Tag: february 2018

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 4 Recap: Andrew Cunanan Claims His First Two Victims

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has again put forth an episode that doesn’t feature the titular fashion designer at all, instead focusing on recreating Andrew Cunanan’s string of murders that culminated in Versace’s death. Episode four moves backward in time another week, to the end of April 1997, when Cunanan started his killing spree in Minneapolis.

The two victims are Jeff Trail and David Madson, whose relationships with Cunanan and each other in real life are a bit unclear. No one knows for sure that Trail and Madson were secretly involved with each other and no one knows for sure if Trail and Cunanan were ever more than friends. What is known is that Cunanan was romantically involved with Madson, but according to the police, Madson ended the relationship months before the murders.

On the show, Trail is invited to Madson’s apartment by Cunanan for the express purpose of killing him (which in Cunanan’s mind will free Madson up to be with him). Trail is barely inside the loft before Cunanan bludgeons him to death with a hammer as Madson looks on, horrified. Cunanan tries to explain that he just snapped, and it seems Madson “believes him,” though Madson is obviously terrified for his own life and going along with whatever Cunanan tells him.

Cunanan rolls Trail’s body up in a rug and the two eventually leave in Madson’s Jeep. Cunanan thinks they’re running away together, while Madson is portrayed as a kidnapping victim. When the police find Trail’s body, they initially think Madson is the killer — and in fact, investigators couldn’t definitively prove whether Madson was an accomplice or simply a victim, though nothing ever gave them a reason to think he was anything other than a victim. But once they identified Trail’s body and then later found Madson’s body, investigators decided Cunanan was acting alone.

Before that, though, Cunanan and Madson flee for several days together, with Madson growing increasingly fearful for his life. He muses about being branded a murderer when Trail’s body is found (he doesn’t know that police have already found it) and what that will do to his poor parents. Cunanan, meanwhile, is acting like everything is fine and the two of them are going to live happily ever after. It’s interesting to think about what would have happened if Madson never tried to flee. Cunanan probably would have killed Madson eventually either way, but maybe not before he was caught and charged with Trail’s murder.

We’ll never know, of course, but it’s interesting to think about. However, after three days on the run with Cunanan, Madson tries to escape during one of their stops and is gunned down near a lake north of Minneapolis. Intercut with the kidnapping are flashes of Madson’s childhood and his relationship with his father, who wasn’t thrilled with his son being gay but accepted and loved him nonetheless. It’s a very effective choice on the part of the show because it humanizes Madson in a way that none of the other victims has been humanized so far. The depiction of Lee Miglin last week was strong, but not nearly as poignant as that of Madson’s portrayal.

Trail and Madson’s murders really seem like the product of psychosis and jealousy. The American Crime Story executive producers told me at the 2018 TCA winter press tour that they wanted to examine how Cunanan came to be a spree killer, but so far it mostly seems like he’s just a psychotic, angry, unstable man. Perhaps as the season works its way further and further backward in the timeline, some of that will become clear.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 4 Recap: Andrew Cunanan Claims His First Two Victims

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 4 Recap: Drive

“You can’t do it, can you?” “I can’t what?” “Stop.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is what Matt Zoller Seitz once described, by way of a subtitle to his blog, as “a long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable destination” — the titular murder, seen in the cold open of the very first episode. We’ve already seen where we’re going; what’s left to the show is to depict how we got there. Even those swept along and killed by Andrew Cunanan during the journey seem to sense it. Hence the exchange above. Promising young architect David Madson is the love of Andrew’s life, to hear Andrew tell it. He’s a man to whom the murderer is so fanatically committed that he not only slaughters his rival for David’s affections, his own former love interest Jeff Trail, with a hammer, thus beginning his murder spree, but then manages to convince the shellshocked David that he has some how become an accomplice to the crime and must flee by his side. As time wears on and the shock wears off, David grows less pliable to Andrew’s nonsensical advice and admonishments, but also more honest with himself about where his journey as the Bonnie to Andrew’s would-be Clyde will end. He has no more hope of survival than Andrew has a chance of shutting the fuck up and telling the truth. He can’t do it, can he.

