Note: This article contains light spoilers.
There are plenty of murders in FX’s “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” but no one dies in the most terrifying scene that has aired so far. Midway through the second episode, gay-hustler-turned-serial-killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) picks up an older man at the beach. As they enter the john’s spacious hotel room, Andrew asks how many people he employs. “Five thousand, globally,” the guy admits, but hastens to add, “I can be submissive.” So Andrew covers his face in duct tape, hissing, “You’re helpless. Accept it.” Then he turns up the stereo and dances in his orange bikini-cut swimsuit to “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey until his mark stops struggling. At the last second, he pokes a hole in the tape.
The scene is chilling for many reasons. There’s the painful suspense of waiting to find out if Andrew will let the john die. (Because the season unfolds in reverse-chronological order, we’ve already seen him kill Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) in the premier; we know he’s capable of it.) There’s the sadistic pleasure Andrew, who spends his days smoking crack in a $29.99-a-night Miami Beach motel room, takes in dominating a powerful businessman. And creepiest of all is Criss’ body language as he gyrates, his face frozen in determination while his arms flail. This is the moment we realize exactly how unhinged Andrew Cunanan is.
“Easy Lover” is a brilliant sync: a disconcertingly upbeat soundtrack to a man’s suffocation, with a touch of lyrical irony given Andrew’s line of work. But perhaps the most striking thing about using a Phil Collins song in this context is what the reference brings to mind: American Psycho, the Mary Harron film based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. Set in the 1980s, American Psycho finds yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman frequently extolling the virtues of his favorite soft rock hits. He turns on the stereo when he’s feeling great, which is mostly when he’s toying with a victim. In one scene, he plays Genesis’ “In Too Deep” and extemporizes on Collins’ career before he fucks and slaughters two prostitutes. Andrew’s encounter inverts the roles of sex worker and john, adding another layer of queerness to this tale of a gay man who preys on other gay men. “Versace” is using music to frame its subject as an explicitly gay variation on the American Psycho archetype.
Thankfully, for those of us who have no desire to revisit “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” or “Walking on Sunshine,” the show doesn’t overstate its case by cutting in additional Bateman murder jams. While the music of American Psycho captures the banality of Reagan-era capitalist evil, it’s the female-fronted house and dance-pop tracks that would’ve played in a typical ‘90s gay bar that suffuse this season of “American Crime Story.” Released the same year Cunanan turned violent, 1997, Jocelyn Enriquez’s egregiously overplayed “A Little Bit of Ecstasy” blasts as Gianni and his partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin), arrive at the club for yet another hedonistic night out, and soon decide to leave because they’d rather be alone together. Later, Andrew dances to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” and Lisa Stansfield’s “This Is the Right Time” at the same venue as he prowls for victims, clients, hookups, or all of the above.
Like the disco that soundtracked the sexually fluid nightlife of the 1970s, the songs selected by music supervisor Amanda Krieg Thomas layer mantras of pleasure over beats that thump like an overexerted heart. Their appeal in the context of a gay club in the mid-‘90s isn’t hard to grasp: This is the only public place where queer men can express their desires without fear, and the music heightens that temporary sense of invincibility. The only threat in a room like this is AIDS—until Andrew appears. As soon as he enters the frame, all you can hear in these otherwise liberating hits is artifice, recklessness, and caprice.
Outside the club, the pop songs Andrew loves can sound even darker. In a flashback from the premiere, Stansfield’s “All Around the World” plays as a younger Andrew tries on expensive suits owned by his rich friend Lizzie’s (Annaleigh Ashford) husband. While she scolds him for raiding the closet and he reminds her, “I have nothing,” the song emphasizes the disconnect between his worldly pretensions and his parasitic lifestyle. The first time we see him in episode two, Andrew is a fugitive speeding toward Versace’s part-time home, Miami Beach, in a stolen truck. After catching a radio news report about himself, he finds a station playing Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”cranks up the volume, and screams along with abandon. As high on his own notoriety as Patrick Bateman was on frivolous bloodshed, Andrew is celebrating the murders of men—three of them gay—with an iconic gay disco anthem.
There is a crucial difference between the American Psycho approach to music and the way “Versace” uses it, though. Bateman is a caricature of vain, ruthless, materialistic finance bros—a monster brought to life by a dominant culture that elevated those destructive traits. His affinity for Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News is an indictment of those artists. (Ellis agreed: “I ended up feeling bad for Bateman’s loving attention toward the band [Huey Lewis], which, in itself is this kind of criticism of the culture,” he told* Billboard.) Their songs are just another blandly sinister accessory to Bateman’s vapid existence, like his tanning bed and his embossed, bone-colored business cards.
As interpreted by this season’s writer, Tom Rob Smith, Andrew Cunanan is less a reflection of gay culture than a plague on it. If the john he nearly kills before going after Versace hadn’t been closeted, it’s quite possible Andrew would have been caught before he killed the fashion icon. When Andrew leaves the hotel room, the traumatized businessman slips on a wedding ring, calls 911, then thinks better of it and hangs up. Andrew’s earlier victims, who we’ll meet later in the season, are also casualties of the closet. In that sense, Andrew is the personification of society’s homophobia, which he uses to isolate and manipulate his targets, as well as HIV, which can turn sex deadly. In Miami Beach, he hides from the FBI in plain sight, buying neon tank tops and Speedos to blend in with the throngs of innocent gay vacationers. Music is one more layer of camouflage. Andrew’s grotesque enjoyment of “Gloria” isn’t a criticism of the song—it’s a perversion of its liberating meaning, and a threat to the culture that cherishes it.
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