend Jeff Trail soon arrives. He’s come to retrieve a gun Andrew stole from his apartment (big red flag alert). David has to let Jeff into the building, and as the two make their way back to the apartment – where Andrew waits in the shadows – they converse about Andrew the way someone talks about a volatile child. It’s clear they both think they need to handle Andrew with kid gloves. David seems sympathetic; Jeff, not so much.

“He has no one,” David says.

“He should ask himself why,” Jeff shoots back.

Before the opening title card has even appeared, Jeff is dead – brutally bludgeoned to death by Andrew with a hammer. From here, the episode settles into a steady, unrelenting feeling of nameless, inescapable dread. Andrew is able to manipulate David into going on the run with him. But it can’t last. Andrew wants to live in a fantasy where David will love him for who he is – but that’s the problem. Andrew isn’t anyone. He’s a blank slate; a shapeshifter who can be whatever the situation needs him to be. You get the sense throughout “House By The Lake” that Andrew is really trying to make his new arrangement with David work. But it’s impossible. David is Andrew’s emotional (and in some cases, physical) prisoner, and when the realization seeps in that David will never accept him, Andrew kills David too. And then it’s off to Chicago, and towards last week’s murder of Lee Miglin.

No One Else

Unlike previous episodes, “House By The Lake” isn’t ultimately about Andrew. It’s about David, and the tragedy of his all-too-brief life. In various flashbacks, we see David as a younger man with his gruff, outdoorsman father. While out hunting one day as a small boy, David runs from the sight of a dead animal. He’s later ashamed at his perceived weakness, but his father is sympathetic. “I never want you to be sad,” his father tells him.

Later, we see David coming out to his father in an uncomfortable, not entirely hopeful, but ultimately realistic scene. “Mind if I take a moment?” David’s father asks after David confesses he’s gay. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

The father follows this up with, “Maybe you wanted to be told I don’t have a problem with it; I can’t say that, but what I can say is I love you more than I love my own life.” It’s a heartbreaking moment, made all the more heartbreaking later when, as David lays dying, he has a vision of sharing a cup of coffee with his father.

David’s sexuality, and his ultimate fear of disgrace – a fear that was brought up last week as well, but about Lee Miglin – is what colors all of David’s ultimately terrible decisions following Jeff’s murder. A rational, reasonable thing to have done following Andrew’s brutal crime would have been to call the police and report Andrew immediately. But Andrew, so adept at manipulation and exploitation, is able to talk David out of this. And when enough time passes, it’s too late. As Andrew puts it, if David tries to call the cops, the cops will simply believe he was in on the murder with Andrew. “They hate us, David. They’ve always hated us,” Andrew says. “You’re a fag.”

These fears turn out to be ultimately reasonable. Later, when two detectives arrive at the apartment after Jeff’s body is discovered, their first assumption is that the murder is some sort of “gay thing.” They arrive rather quickly at the assumption that David was in some way involved with the murder, and they go so far as to bring that assumption to David’s frightened parents.

The most telling moment of the episode comes when, while on the run, David and Andrew stop at a bar. Andrew is still riding high, seemingly unperturbed that he’s committed a murder and is now a fugitive. In this moment, David excuses himself to the bathroom, where he shatters a window and sees a clear path to escape. The camera lingers on this moment, as we wait for David to do the obvious thing: get the hell out of there.

Andrew, meanwhile, sits in the bar, listening to the soothing sounds of special guest star Aimee Mann crooning a sad, slowed-down cover of The Cars’ “Drive.” Here, in this brief moment, Andrew’s barriers fall away and he begins to weep. Is he weeping because of the music (it’s pretty damn sad), or is he weeping because he knows he’s dug himself into a hole he can never climb out of? Up until he murdered Jeff Trail, Andrew’s crimes were petty – long cons and little (and sometimes big) lies. There’s no going back from murder, however. And in this moment, perhaps Andrew realizes that nothing matters anymore. That if he wants something going forward, he might as well kill to get it.

This moment of reflection is broken when David unexpectedly returns to the table, having decided not to escape. Why? The answer comes later, as the two are on the road again. David confesses he’s thinking about what the police are going to find out about him, and says he realizes he’s been doing this his entire life – thinking about people “finding out” about his sexuality. He wonders how his parents are going to live in their small town “with all that talk.”

“Was I really afraid…that you were going to kill me, or was I afraid of the disgrace?” he asks Andrew. David is stuck. He’s fear of people judging his sexuality has tethered him to Andrew, and it will, tragically, lead to his doom. As Andrew puts it: “The truth is, we have no one else.”

It Was All A Lie

By now, the viewer has likely caught on to the bait and switch American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace has pulled. This isn’t a bad thing; in fact, it’s rather ingenious in its construction. The first two episodes lull the viewer into assuming they know exactly what type of season this will be. Episode three, however, hints that things are going to turn out much differently. And now, by episode four, Versace seems to be pulling back the curtain completely. If this were a card game, this episode would be the moment the player who has been brilliantly bluffing you shows you their hand.