Or can he? “House by the Lake” is the second “murder spotlight” episode of ACS Versace in a row, revealing the fate of victims one and two and tantalizingly hinting at the paths the two men walked to put them in Cunanan’s crosshairs in the first place. They’re old California acquaintances since relocated to Minneapolis, where David seems reasonably well-situated to begin a career on a par with the soon-to-be late Lee Miglin’s. Andrew can’t have that — not unless he can have David too, which Jeff renders impossible. So Andrew hoodwinks David into luring Jeff to his death, venting a lifetime of frustration, resentment, and hatred into the man’s skull. “I lost control,” he manages to reassure David half-apologetically, after he bathes the stunned witness clean of all the blood he’s been splattered with. “I love you.” Later, as they walk David’s dog together to keep up appearances, Andrew says “I promise you no one else will get hurt as long as you’re by my side.” They begin a road trip. You can guess how it ends.

The most compelling contrast between “House by the Lake” and its predecessor, “A Random Killing” — as well as the assassination of Gianni Versace itself — is that at this point, Andrew may well believe what he’s saying. He killed Jeff to punish Jeff, yes, that’s clear enough. But he also killed him as a means to an end: a fantasy life with David over the border into Mexico. The operative word there is, of course, life. At this early stage in the spree, Andrew still harbors delusions about being able to move on, escape, perhaps even thrive. To paraphrase his final words to Lee Miglin before he crushed the man’s chest with construction materials, he’s not out to simply destroy. He still wants to build.

What brings it all crashing down is David’s ability to see through it, even if Andrew himself can’t bring himself to do so. Eventually, David realizes that Andrew sent him to let Jeff into his apartment building that awful night rather than doing it himself so that he could incriminate David in the eyes of the law. (Which indeed he did, as well-intentioned but obliviously bigoted cops treat David like a suspect and sex freak at every point in their investigation, wasting time they could have spent saving his life.) He unsuccessfully seizes the wheel of their getaway car, demands they call the police about the murder even as Andrew draws a gun on him in the middle of nowhere. “It’s not real,” he insists. “It could have been,” Andrew replies. “No,” he insists once more. “It couldn’t.”

The episode is structured by writer Tom Rob Smith and director Daniel Minahan (an early Game of Thrones veteran) to contrast the flight of fancy constructed by the murderous Andrew, and David’s ability to see through it, with this relationship’s flipside: flashbacks to earlier times in David’s life, when he feared his deviation from traditional masculinity would incur his father’s anger, only to discover his dad was a loving, forgiving figure. When Mr. Madson takes little David hunting and the kid freaks out, it’s no big deal — hunting’s not for everyone, and besides, they can just go for a walk together. When David graduates college at the top of his class and uses the occasion to finally come out, his dad’s a bit taken aback from a moral perspective, but that takes a serious back seat to his abiding love for his son, which he expresses in no uncertain terms. He’s so sincere and supportive, in fact, that he wonders why David chose now of all times to tell him, leaving the younger man almost embarrassed at the crude “good news/bad news” approach he’d chosen to adopt. During David’s fatal flight from the law, the cops keep insisting to his parents that he’s up to no good, and that he has deep dark secrets from them. The fact that they don’t know shit is one of the most sadly satisfying moments in the whole sordid affair.

There are many darkly funny moments along the way as well. There’s Andrew’s absurd attempt to blow off David’s concerns about getting caught at the border: “Well I’ve been moving product across the border for years.” (This takes place during a lunchbreak that had me thinking the inane phrase “A man, a plan, a sandwich, Cunanan.”) There’s the entire grim splatstick routine that takes place at David’s apartment as various cops and friends and neighbors try to figure out exactly whose ruined corpse is rolled up in a carpet. There’s David’s heartsick, self-contemptuous monologue about being more worried about being disgraced than being killed, which we now know Andrew will plagiarize virtually word for word when he murders Lee Miglin in a few days. There are all the different ways the police mangle Andrew’s last name (my favorite is “Cunainoon”) and the ridiculous descriptions of himself he threw around in front of David’s friends (“a Jewish millionaire from New York”?). Here’s also as good a place as any to praise the casting of Cody Fern and Finn Wittrock as David and Jeff respectively: two all-American boys.

