Even when someone’s death is not unexpected, untimely, and violent, there’s often a profound ripple effect through family and community. When the person is murdered, it’s a whole other level of crazy.

The final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story begins where the first episode did, with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) shooting Versace (Edgar Ramirez) in the face at point blank range. The first time, we saw the reactions of the people around Versace. This time, we follow Andrew as he breaks into an empty houseboat and raids the fridge. Finding a bottle of champagne, he smiles as he tears the foil from the cork and turns on the TV to watch news coverage of the murder. (Of course, there’s speculation that it’s the mafia, and veiled suggestions that the “infamous” designer might have been targeted for reasons they aren’t quite able to talk about.) As an eyewitness describes seeing Versace on the ground, the cork explodes out of the champagne bottle like a gunshot and Andrew startles violently, then collapses on the couch, giggling. A correspondent notes that Andrew Cunanan is the suspected killer. “Oh my God,” he breathes. You think he’s panicking at first, but as he walks up the stairs to sit on the upper deck of the houseboat, holding the champagne bottle by the neck, watching the police helicopters scanning the waterfront, you realize it’s not panic but elation. He’s done it. He’s famous.

We cut to Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) as FBI agents come to let her know that Andrew Cunanan has killed Gianni Versace. “When will it end?” she asks in a brittle voice. “You had two months. You had his name. His picture. He had the money he stole from Lee. What have you been doing?”

“We’ve been looking for him.” But the agent can’t wholly defend himself, and they all know what she’s really saying. Lee Miglin’s murder wasn’t particularly compelling to them until Andrew killed a celebrity. Until then, it had been dismissed as a Gay Thing. A trivium. The FBI suggest she get on a flight out of Florida, that Cunanan might know she’s filming there.

Her voice could etch glass. “You want me to run. From him? You provide whatever security you think necessary. I have never missed a broadcast in my life.”

Andrew learns from the TV that he’s made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. He’s described as a male prostitute who served affluent clients. (It’s left open to speculation whether he knew Versace in that capacity.) He catches a statement from Marilyn Miglin in which she simply says her husband of 38 years was “her prince” and that she had “a fairytale marriage.” You can’t help hearing both connotations of the word “fairy,” and remembering Cunanan’s siblings referring to him as “Prince Andrew”; everything’s starting to converge and in Marilyn’s slow, deep, pause-riddled voice here is almost oracular.

Andrew dresses, leaves the houseboat and steals a car, giggling at the radio coverage suggesting Mafia involvement in Versace’s murder. Then he realizes he’s stuck at a police checkpoint and it stops being quite so funny. There’s no way off the island. All the causeways are blocked. The world’s finally paying attention to Andrew. He throws the stolen car keys into the water and screams.

He’s not the only one who’s watching the coverage. His mother is hiding under a blanket in front of the TV when the knock comes at the door in San Diego. She opens the door for the police and meekly asks “Have you killed my son?”

No, they have not. Andrew, now trapped like a rat with no money, isn’t laughing any more. Back in the houseboat, he watches TV footage of his mother being dragged out of her condo by the feds, looking totally unraveled.

Meanwhile, the cops have relocated poor, uneducated junkie Ronnie, a character I wasn’t expecting to see again and from whom I definitely wasn’t expecting one of the most searing monologues of the series. “He wasn’t hiding,” Ronnie tells the female cop. “Oh, you were looking for him, weren’t you? The only [lesbian] on the force? But the other cops, they weren’t looking so hard, were they?” It’s a tough call whether the look on her face or Ronnie’s is more devastating. Ronnie’s dismissiveness of their attitude—sure, Cunanan kills a bunch of gay nobodies and nobody cares, but now he kills a celebrity and he matters?—is so scathing and so hideously real, and when the cop doubles down and accuses him of being an accessory to murder, he just scoffs.

“So you never talked about Versace?” the male cop asks Ronnie.

