Versace…! Head is officially starting to hurt trying to keep this timeline straight.
Versace is back from its week hiatus, the new episode of American Crime Story: Versace goes back even FURTHER in the timeline of Andrew Cunanan. Granted, not all the way back to his first interactions with Versace, but a year before he started his killing spree.
In 1996, Andrew is doing alright for himself, as he’s living the glamorous life. That is, he’s crashing at a mansion with a luxurious swimming pool (in which Andrew swims in naked during the opening scene), which is technically owned by an older man named Norman (Michael Nouri).
Andrew and Norman aren’t dating, per-say, despite having had sexual relations in the past. Rather, and this is where the tale turns sad, Norman pities Andrew. He sees that he’s become accustomed to his lifestyle, and doesn’t want to throw him out on the street.
But all good things must come to an end. This relationship does end up crashing and burning eventually, shortly after Andrew’s birthday party.
Most noticeably amongst the guest that Andrew invites is David, whom he killed two episodes ago, and Jeffrey, who met his fate in the previous episode.
Andrew loves David (lol some things never change). Like, head-over-heels in love, despite the fact that David clearly doesn’t feel the same way. Jeffrey, at this point, is no more than just a close friend to Andrew— a close friend that he plans to use to get closer to David.
After trying forcing Jeffrey to put on his old navy uniform for a conversation starter (clearly Andrew was manipulating people long before he started killing them), David arrives and is almost immediately impressed.
Impressed with Jeffrey, that is. The two hit it off right away, leaving Andrew running to the bathroom to do lines of coke and wonder what’s happening and where he went wrong.
The party doesn’t improve when he’s interrupted by Lee, the guy who Andrew killed THREE episodes ago (are you starting to see where the headache comes from?). Andrew, evidently, is embarrassed of Lee and doesn’t want David knowing about his relationship with him.
After gathering together everyone who he eventually ends up killing for a group photo, Andrew has his confrontation with Norman. Norman catches Andrew in a web of lies and then gives him a pretty solid ultimatum: either tell the truth or get out.
Andrew being Andrew choses to leave. The problem is he really doesn’t have anywhere to go — his apartment is literally falling apart.
That’s not going to stop him, though. Oh no. As we heard referenced in previous episodes, Andrew then saids the letter to Jeffrey’s dad — hoping to out him as gay before he’s ready and sabotage the relationship between Jeffrey and David.
The plan has the exact opposite effect. Jeffrey confronts Andrew, telling him he’s moving to Minneapolis — where David lives.
Panicking, Andrew comes up with another brilliant plan (since he’s so full of those): he’s going to invite him to a fully funded trip to Los Angeles and try to win him back. Sorry, did I say invite? David really didn’t have much say in the matter, as Andrew refused to take no for an answer.
Of course, Andrew doesn’t have the money to pay for any of this, but that’s not really his concern at the moment. He just wants David to see how much he means to him.
And, to his credit, David realizes that feeling pretty quickly. Problem is, it’s not a mutual feeling. He eventually tells Andrew that they can’t be together and he’s not the one. Even when David gives him the slightest chance, Andrew reverts back to his lies and the whole thing falls apart.
A couple of days letter, Andrew is hitting a new low. After stumbling into a bar and making up a lie about his new fiancé to the bartender, he comes across a shady guy sitting in the corner who offers him meth. He takes it and winds up having a trippy dream that involves Versace, love and a measuring tape.
Now, with a new drug addiction to support and an exponentially growing credit-card bill, Andrew is officially out of money.
He returns to Norman’s house, pleading to be let back in, but Norman opts to call the police instead (can you blame him?), He gets bailed out by his mother, who takes him back to her apartment — a housing situation that somehow looks even worse than Andrew’s.
His mother, though, seems to think Andrew is destined to great things. Even when Andrew straight-up tells her that he’s unhappy, his mother won’t let him stay in that frame of mind — he’s a born star.
A born star who ends the episode declaring he’s on his way to Minneapolis. And the rest is history.
There’s only three more episodes of Versace left, what do you think is going to happen next? Check out the newepisode on Wednesday nights at FX and read our other Versace recaps by clicking here.
