I caught the flu the day this episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace aired. In the (almost) a week it’s taken me to write this review, I’ve (almost) gotten over the illness. I have not gotten over the episode.
Journey back in time to the third and fourth slayings in Andrew Cunanan’s five-person killing spree, “A Random Killing” bears a half-truth as a title. Victim number four was random indeed, needlessly slain for his truck after a careless leak tipped Andrew off that his stolen car was being tracked. The need felt by victim number five’s surviving loved ones to paint his murder, too, as random — and Andrew’s need to make this impossible for them to do — is the crux of the story. The resulting hour is as menacing, as moving, as good as live-action drama about murder can get.
Any discussion of this extraordinary episode of television must begin with the casting of its two new principals, millionaire Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin and his beauty-queen turned home-shopping entrepreneur wife Marilyn. Hiring Mike Farrell, M*A*S*H‘s B.J. Hunnicutt, and Judith Light, Who’s the Boss‘s “Angeluhhh,” isn’t quite the stunt showrunner Ryan Murphy pulled off when, say, he made John Travolta and David Schwimmer part of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s defense team and made a masterpiece out of the result. For one thing, the career peaks that trio were hitting around the time of the actual O.J. Simpson case added to The People v. O.J.‘s ’90s-retro frisson. For another, Farrell lacks the “hey, it’s that guy!” cachet held by the others for today’s viewers, while on the other hand, shows from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Transparent have given Light ample opportunity to show off her dramatic chops.
What matters, then, isn’t merely the fact that famous faces animate both Andrew Cunanan’s closeted client and target and that target’s determined yet devastated widow. What matters is what those faces do, and the remarkable degree to which writer Tom Rob Smith and directer Gwyneth Horder-Payton allow them to do it.
As Lee, Farrell is revelatory, his kindly face registering a heartbreakingly familiar range of emotions. Pride in his wife’s accomplishments and gratitude for her pride in his. Coldness at the prospect of actual physical intimacy with her but comfort and relief for her continued friendship. The agonizing, eroticized decision to lie to her and allow her to make a business trip without him so he can arrange a liaison with his young escort lover. (His strange, hard-to-watch mini-breakdown when she asks him to join her and he realizes he’s going to refuse is just unbelievably strong work.) The unshakeable religious guilt he feels as an older Catholic man keeping his orientation in the closet, a pain akin to a chronic illness. (“I try,” he whimpers to Jesus and Joseph in his private basement chapel. “I…try…”)
Puppydog enthusiasm for Andrew’s presence and affection, so strong that not even Cunanan’s sour sarcasm and cruelty about the transactional nature of their relationship can truly dampen it. (“I feel alive! You make it seem so real!”) Genuine, almost childlike love of architecture, particularly his world’s-largest-building dream project and his vision of anonymously hanging around on the observation deck, enjoying others’ enjoyment of the results.
It’s this last bit more than anything else that triggers Andrew’s homicidal rage, not that it would take much at this point at any rate; Andrew actually holds his gun on Lee behind the man’s back, just to feel the power he imagines Lee feeling. “I want it to inspire people to reach up,” Lee says of his “Sky Needle.” “It’s about that, not about me.” To Andrew, the very idea that any achievement is not about the immediate glory of the person responsible for it, much less the tallest building in the word, is a heresy of the highest order, and must be punished as such.
So Andrew drags his aroused, oblivious partner into the garage, tools arrayed ominously in the background, and debuts the face-tape routine we remember from the previous episode’s “Easy Lover” sequence. “You like being pathetic, don’t you?” he sneers, before showing Lee how truly helpless he is by suddenly smashing his face in. By now that marvelously expressive face is totally obscured by the tape, so we are only left to imagine the horror, panic, and pain in his eyes by cross-referencing it with his muffled whimpers — worse, perhaps, than seeing it straight up. As Lee lies there, Andrew announces that he’s killed two people already, he’ll stage his soon-to-be corpse with women’s underwear and gay porn, outing him through the act of murder. “You know, disgrace isn’t that bad, once you settle into it,” he says, before lugging over a bag of concrete mix, staving in the man’s chest, and then stabbing him repeatedly. To add insult to this fatal injury, Andrew uses Lee’s beloved blueprints as a placemat for a meal of meat before burning them up. No dreams get out of here alive.