“All he talked about was Versace,” Ronnie replies, his slightly clouded-over eyes suddenly clear as he leans in. “We all did. We all wondered what it would be like to be so powerful it didn’t matter that you were gay. The truth is, you were disgusted by him long before he became disgusting… Andrew isn’t hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”

It’s such a nasty and amazing moment. Because everyone in that room knows this guy is telling it exactly like it is. And there are no available rejoinders, just none. Again, the narcissistic quandary: When you’re not being looked at, you stop existing, so how far will you go to ensure you stay alive? And when society has a tendency to erase you because, as Ronnie puts it, you were “born a lie,” how much more toxic is it to have been raised by parents who, whether deliberately or by incompetence, saw to it that you never had a sense of your inherent human value? Lots of people deal with societal intolerance without becoming anything but stronger for it. Lots of people have narcissistic tendencies without being disordered. Lots of people have personality disorders and never kill anyone. But Andrew Cunanan was a perfect storm, and this man who barely knew him understands it almost instinctively.

Andrew haunts the waterfront, literally and figuratively adrift, and is getting really hungry. In front of a TV screen again, he sees Lizzie (Annaleigh Ashford) reading a statement in which she says she knows who he really is, adds that she loves him unconditionally, and urges him to turn himself in.

Next, David Madson’s father appears on TV, responding to accusations that David was involved with Andrew in the murder of Jeff Trail. (The cops really haven’t bothered connecting the dots, have they?) Andrew turns off the TV, but the voices don’t stop—it’s almost as if they’re in his head, but really there are just multiple TVs and radios blaring the same coverage. The desperation is getting serious at this point. He’s hungry enough to try (unsuccessfully) to eat dog food. So he watches Marilyn Miglin on the Home Shopping Network, talking about how she always wanted to make a perfume for her mother; how her wonderful father had died young; how they had lived in poverty and her mother had never had money for luxuries; and how this perfume she’s selling is one she would have wanted to go back in time to give to her mother as a way of saying “how special” she was.

Special.

And yep, Andrew calls Dad (Jon Jon Briones), who immediately says he’ll be there for Andrew in 24 hours, regardless of the danger he’ll be putting himself in. “I will find you. I will hold you in my arms like I used to. I promise.” Andrew is stupid enough to be filled with hope, and packs his things and waits.

But Modesto Cunanan doesn’t show up in Miami. He shows up on TV, from Manila, telling a reporter his son is innocent.

Of being a homosexual.

Modesto goes on to say Andrew is “special” and “a genius” and that he would never kill anyone and that he’s too smart for the police to find him anyway. That he phones all the time. That he has spoken to Andrew in the last 24 hours.

“What did you discuss?” the reporter asks.

Modesto smiles like a snake. “The movie rights to his life story. Andrew was very particular about the title.” The camera zooms in on Modesto’s face. “A Name to Be Remembered By.” Horror dawns on Andrew’s face, followed by rage. He puts a bullet through the TV screen, and through his father’s face.

In Milan, Antonio (Ricky Martin) and Donatella (Penelope Cruz) are talking before the funeral. Antonio mentions staying at Lake Como in a house Gianni had left to him. Donatella tells Antonio the board had to take possession of all Gianni’s properties because his personal finances were troubled. There’s nothing she can do. She’s on the board and Gianni’s sister, but there’s nothing she can do. Antonio’s out in the cold. Nice lady. At the memorial service, the priest won’t mention Antonio or even touch him as he walks by to bless the family. It turns out that Ronnie never understood that maybe there was really no amount of wealth or privilege that could erase the stigma of being gay. Well, maybe in Miami Beach, but not in the Catholic Church, not even when your priest is supposed to be there to help you process the loss of your partner of 15 years.

Andrew’s now eating the dog food as he watches Princess Diana and Elton John arrive in Milan for the funeral. He watches the service, fervently singing along with the boys’ choir rendition of “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” I don’t think he’s singing for Gianni Versace.

They’ve found the houseboat. The landlord, the cops, the FBI, helicopters, snipers. Andrew locks himself into a bedroom, where he sees a phantasm of his younger self. As the cops enter the houseboat, Andrew poses (dramatically as ever) in a seriously freighted silhouette, with the barrel of Jeff Trail’s gun in his mouth.

“I’m so happy right now,” he says to Gianni Versace as we hear the shot. They’re back in the San Francisco opera house from the season premiere. Gianni tells Andrew he doesn’t need to persuade people that he’s great or special, he needs to do something special. “Finish your novel,” he tells Andrew. Andrew begs to be taken on as his protégé, then tries to kiss Versace, who rebuffs him. “No,” Versace says. “I wanted you to be here to be inspired, to be nourished by this,” he says, indicating the empty house. “If we kissed, you would doubt. One day you will understand why I said no.”