Hot off the heels of this year’s Oscars, Allison and Clint are joined by The AV Club‘s Caroline Siede and Consequence of Sound Film Editor Dominick Suzanne-Mayer to talk about the highs, lows, and hard-won jet skis of the 90th Annual Academy Awards. | 6 March 2018
5. The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Network: FX Last Week’s Ranking: 3
There are a few moments in The Assassination of Gianni Versace where the temptation to feel pity for whatever happened to create the freakish empty husk that is Andrew Cunanan is relatively strong. Several such moments occur in the latest episode, “Descent.” Then you’re inevitably visited by a character he’s killed in a previous episode, and all you can do is feel sorry for the whole damned world. Because “Descent” is, in the end, about love. Sometimes when people can’t locate any within themselves they have a hard time finding it in others. Occasionally, someone is driven actually insane by this, and might even do something unspeakable. We already know what’s going to happen to Andrew Cunanan. I wonder if he does. —Amy Glynn (Photo: Suzanne Tenner/FX)
A single week off-schedule for American Crime Story, and I find myself identifying with the killer, Andrew Cunanan, as soon as it returns. This might be what is commonly called “Stockholm Syndrome.” It might also be good television—who can know for sure? What I do know for sure is that in this week’s episode, the sixth, there are no killings: we’re in 1996, a year before the first of Andrew’s murders, and it is his birthday. Present at the party are three future victims: Jeff Trail, David Madson, and Lee Miglin. Cunanan is living in an airy and palatial San Diego mansion as the guest and sugar baby of an older man named Norman Blachford, posing as his art consultant, his interior designer, and a man he definitely isn’t fucking.
“What a volatile mix you are,” one of Blachford’s friends sneers at the psychopathic toy-boy, catching him admiring his reflection after snorting some restorative cocaine. “Too lazy to work, and too proud to be kept.” As it turns out, both Cunanan and Blachford have been circling each other, so that what appears to be a mutual agreement is in fact a kind of double bluff—a meet-cute orchestrated by the younger man has ended, one year later, in his older lover hiring an investigator to expose the truth about Cunanan’s low-rent past. He is not, in fact, Andrew DeSilva PhD, but a college dropout. He once worked at a Thrifty drugstore, and his mother’s name is MaryAnn. The kind of total reinvention he’s attempted is not for the lazy, nor the proud: it’s hard and dirty, sometimes shameful work.
“A 1997 Washington Post profile noted that Cunanan was ‘a multilingual sophisticate who knew exactly which older men he wanted to meet,’” according to a piece at Newsweek probing the veracity of this week’s episode. Likewise: “Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a columnist for the San Diego Gay and Lesbian Times, said that if an older man was interested in orchids, ‘Cunanan would go out and buy every book available on orchids and soon he would be talking about the subject as if he had studied it all of his life.’”
Not being interested in orchids, or in older men who happen to be interested in orchids, I instead spent the show’s long week off-air with Zadie Smith’s most recent book, Feel Free. One of the essays therein happens to be “On Attunement,” which contains as elegant a summary of the specific hell of being undereducated in an overeducated room as I have ever read. (Like ending up in any restaurant where the meal requires several sets of cutlery, or being asked about my schooling and my parents’ jobs, this is my idea of a nightmare.) “I have known many true connoisseurs,” Smith writes. “They never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, [or who] have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters…I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential.”
Whatever Cunanan’s anxieties, he’s unafraid of homework. He is capable of posing as a man who knows about interiors, or orchids, or fine art; he can decode a wine list. How perversely freeing it must be to be a sociopath, and not to answer with the truth about your Podunk school, your parents’ jobs, your status as a former or a current rube: how weirdly punk to simply live the lie, and lucky to believe it.
After the Blachford live-in lover job implodes, our killer-autodidact heads to L.A., meeting David Madson for the kind of hotel dinner that requires—in my personal opinion—far too many forks. Asked about his family, Cunanan recounts the fiction that his father was a powerful stockbroker who travelled back to the Philippines to run a string of pineapple plantations, and his mother was a New York literary maven who brought lobster dinners to him at the school gates.
He looks as though he has convinced himself, despite not having managed to fool David. He is glassy-eyed with joy, half there and half lost in a manic fugue. When Madson leaves and Cunanan returns to squalor, takes up crystal meth, and ends up both hallucinating an encounter with Versace and returning to his family’s dumpy condo for an eerie, Norma/Norman Batesian exchange with mother MaryAnn, the lie seems necessary. Connoisseurs, most often, do not grow up poor with overbearing mothers. Real sophisticates are rarely bathed, as adult men, by loony parents. Saying that there was no killing in this episode was hardly accurate —it’s this sixth hour’s grim nadir that forces Cunanan to kill off, systematically, the last remaining sane, humane parts of himself.