Perhaps this is why, ultimately, the season is moving backwards rather than forwards. Andrew Cunanan’s murder of Versace made headlines, but it wasn’t an isolated incident. By moving back in time, we’re getting the whole story, bit by bit. We’re learning the true, terrible nature of Andrew Cunanan.

Director Dan Minahan approaches this episode on two different fronts: one is that ever-mounting tension mentioned earlier. The first half of the episode, set in the nightmare that is David’s apartment, is full of pulse-quickening moments of dread, all of it underscored by an unsettling, ever-present droning sound on the soundtrack. The other front of this episode is the tragic side; the sad life and death of David Madson, who ultimately dies by a river in the middle of nowhere. These heartbreaking elements are the more effective, made all the more so by the performances, particularly Cody Fern as David.

By the episode’s end, David has realized Andrew’s true nature. He recounts the romantic evening he and Andrew once spent years ago, sounding wistful before ultimately ending with a harsh, blunt: “It was all a lie.” “Is that why you killed Jeff?” he asks Andrew. “You loved him…but he figured you out in the end, didn’t he? He finally saw the real you, and you killed him for it.” Fern’s delivery of these lines, with just the right mixture of anger and misery, is pitch-perfect.

As always, Darren Criss’ performance as Andrew remains a highlight, but Andrew has grown more and more despicable and detestable as the season has continued, which ultimately makes spending time with him distasteful. It’s a very tough balancing act, and Criss pulls it off for the most part. But there’s only so much we can take. A shot near the end of Andrew cuddling David’s dead body is particularly blood curdling.

Stray Observations:

– As I’m pretty sure I’ve said multiple times in this review, this is a sad, heartbreaking episode. But there’s some (darkly) funny stuff, too. The way Criss delivers Andrew’s line, “I’m so glad you decided to come with me!” after he’s virtually kidnapped David is bleakly hilarious.

– One subtle but unmissable running motif in the episode: Whenever David and Andrew walk somewhere, Andrew puts his arm over David’s shoulder possessively, like property.

– Finn Wittrock makes a very brief appearance in this episode as Jeff Trail. Next week’s episode, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” will give him center stage. It’s also the best episode of the entire season.

– This week’s pop songs: the aforementioned “Drive” by The Cars (as covered by Aimee Mann), and “Pump up the Jam” by Technotronic.

– Yes, that really was Aimee Mann in the bar. “We talked about who we could get to play this,” producer Brad Simpsontold Vanity Fair. “Somebody who was first known in the 1980s, who had a strong voice and you could buy as somebody who would live in this landscape. When we went to Ryan [Murphy] for suggestions of who could it be, he instantly said, without a beat: ‘Aimee Mann. Send her the pages, tell her we’re gonna figure out the song, but it has to be her.’”

‘American Crime Story’ Review: ‘House By the Lake’ Tells a Tragic Tale

Dailybreak.com

One challenge I’ve found while watching this show is separating fact from fiction. Much of the series is based on the heavily researched book “Vulgar Favors” by Maureen Orth, but as that book supplies facts, many of the private conversations shown on television must have been invented for the plot. As many of the key players are dead, we may never know the truth about what really happened between Andrew Cunanan and his victims.

In episode four, we see Cunanan murder his first victim (that we know of), Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock), and second victim, David Madson (Cody Fern). It was unclear during this episode how the three are related – friends, lovers, exes? For now, we mostly focus on Cunanan and Madson on the run after the murder of Trail. The episode paints Madson as an innocent bystander and possible kidnapping victim, but what if none of that were true?

After Trail’s murder, Madson seems afraid for his life and possibly shell shocked. But as time goes on, he stays silent, helping Cunanan make his getaway. Madson appears to have many opportunities to escape from Cunanan – when the two walk the dog, during several stops for food, a night out in a bar (shout out to the totally random guest star of the week, Aimee Mann, as a bar singer). So why didn’t Madson run? They were on the road together for five days, surely during that time he could have bolted, asked for help or simply overpowered Cunanan. What if he wasn’t so much a hostage…but more of an accomplice?

Personally, I don’t know which way I think it went (in reality, Madson was initially blamed more for the murder, since it was his apartment), but the show definitely takes a stance that Madson was innocent, seemingly based on his stable, middle-class upbringing. He is painted as a sympathetic victim in comparison to Cunanan’s cold monster. Could Cunanan, master of lies and manipulation, have talked Madson into being more than a bystander? Did he brainwash Madson into helping him kill Trail?

All of this remains a huge question mark, and we STILL don’t have a clear motive for any of these murders (aside from the fourth, William Reese, who was carjacked by Cunanan). Maybe Trail’s and Madson’s backstories with Cunanan will help with that a little, but I’m starting to feel like no one really knows why Andrew Cunanan murdered these people. Here’s to hoping (for my sake and for that of the victims) that isn’t the case.

Do you think David Madson was more of an accomplice than the show let on?

Dailybreak.com