Of course, Versace’s right, and we’d all live in a better world if there were more men with boundaries that intact.

We cut back to Marilyn Miglin as the police come to tell her that Cunanan’s dead. “Good. It’s over.” Her assistant finds her looking through letters. “We receive hundreds of letters from viewers,” she says. “Since my husband died, I receive letters about him. People he helped. Whose bills he paid. He never told me.”

At Lake Como, Donatella tells Santo that she was annoyed with Gianni the morning he was killed, that she didn’t pick up the phone when he called.

Antonio takes a boatload of sleeping pills.

A plaque with Andrew Cunanan’s name on it is applied to a blank piece of marble in a columbarium. A maid finds Antonio still alive. Donatella lights a candle for Gianni. The camera recedes down the faceless hallway of the columbarium, the ashes put away behind the identical squares of white stone.

In everyone, there is a creator and a destroyer.

In American Crime Story’s Searing Finale, There’s a Creator and a Destroyer in Everyone

As we’ve discussed, people are not born sociopaths. They are made. And it generally happens in early childhood. It’s a humbling thing for a well-meaning but fallible parent to contemplate, and the idea at the core of “Creator/Destroyer” from the first minutes, in which we see young Gianni Versace in his mother’s dress shop in Calabria, watching her work and sketching. It’s not… well, it’s not entirely a “boy” thing to do in midcentury Calabria. Potentially the kind of thing a conservative parent would try to quash.

Instead, his mother (Francesca Franti) teaches him her trade. Boys in school pick on him for being queer and his teacher tears up his sketches, but his mother promises her support in whatever he wants to be and do—and she means it. When he reports that the teacher has called him a pervert, she quietly reassembles the torn pieces of his sketch and says, “It’s beautiful,” then proceeds to show him how to make it.

And that is one big reason why Gianni Versace grows up to be Gianni Versace, and Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) grows up to be a fraud, a pathological liar and a spree killer enraged by men who have earned respect for their work.

We cut to 1980 San Diego, where the Cunanan family is loading a moving van under the direction of Andrew’s father, Modesto (Jon Jon Briones), a man whose ego issues are apparent from the first frame. The rest of the kids are sweating in the heat while Modesto bombasts about how he will turn the $500 they would have paid for professional movers into $10,000. Meanwhile, Andrew’s upstairs reading Brideshead Revisited. They arrive at, well, let’s say a bit of an upgrade from their previous digs, a huge, white suburban house, and Modesto leaves his three other children and his wife to unpack while he takes “Prince Andrew,” who is blatantly and toxically favored by Dad, into the house for a private grand tour.

Interestingly, Andrew hadn’t been lying about his parents giving him the master bedroom. One of the weirdest details in his bizarre spiel to David Madson was actually true. Modesto says he’s giving the bedroom to Andrew because “When you feel special, success will follow.”

There it is, in a nutshell. One child is told to “feel special,” while the other is guided through the concept of “special” being something you work your ass off for, for years. One is taught empty entitlement; one is given tools.

It gets creepier. Modesto and Andrew get dressed side by side, each laying out their suits and attending to every fussy little detail while staring at their reflections in a closet door mirror (more Narcissus imagery). Andrew goes to a school interview while Modesto does the same at the local branch of Merrill Lynch (so there’s some truth to that, too—sort of). While Modesto goes on like a used car salesman about having come from nothing and pulled himself up by the bootstraps (obviously a superior recommendation to a degree from Harvard), Andrew’s interviewers ask him what he’d choose if he could have one wish. He rattles off a list of cars and assets; the question is re-asked and he answers simply, “To be special.”