The week we see Andrew Cunanan at two extremes, luxuriating in wealth and opportunities, and by episode’s end, alone, desperate for money, and deeply unhappy. Major credit goes to Darren Criss’ ability to portray Cunanan’s appropriately titled descent in a captivating performance as Cunanan is faced with rejection from his love interest, his best friend, and finally his benefactor. Darren rightfully continues to receive massive amounts of praise this season, and wins this week’s MVP award with 87.2% of your vote.
The most recent episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins to reveal bits and pieces of Andrew Cunanan’s twisted and broken state of mind as he starts to break down. The episode opens to Cunanan in a luxurious waterside mansion in sunny San Diego swimming naked in the pool. The timeline for this falls a year before he commits his first murder.
It is shocking to understand just how much Cunanan was able to accomplish in a short amount of time. In this flashback, he is pretending to be an art curator who lives with his wealthy, old client (sound familiar?).
The client/fling, Norman, is throwing Andrew a birthday party with all of his closest friends, including Lizzie, Jeffrey Trail, and the love of his love, David Madson. So for someone who seemed to have it all, what exactly pushed him to go on a murder spree? This is what this episode helps us understand.
Cunanan’s goal in life has always been to be something he’s not, and in a similar fashion, he attempts to craft Jeffrey in a more “presentable manner” for the party. He goes as far as personally wrapping a present and asking Jeff to regift to him at the party. This is the moment where his subtle urges to manipulate start to shine through–and perhaps the beginning of one insane journey.
Cunanan’s love interest, David Madson, flies in from Minneapolis to attend the party but appears to form a connection with Jeffrey. This puts Cunanan in a state of panic as he heads to the bathroom to snort a line of coke. This is strike one on the path to Cunanan losing it.
And if that isn’t enough to send Cunanan off the rails, one of Norman’s friends approaches him to exchange a few harsh words. He tells Andrew that he is protecting Norman and knows exactly what he is up to which sets something off inside of Cunanan. And while the party already had two of Andrew’s victims in attendance, the entrance of Lee Miglin added a third. Talk about awkward, right?
This illustrates yet another connection Cunanan had to one of his victims and helps the audience begin to piece together the road that led him down a murder spree.
Following the aftermath of his birthday party, Andrew sits down with Norman to go over a list of demands he has if they are to stay together as a couple. This moment seems quite odd seeing as how Cunanan needs Norman more than the other way around. Nonetheless, he begins to list off the need for a higher allowance, Norman’s entire inheritance, and a car.
Unfortunately for Andrew, Norman begins to attack him by revealing he knows exactly who Cunanan is. The truth hits Andrew like venom, as he begins to lash out. Despite Andrew being a basket case, Norman attempts to offer to help out in other ways but Andrew just won’t have it. He storms off after Norman refuses to follow the demands on his list.
Following his fight with Norman, Cunanan heads to the only place he can think of–his real home which is a small tiny apartment inclusive of one mattress and his dear mother. It is here where he begins to take revenge on Jeffrey, who he feels is trying to David away from him. Some episodes ago, we learned Andrew sent a postcard to Jeff’s house outing him as a gay man. In this episode, we see him committing the act of writing it.
Upon finding out, Jeffrey confronts Andrew and tells him he is moving to Minneapolis. The same place David Madson currently lives. Andrew perceives this as a threat and begins to court David into an all-expenses-paid trip to L.A. Even though David shows up for the trip, he ultimately ends up rejecting Andrew and his advances. He tells him he is not the one for Andrew and while Andrew requests he simply gets to know him. When Andrew begins to spin a web of intricate lies, David walks away once and for all.
It has been quite some time since we’ve seen Versace in an episode, but lo and behold he made an appearance in this one. However, it was in one of Andrew’s dreams where Versace is his tailor and tells him they are not the same because he is loved, unlike Andrew. And this is where things get crazy. In a meth-induced state, Andrew goes back to Norman’s house violently shouting to be let into the house as Norman calls the police. Andrew goes back, broken and defeated, to his mother’s house where he tells her his next destination is…Minneapolis.
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