But I’m saving my final praise for Darren Criss as Andrew one more time. Not just for the delicate balance he must strike around David between unpredictable violence and careful reassurance throughout the episode, nor even for his final act of tenderness toward his victim (who’d hallucinated a reunion with his father before dying) — curling up with the corpse for a last embrace before driving away. No, the highlight here is the endless closeup on Criss/Cunanan’s face as he listens to a roadhouse performance of the Cars’ “Drive” by guest star Aimee Mann while his beloved victim sneaks off to the men’s room, debating whether or not to try and flee. He breaks before your eyes, there’s no other way to put it, and he does so over the same sentiment David will eventually express to him, getting himself killed in the process: “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong.”

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 4 Recap: Drive

The New Girl loft was the scene of a murder on last night’s American Crime Story

No episode of The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has started where the last one leaves off. Narratively or geographically: Every week, the show takes a step back in time to further peel away the layers of the personal and cultural pressures that forged serial killer Andrew Cunanan (and, to a lesser extent—in that we haven’t seen him since episode two—the victim whose name is in the show’s title). Cunanan shoots Versace on the steps of his Miami villa in the cold open of the premiere episode; when the second episode, “Manhunt,” picks up, the murderer hasn’t even arrived in Miami yet.

It works to disorienting effect, but the show employs some clever tricks as well as some tried and true devices to prevent viewers from getting totally lost. “A Random Killing” opens in Toronto, introducing fragrance magnate Marilyn Miglin in the midst of a home-shopping segment. When the modern aspect ratio has been restored and Marilyn’s trying to contact her husband, Lee, on an airport payphone, onscreen text informs us she’s in Chicago. Last night’s episode, “House By The Lake,” begins with a corny sales pitch for one of the Twin Cities. But I’m not buying it. The chyron after the star wipe might read “Minneapolis, Minnesota,” but that’s definitely the neighborhood occupied by a Los Angeles educator and her knucklehead roommates. I’ve stood across the street from that building, yakking at a camera. I’d recognize that sculpture hanging above the doorway anywhere. That’s the New Girl loft.

Two shows, different as night and Jess Day, choosing the same, relatively nondescript converted industrial space as a shooting location. Sitcom establishing shot as murder scene. New Girl films on the 20th Century Fox lot, but footage of 837 Traction Avenue has set the scene for nearly every (if not every) episode of the show that’s aired since 2011. It’s central to the premise of the entire show, in which Jess moves into the building with three strangers after she finds her boyfriend sleeping with another woman in the pilot. But take a different approach to framing the building, and, voilà: It becomes David Madson’s loft in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the body of Jeffrey Trail was discovered in late April of 1997.

Asked how the production settled on that location, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson said, “We were looking for an area that matches the loft district [where] David lived in Minneapolis—without the L.A. skyline. We worked off of the actual photos the location and art department chose.”

Since first watching the Assassination Of Gianni Versace screeners in early January, I’ve been chuckling to myself at the coincidence. (There’s the added wrinkle of Max Greenfield being a cast member on both Versace and New Girl.) But my heart also breaks a little at the implication: Even after surviving to seven seasons and picking up a handful of award nominations, New Girl’s impact on the TV landscape is minimal enough that it can’t stake a firm claim to one of its most recognizable and identifiable images. Establishing shots are calling cards, pins dropped in a map that say, “The Friends live on this corner,” or, “This is the Conner family home.” If your show reaches a certain level of prominence or prestige, it’ll be associated with these real-life structures for as long as they’re left standing. You’re not going to see an HBO crime drama set up shop in New York and use Tom’s Restaurant as a recurring setting—at least not without some sort of wink toward Seinfeld.

That sense of place, and a show’s relationship with it, are some aspects of what media scholar and A.V. Club contributor Myles McNutt has written about as “spatial capital,” so I reached out to him about the New Girl loft showing up on Versace: “Any location carries spatial capital: This includes its proximity to the studio where the production is based, its similarity to the location being represented, and—important in this case—what other projects the location has appeared in. I would have personally felt that ‘appearing in an establishing shot every time New Girl returns to the loft’ would be significant enough to raise questions about this location, but maybe they never saw the show, or felt its linear ratings were so low few would be forced to confront the intertextual confusion.”