Modesto gets the job. Now we know where Andrew’s recurring Lobster Dinner motif comes from. And we get a flash of how Mary Anne (Joanna Adler) became… a bit off. Modesto’s a wee bit of a gaslighter—show of hands, who’s surprised?—as well as a Big Fat Liar at work—again, surprised? He interrupts Andrew and his mom trying to do homework together because he’s bought Andrew a car (Andrew is about twelve and has several older siblings whom Modesto basically ignores). Mary Ann protests that it isn’t fair to the other kids, who are actually old enough to drive, and Modesto calls her crazy again, and grabs her by the throat and throws her to the ground while Andrew watches. Modesto tells Andrew that his brother and sisters aren’t “special” and that his mother has a weak mind and that Modesto is his mother and his father. As Mary Anne dusts herself off and approaches the car, Modesto puts the window up, so her face is reflected in the glass, with Andrew and Dad enclosed on the other side. Andrew mentions wanting to be a writer. Dad says it’s better to be “an opportunist.”

We cut to 1987, when a decidedly queenly Andrew sashays out of that car and into a yearbook portrait session, where he gets called a “fag” for increasingly loud protests over the uniforms and identical poses. “If being a fag means being different,” he says to the jock who’s insulted him, “sign me up!” He marches to the front of the line, unbuttons his shirt, and strikes a campy pose.

Oh, and Modesto’s not at Merrill Lynch any more. He’s doing “trades” from a seedy office in a strip mall. And he seems to be ripping off little old ladies. Hmm.

Andrew’s mom can tell from his cologne that he’s seeing someone: “Who is she?”

“What would you say if I said she was over 30?”

Mary Anne says a young man should be with an older woman, who will teach him to be a man. Andrew goes upstairs and dresses for his date. The date’s definitely over 30, and doesn’t appreciate being brought to a high school house party because he’s married and can’t be seen out with Andrew like that. So Andrew goes to the party alone, tossing aside his trench coat and swaggering into the party in a tomato-red leather jumpsuit. This definitely clears him a lot of space on the dance floor, and also attracts the attention of the delinquent house sitter who’s hosting the party. Hey, Lizzie! (Annaleigh Ashford). She takes to him at once and confides that she’s not a high school student but a bored housewife who promised the owners-—he daSilvas— that she’d watch their place while they were out of town.

So Andrew has now made one of the two closest things to an actual friend he’ll ever have (Jeff Trail will be the other). Meanwhile, the stockbrokers are on to Modesto that he’s been conning little old ladies over fake stocks. The feds are involved. Modesto runs for it, pretty literally—he’s still in the building when the FBI shows up.

Andrew’s senior yearbook page is captioned, “Apres moi, le deluge.”

“I dunno, it just sounded sorta cool,” he says to a classmate of the enigmatic words, attributed to Louis XV and/or Madame Pompadour.

Meanwhile, Modesto runs home, pries open a floorboard, removes cash and passports, knocks his wife out of the way and flees. Andrew pulls up just in time to see Dad jumping a fence. “Don’t believe a word they say,” he says to his son, and takes the car keys from his hand.

Mom tells Andrew they have nothing left, that Modesto had even secretly sold the house because he knew they were coming for him. Andrew decides to go to Manila to track him down, over Mary Anne’s hysterical protests. “He’s dangerous!” she screams, and Andrew puts his hand over her mouth.

“You’re wrong about him.”

Gaslighters are interesting folks, folks. Here’s a kid who has grown up watching his father mentally and physically abuse his mother, and when she says he’s dangerous, he disagrees.

He finds his father in his home village outside Manila, staying with an uncle Andrew’s never met. No, there is no money, and no plan; yes, he defrauded and stole. Modesto never stops defending his actions. Andrew loses it.

“You’re a lie! And if you’re a lie, I’m a lie, and I can’t be a lie!”

Spoiler alert: That ends up not being strictly true.

Modesto’s response? “You’re weak, just like your mother.” Spits on him. Says he’s ashamed of him. Calls him a sissy. Andrew jumps up with a knife in his hand (He’s been chopping pineapple with it) and Modesto dares him to use it. Instead, he just grips the blade until it cuts through his palm.

“You don’t have it in you,” Modesto sneers. One wonders, had his father not said that sentence, whether any of what happened afterward might have been different. See, being a narcissist-sociopath-psychopath involves total dependency on the projections of others. If they say you’re nothing, you’re nothing. If they taunt you to prove them wrong, you’ll do it.