Farrell’s role is interactional, emerging from conversations with his wife, his killer, and his God. It’s a dialogue. Light’s Marilyn is a monologue. She’s constantly speaking to other people, to be sure — to more of them than Lee, in fact. She’s got an television audience for her home-shopping show, a live crowd for her speech introducing her husband at a fundraiser where she touts him as the embodiment of the American Dream, a host of neighbors and cops with whom she must interact as they first discover and then investigate the crime. She even has a son, on hand as glum-faced comic relief when she touts his ostensibly burgeoning acting career. (“He plays a pilot!” “A Russian pilot. There’s lots of pilots in the movie.”)
But except in the few intimate moments she shares with Lee — and even then she’s arguably more focused on her behind-the-scenes suspicions than the here and now — Marilyn’s main task is the Sisyphean labor of maintaining outward appearances. She’s not shy about this, either. “How can a woman who cares so much about appearances appear not to care?” she rhetorically asks at one point, when she realizes her lack of visible signs of grief must be apparent to others.
What makes this character, and Light’s performance, so crushing is the opposite of what you’d expect, though. It’s not that she’s a perfectly put-together Woman With It All who’s trying to cover up her husband’s homosexuality by any means necessary — the kind of part Light, with her severe facial structure and stentorian voice, could play in her sleep. It’s that she’s trying to reveal the real bond she had with this man, despite what she knows to be true and cannot say — a bond that Cunanan’s actions have made it harder and harder for her to get other people to believe in. She finally breaks down not when confronted with evidence of Lee and Andrew’s preexisting relationship, contra to her preferred narrative of a break-in and burglary, but when she starts telling a cop about the “adventures” they had together back in the day, all hot-air balloon rides and romantic desert rescues. “I loved him,” she sobs, starting to smear her makeup. “I loved him very much! There. Is that betterrrr?” Her bitterness stretches out that terminal -r like she’s ripping flesh from a carcass. “Am I a real wife now?” Her pain isn’t over the lie, it’s over what was true. During the harrowing opening sequence, when Marilyn returns home from her trip and realizes something is amiss when Lee fails to pick her up from the airport, that truth is what haunts her face the whole time.
I’m glad, in that beautiful terrible way tragedy can make you glad, that she gets the last word of the episode, even as Andrew continues shopping and driving and killing on the way to his appointment in Miami. (Cunanan misses the chance to carjack and older woman and winds up hunting down and shooting truck-driving family man William R. Reese instead, pulling the trigger almost as soon as the frightened father tries to turn his assailant’s heart by saying he’s a married man with a son. He had no way of knowing how little Andrew wanted to hear that particular song. With a taste for killing in his mouth, he’ll destroy stability on sight.)
Marilyn returns to her gig hawking her signature line of fragrances on the home shopping channel almost immediately — a gutsy move with which the show challenges us to continue to feel empathy for her as she slips into the uncanny valley between sincerity and showmanship, just as the mere presence of any older woman with a glamorous background triggers our societally induced suspicion and revulsion at female failure to remain young. “He believed in me,” she tells her audience, completely honestly. “How many husbands believe in their wive’s dreams? How many treat us as partners? As equals? We were a team for thirty-eight years.” That’s what they were, even if it’s all they were. That’s an achievement. That’s what Andrew destroyed.
Marilyn ends the episode by recounting the advice she got when she first began selling stuff on TV, a technique for connecting with the camera and the people on the other side. “Just hink of the little red light as the man you love.” She stares at the light, at the camera, at us, and as the impenetrable black mascara of her wet eyes closes and the scene cuts to black, her thoughts are ours to imagine.
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