And while such overlap has always been a reality for Los Angeles, the migration of TV production from L.A. to smaller production hubs like Vancouver and Atlanta has extended this challenge elsewhere. “With all of the genre shows shot in Vancouver,” McNutt said, “it’s inevitable they will be shooting in locations where other shows have shot before—the question is how the shows negotiate this intertextuality, if they’re even aware of it.”

You can see such a negotiation in action in “House By The Lake.” The twilight, the low camera angle, the ominously steady zoom: It’s the New Girl loft, but there’s no merriment, no will-they/won’t-they shenanigans, and no games of True American going on behind those walls. That’s a future crime scene right there.

Even when New Girl uses a nocturnal establishing shot, 837 Traction still looks homier and more inviting than it does on The Assassination Of Gianni Versace. There are lights on upstairs, and the windows are open, as if to shout out to the world, “This is a place where six weirdos in their 30s have been gradually learning the things they should’ve learned in their 20s!”
Then again, if you’re Myles McNutt, you’re pretty sure somebody’s getting killed in that loft, no matter what show it’s on.

The New Girl loft was the scene of a murder on last night’s American Crime Story

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is the TV show to follow right now

There’s been a murder and a crowd has gathered at the doorstep of the Versace mansion. Cops, emergency-care nurses, journalists, passersby, tourists clicking pictures. One onlooker runs over to the corpse, dips a page she’s torn off a glossy in the pool of blood – Gianni Versace’s blood – and quickly seals this ‘souvenir’ in a zip-lock bag.

You’ll realise pretty quickly that the second installment of American Crime Story doesn’t have all that much to do with Versace or his empire or haute couture. It’s not a courtroom trial either, even if a Ryan Murphy courtroom trial is a whole other animal. What it is, is a sprawling nationwide manhunt for the serial killer who murdered the biggest fashion designer of that era, and four other powerful men before him.

And with the search for Andrew Cunanan, the not-so-charming psychopathic prostitute, comes an inquisition of a homophobic society: The America of the Eighties and Nineties, also the time that the AIDS crisis was at its peak.

Adapted from Maureen Orth’s investigative book, and dismissed by the Versace family as a piece of fiction only, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is riveting TV, a thriller that, while only gathering pace and properly engaging you at end of the second episode, is buoyed by spectacular performances. Edward Ramirez’s Gianni is a gentleman, dignified and generous, driven by the pursuit of beauty; Penelope Cruz’s Donatella molded in granite compared to him, enchanting, persistent, business-minded; Ricky Martin slightly over-doing the heartbroken ‘partner’, but it works. And Darren Criss, magnificent as the beautiful and grotesque Cunanan, oozing charm and becoming whatever people wanted him to be, saying whatever they wanted to hear.

Over nine episodes, the show will show us all five murders, and countless other petty crimes of Cunanan’s. And it’s pretty hard stuff: such as the scene just after Cunanan’s finished with Lee Miglin in the third episode, “A Random Killing”, and appears in the Chicago real-estate tycoon’s kitchen holding a giant hunk of meat, slices off a sliver and practically inhales it. It’s nausea-inducing stuff, but there’s other, more to make you queasy: Like that scene described at the beginning of this piece; Or when suits at the FBI office discussing the murders confuse Versace with Liberace; or when the cop interrogating Antonio D’Amico refuses to ‘comprehend’ what he means by being Gianni’s ‘partner’. Makes you think the ‘assassination’ in the title isn’t just for dramatic effect, after all.

Of course, there’s a lot of attention to detail in re-creating that Nineties atmosphere – the discotheques and La Bouche thumping through sunny, progressive Miami’s streets and Speedo-dotted-beaches and denim cut-off shorts. But who has time for nostalgia when there’s a murderer on the prowl; and a tabloid-hooked society bent on keeping the closet locked?

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is the TV show to follow right now

‘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”