We use the word “ego” almost as if we’re describing a character flaw. In fact, the literal translation of the word is “I am.” To be completely egoless might be the ostensible aim of some religious philosophies, but there’s a big difference between relinquishing one and never developing one in the first place. People with broken or empty or malformed egos are miserable and very often highly dangerous. This episode is basically a primer on how to build a human being with no stable idea of who he is. The pressure of that instability is like the seismic buildup between tectonic plates in a subduction zone. The longer the pressure builds, the more catastrophic the quake’s going to be when the ground finally gives way.

Andrew comes home and applies for the job at the pharmacy, telling the elderly Filipino proprietor about his dad in in Manila running pineapple plantations. “Is that so?” the man says, a bit skeptically.

Cunanan’s eyes are dead as a fish’s. “As far as the eye can see.”

American Crime Story Review: Ego, Therefore I Am

Rating: 8.8

Being nothing is terrifying.

Once upon a time, Donatella Versace wore a lot less makeup and dressed like a frump and tried to “assist” her brother, who took her to task for not being… him. “I don’t have time to be kind,” Versace (Edgar Ramirez) says to Antonio (Ricky Martin) in tonight’s episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “Ascent.”

“You don’t have time to be cruel,” Antonio replies. Donatella (Penelope Cruz) probably never realizes that the man she resents the hell out of was the catalyst for Gianni to help prepare her for his impending death by mentoring her.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) is working at a local pharmacy, where the elderly Filipino manager tells him not to read Vogue “on his time.” Andrew’s getting restless. And angry. And experimenting with lying his pants off to a random customer, who seems singularly uninterested in how Andrew only works at the pharmacy because he’s wrapping up his PhD. At home, he violently berates his mother (Joanna Adler) for buying bargain-brand ice cream and then tells her he’s going to take care of her, get her out of the crappy condo and into someplace bigger, better, more important. After another long night of helping still-active Naval officer Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) get laid, Andrew gets an idea and goes to a shoddy-looking escort service. “I can’t sell a witty Filipino,” the charm-school graduate at the desk says. “Even one with a big dick.”

“Then I’ll sell myself,” Andrew replies.

In Milan, Gianni and Donatella share a totally non-incest-y—yet highly erotically charged— moment in the atelier. It’s something hard to capture, and this scene does a beautiful job of it: the distinctly sexual charge between a creator and a muse. I’ve never been a fan of Penelope Cruz, and I admit the real-life Donatella Versace gives me the willies, so for me to be riveted by a close-up of her, as Gianni slowly removes his belt and (in a curious echo of the hallucinated fitting scene in the previous episode) tightens it around Donatella’s neck like a dog collar, tells me something is going really right here. You can see rising pulses, galvanic skin response; her vulnerability, her fear, her insecurity, her love for her brother, a kind of blended submissiveness and power that seem to be filling her from simply wearing the mockup of the dress they can now both see in their heads. You can see him tightening his grip on that piece of leather as if it were life itself, a dying man who doesn’t want his vision to die with him, grasping at the still-unexpressed potential in her. He wants her to wear it. She says, “I’d look absurd.” They attend a Vogue gala in New York, and when Donatella unveils the dress, she instantly becomes the most fascinating woman in the room. You can still see it in her eyes, that she knows this isn’t really her creation, that it isn’t her real self—but you can see a shift beginning to happen. Whatever her mixed feelings, she’s finding her place in her brother’s world.

Back in southern California, Andrew Cunanan prepares to… sell himself, to a quartet of wealthy older gay men, at least one of whom is an AIDS widower. Andrew is good at selling himself. Two of the three men even seem to buy his elaborate story of having tried to make it work with a young wife but fleeing the marriage because he couldn’t live a lie any more. (The third, the acerbic David Gallo, makes it crystal clear he doesn’t buy any of it.) The other two men, Lincoln and Norman, find themselves vying for Andrew’s attention. Lincoln wins. Andrew trades his “availability” for an expense account.

Donatella returns to Milan flush with success, and the mixed reviews the eye-popping dress is receiving are all good news to her—Versace has never received this much attention from the press. But while people are gossiping about the dress, they’re not buying it. Economic downturn, desire for practicality. Donatella makes one of her first confident, pragmatic, and expansive suggestions—that some Versace designs have a runway version and a scaled-down, prêt-à-porter version for the everyday consumer. It’s a reasonable and wise idea, so Gianni’s response—a complete tantrum during which he rips pieces off the celebrated co-creation—cuts pretty deep, and only worsens when it becomes clear he is suddenly going deaf.

In San Francisco, with friends in a boutique hotel restaurant, Andrew explains he has become a “consultant” for an oil millionaire. Then he asks the group, “What do you think people in this restaurant see when they look at us, making all this noise, spending all this money. Who do you think they think we are?” But before the creepiness of that question has time to sink in, Andrew has noticed David Madson (Cody Fern) sitting alone at the bar.

In Andrew’s opulent suite upstairs, David’s almost ridiculously taken with the view, the potted orchids, the complimentary bedroom slippers. He’s nervous. Not as nervous as he should be, unfortunately. They hook up, and later David tells Andrew about a childhood friend who was bullied, how he’d promised to build her a house they’d live in together where no one could be mean to her again. “When I told her I was gay, she was so upset,” he says wistfully. “I guess she felt betrayed.”

Except it turns out that Lincoln’s a bit possessive and Andrew’s itemized bill makes it clear he was entertaining another man. He cuts Andrew off, picks up another young man at a bar, and brings him home. The guy says he’s straight, but he does seem to like money, and they end up at Lincoln’s house. The guy’s on edge, and Lincoln says he’s calling him a cab. Andrew walks in unnoticed. Lincoln takes the strange man’s drink. The guy snaps, and bludgeons Lincoln to death with a piece of sculpture. Then he realizes Andrew is there. “He tried to kiss me!” the man says in a daze.

“I know,” Andrew says, hands up. “You should run.”

At the theater where they first met, Norman invites Andrew to meet him and show him a memorial plaque he’s had made for Lincoln. Andrew explains that the killer has been caught, that he confessed to “snapping” and “losing control” when Lincoln made an advance. “And I suppose the police found that defense… understandable,” Norman says bitterly. Andrew talks Norman into moving to La Jolla from Phoenix. He tells a touching story about a childhood friend who was bullied and how Andrew had promised her that one day he’d be rich and successful and buy a beautiful house where they could both live. “I could do that for you,” he says.

Andrew’s mother simply can’t believe that her son’s leaving to tour the world assisting Gianni Versace in opera costume design. But then it sinks in that he doesn’t intend to take her, and she panics. She begs for an audience with Versace—he’s Italian, too; he understands family. She gets more and more worked up, and Andrew finally yells, “Stop it!” and shoves her into a wall. The urgent care doctor informs her she’s fractured her shoulder blade and asks what happened.

“It was an accident,” Mrs. Cunanan says tonelessly. “My son found me and called the ambulance. He’s always been a good boy.”

Andrew doubles over in tears.

In Milan, Donatella (now in her hallmark black leather and indoor sunglasses) explains that Gianni has a rare ear cancer and has decided to leave the company in her hands while he recovers in Miami. She reminds everyone how stubborn her brother is, that he will be back.

“We need to be talked about,” Donatella says. “If we are not being talked about, we don’t exist.”

Meanwhile, Andrew is moving Norman in to the glass-walled seaside mansion in La Jolla. “Ah,” he says, “if they could see me now.”

“Who?” Norman asks.

“Everyone.”

A creator falls (temporarily, for now). A destroyer rises (temporarily, for now).

While on the surface this would seem to be Donatella’s narrative, she’s really rather incidental to the story. This episode is about the drive to rise above one’s circumstances, but it’s also about the fundamental difference between a narcissist and a maker. Both might seek, be drawn to, find celebrity, money, access, privilege, attention. One of them does it by giving the world something. The other has nothing to give and resents the notion that he should. The myth of Narcissus is a poorly understood one; people tend to think Narcissus was in love with himself. Read the texts carefully and you’ll understand that his problem was of a fundamentally different nature—he didn’t have a self to love. The reflection in the pond that besotted and tormented him, the unattainable perfect Other, was his own face, and he didn’t realize it, and that failure of recognition drowned him. It drowns most of them, ultimately. It’s just a matter of how many people they destroy along the way.

American Crime Story Explores the Real Meaning of Narcissism in “Ascent”

Data point: Full-blown personality disorders such as sociopathy, psychopathy, narcissism and borderline disorder tend to occur co-morbidly; meaning if you have one, you probably have at least two. (Narcissist/sociopath is a common constellation, as is borderline/histrionic).

Related data point: Most experts in matters of the human psyche agree that personality disorders are not congenital. They are forged, probably built in early childhood by repeated, systematic destabilization of the child’s developing ego. This fact could almost make you feel sorry for a person with a full-blown personality disorder, except that they are so effing destructive that feeling sorry for them is somewhere between insane in its own right and impossible. 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 tonight’s 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.

1996. La Jolla, Calif. Fancy car pulls up to opulent beachside mansion. Cunanan (the increasingly chilling Darren Criss) swaggers out of the car and into the house, cold and arrogant, swinging glossy shopping bags from Ferragamo, then strips naked and dives into a swimming pool. (Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” has never been used to more perfect effect.) He rubs leftover coke residue on his gums in giant walk-in closet, carefully wraps a gift, and gets dressed. Andrew is definitely living large, his creepy grandiosity in full flow. A situation you’d think he probably wants to maintain.

It is one year before the murders of David Madson, Jeff Trail, Lee Miglin, William Reese and Gianni Versace.

So, it’s Andrew’s birthday, and the wealthy older man he lives with is throwing him a lavish party. We’re not yet clear on how he scored this, um, gig, but Norman’s got some protective friends who don’t love Andrew, and when Andrew’s friend Lizzie (Annaleigh Ashford, whom we met in the season premiere) sits down with him, Andrew explains that the whole party is designed to attract David (Cody Fern) and he needs her to help make it look like Norman (Michael Nouri) is not a rich man he’s preying on in exchange for sex. He needs David. Loves David. “He’s a house,” Andrew says. “A home. A yard. Picking kids up from school… he’s a future. I’ve only ever dated the past.”

“Who are you trying to be?” Lizzie asks, plaintively. She cares. For a second, you almost care, too. You wonder what happened in his house, his home, his school-kid days, his past. Something creepy, no doubt.

“Someone he can love,” Andrew replies.

Wrong answer.

Data point: Sociopaths and psychopaths are very similar. But not the same. Both have unstable egos, a shifting and uncertain sense of self that can explode into abrupt displays of grandiosity, excessive risk-taking behaviors, wild tapestries of lies, or rages. Some people with these disorders are aware that they have them, aware that they do not experience normative human emotions; some are not. But a sociopath is highly unlikely to murder you; serious physical violence is in the deck with psychopaths.

I think if I could magically enter this narrative and save only one person from Andrew Cunanan, it would probably be Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), who at this point has left the Navy with very mixed feelings, still sees Andrew as a friend (and obviously has utilized him as a procurer) and shows up at the party with a hiking trail guide as a gift, only to be dragged into the bedroom and told to put on one pair of designer loafers and make sure David sees him giving Andrew the other. “I need him to see that I’m loved.”

“I do love you, buddy.”

“I need him to see that.”

Adding insult to injury, he tells Jeff that as far as David knows, Jeff’s a naval officer. “You want me to impersonate an officer?” The look of pain and confusion on Trail’s face as it seems to dawn on him that he has tied his coming out to someone who doesn’t remotely understand what it took for him to leave the military and now wants him to pretend to be the person he was when he had to pretend he wasn’t gay—wow, that is a stone with a wide, wide ripple effect. He’s so freaking honorable and good. You’d want to jump into the scene and get him the hell away from Cunanan even if you didn’t know his cranium had a blind date with a hammer coming in a year.

David shows up. As an architect, of course, he’s blown away by the sleek, capacious, glass-walled house, the lawns and clusters of banana trees sweeping toward the ocean—he’s wondering how Andrew’s pulled this off. Then, never one to disobey an order, Jeff “gives” Andrew the shoes, Andrew makes a humiliating fuss about them, and for some reason, with all his attention to detail, it has not occurred to Andrew that Jeff and David, two attractive, honest, non-desperate men, will hit it off instantly.

And it all starts to unravel.

Norman’s bitchy friend corners Andrew and lets him know he’s wise to his shtick. Jeff and David are enjoying each other’s company way too much. Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) shows up and Andrew makes a big display of not recognizing him. (Lee’s faintly desperate to be alone with Andrew; it’s also hard to watch, knowing what’s coming). Lizzie snaps a picture of all of them, Jeff and David with their arms already around each other and rage beginning to simmer in Andrew’s eyes.

After the party, Andrew sandbags Norman with a list of demands. Norman coolly responds that you don’t become as wealthy as he is without doing “due diligence,” and proceeds to out Andrew—he knows Andrew’s real name is Cunanan, not DaSilva; he knows he’s lied about his past and his family; he knows that Andrew targeted him, that they didn’t meet by accident. Norman’s composure and self-assurance in this scene are outstanding; he even offers to pay for Andrew to go back to college. “I’ll allow you all the lies you want,” he says, “except one: that I’m a fool.”

Andrew does not get his list of demands, smashes a glass table, and leaves in a seething rage.

Jeff Trail gets a phone call from his dad. Apparently someone named Andrew has sent him a weird postcard, suggesting that they’re lovers. Jeff confronts Andrew, saying the suggestive postcard felt “like a threat”: He grabs Andrew by the shoulders and yells, “Stay away from my family!”

Andrew’s amazing response: “I never realized you were capable of violence.”

Jeff tells Andrew he’s moving to Minneapolis—though it’s not for David, he says. He wants to be closer to home and he’s tired of the heartbreak of seeing naval ships in port. Andrew of course takes it in a spirit of goodwill and equanimity. Actually, no, he doesn’t. He sneers and acts betrayed and screams at Jeff to stay away from David.

Then he calls David and manipulates him into coming to Los Angeles, stages a credit-card-killing weekend at a five-star hotel with lobsters and a rented Mercedes convertible. He takes David shopping, buying him a wildly expensive suit. Over an extravagant dinner, David tries to let Andrew down gently. He says he believes Andrew doesn’t make a lot of positive connections and that he’s glad they’d had one great night together, but that they can’t just keep reliving their first date. In an attempt to see if they can take things to the next level, David asks for the “truth” about Andrew’s parents. Andrew gives a lot of sketchy answers. David says, “One day, you’re going to make someone very happy.”

Andrew goes back to the fleabag motel he’s been camping in since he left Norman. His failed attempt to seduce David has cost him almost $30,000.

In a bar, Andrew tells the bartender that David agreed to spend the rest of his life with him, then finds a drug dealer in the corner, asking him for “something stronger.” In the remarkable hallucinatory high that follows, he sees himself in a fitting with Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez). “I am the most generous man in the world,” he tells Versace, who obsequiously goes about the fitting while Andrew rails about how he has given people everything and been left with nothing. “This world has wasted me. While it has turned you into a star.”

“Was it the world, sir?” Versace replies placidly.

Andrew seethes: “We’re the same, you and me. The only difference is you got lucky.”
Gianni Versace puts the tape measure around Andrew’s neck. “Not the only difference, sir. I’m loved.”

Even high out of his mind on meth, Andrew Cunanan finds himself not measuring up.

And now the drug dealer wants money Andrew doesn’t have. So he goes back to Norman’s house. But he can’t get in. He screams at Norman through the locked glass doors while Norman calmly picks up the phone to call the police. There’s only one place left to go.

At least his mom (Joanna P. Adler) is happy to see him. She’s a little mentally unstable, but she’s glad to see him. She bathes him and sings an Italian lullaby, says he doesn’t smell like himself any more, and attempts to wash the not-him smell off. She tells Andrew how other moms are jealous because her son is touring the world with Gianni Versace, designing for operas. She is overwhelmed with pride over the things her son has done. Andrew becomes more and more visibly miserable. She doesn’t notice.

In the morning a seriously frayed and unstable Andrew Cunanan drives away, saying he’s going to Minneapolis.

One of the things that makes someone’s personality “disordered” versus “eccentric” is whether or not they are capable of internal validation. Narcissists, for example, have to constantly seek reflections of themselves in other people because they fundamentally do not know who they are; they lack a stable ego. Of course, there are lots of people who don’t have personality disorders who struggle with internal validation at least sometimes—hell, maybe it’s 100% of us. And probably everyone has had the experience of feeling rejected, unloved or unlovable. Maybe especially if you find yourself in any kind of demographic category that isn’t always accepted by others.

This episode is 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.

American Crime Story Review: “Descent” Is About Love, and Even More So Its Absence