The opening of the penultimate episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace takes us further back in time than we’ve ever been in the series. It’s 1957, and a very young Gianni Versace is trying to learn his place in the world. He’s an outsider at school; picked on by teachers, ignored by fellow students. He sits in his mother’s dress-making shop and watches her work, a sense of awe and wonder on his face the entire time.
He wants to do what his mother does. And so he does.
While school discourages this desire in Versace, his mother embraces it. If her son wants to be a dress-maker, so be it. She wants to nurture this in the child, and give him the chance to grow.
Yet when she places a pencil in Versace’s hand and asks him to design something for her, he instantly gives up.
“I can’t,” he says. “It’s too hard.”
It’s supposed to be hard, his mother counters. “Success only comes with hard work,” she says. “And it takes many years. But that’s alright. That’s why it’s special.”
It’s clear why this scene is here: to sharply contrast Versace against his murderer Andrew Cunanan even more. Here is the message that no one bothered to instill in Andrew – that success takes time, and that you have to work for it.
1980
It would be inaccurate to say that one event, one specific thing, turned Andrew Cunanan into the sociopathic serial killer he became. That’s not how these things work. But while there was no specific trigger, it’s clear from “Creator/Destroyer” that Andrew’s upbringing certainly didn’t help matters. This week, we’re provided with more insight into Andrew’s life, and it’s not pleasant.
As a child, Andrew adores his father, Modesto “Pete” Cunanan (Jon Jon Briones, giving a phenomenal, disturbing performance). Modesto is an immigrant, and he seems obsessed with the concept of making the so-called “American dream” a reality. He moves his family across the country, and sweet-talks his way into a cushy job at Merrill Lynch.
It becomes very clear very quickly that Modesto is a cruel, even violent man. His wife lives in terror of him, and his other children steer clear. Andrew is the only child who receives any sort of warmth from the man, and as a result, he would do seemingly anything to make his father proud.
We watch as the young Andrew interviews to join a fancy school. When asked by the board why he wants to attend the school, Andrew replies, “Because it’s the best school in America.” When asked who told him that, Andrew says: “My father.”
The school board then asks Andrew a seemingly simple question: if he could have one wish, what would it be? Never one for simple answers, he rattles off a list of material things – a house overlooking the ocean, multiple Mercedes’. Here, the school board cuts him off, reminding him that these are multiple things, and what they want to know is what would be his one ultimate wish. Andrew thinks about it for a moment, then replies: “To be special.”
Here again is the sharp contrast between Andrew and Versace. Andrew doesn’t want to be good at anything; he doesn’t want to have talent. He just wants the adulation.
And for a while, he gets it, courtesy of his father. Like when Modesto buys a brand-new car for Andrew, even though Andrew isn’t even old enough to drive yet. Thanks to his father, Andrew comes to believe he truly is special. But this feeling won’t last forever.
1987
A lot can change in 7 years. After setting up Andrew’s “special” childhood, “Creator/Destroyer” jumps ahead 7 years, just as the bottom is about to fall out. Modesto is no longer working at Merrill Lynch. Instead, he’s set-up shop in a rinky-dink firm that operates out of a strip mall; the type of establishment that might have popped-up in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Andrew has grown into a cocky, fun-loving 18 year old. He has an older, married lover who buys him gifts and keeps him comfy – but Andrew wants more. He wants to show his lover off to his friends – something the older man wants no part of. “This is strictly on the side,” he tells Andrew. It’s not that Andrew genuinely cares about this older man; he just wants to show-off. That’s the nature of Andrew Cunanan. To brag; to cause a scene. To get attention.
The happiness that Andrew is feeling is about to crumble apart like a sand castle as the tide is coming in. Modesto is busted for fraud – he’s been selling non-existent stocks to clueless, elderly people. When the feds come calling, Modesto flees the country – leaving his family behind, and in serious financial trouble. Andrew’s mother is understandably worried, telling Andrew that the family has no money, and that Modesto secretly sold their house months ago. But Andrew doesn’t want to hear it. He shrugs his mother off, and insists that his father wouldn’t leave them in such trouble. He must have a plan. He must have money stashed somewhere. He must.
So Andrew charts a trip to Manila to find his fugitive father. Modesto is living with a relative, bunked out in a shadowy, sweaty shack in the middle of nowhere. He welcomes Andrew with open arms, but the reunion turns sour very quickly. Andrew asks Modesto about any hidden money the family might be able to use. Modesto insists there is money. A lot of it. “Millions,” he says.
“Where?” Andrew asks.
“Out of reach,” is Modesto’s lame answer.
Later that night, however, Andrew gets the truth: there is no money. Andrew is furious and disgusted with Modesto, but Modesto is, in turn, just as disgusted with Andrew.
“You can’t go to America and start from nothing,” Modesto says bitterly. “That’s the lie, so I stole.”
“If you’re a lie, than I’m a lie,” Andrew cries.
“You’re not upset that I stole, you’re upset that I stopped,” his father shoots back. “Now you have to work, for yourself.”
In a fit of rage, Andrew brandishes a knife at his father, but backs off, whimpering.
“You don’t have it in you,” Modesto says, his voice thick with disgust. If only he could see into the future…
That bleak, blood-soaked future is calling. But first, Andrew returns home, defeated, and takes a job at a pharmacy. When quizzed about his family by the pharmacy owner, Andrew does what will soon come very naturally to him: he lies. His father is a success story, he says. And if Andrew’s father is a success story, then so is Andrew.
Creator/Destroyer
After spinning its wheels in previous episodes, American Crime Story finally finds its footing again with “Creator/Destroyer.” Part of that is due to the direction of actor Matt Bomer. Bomer doesn’t just juggle multiple narratives with ease, he also sets up three distinct time periods and locations – the Italy of Versace’s youth, the California of Andrew’s, and shadowy, humid Manila where Modesto is hiding out. The result is a clear, concise three-act structure that other episodes of this season have been drastically missing.
The other key element of this week’s episode is the performance of Jon Jon Briones as Andrew’s father Modesto. Briones is incredible here, crafting a truly memorable, truly unsettling character. Because of Modesto’s sleazy, cruel nature, we find ourselves empathizing with Andrew ever-so-slightly. It’s hard to have any sympathy for Andrew, since we know what a destructive monster he eventually becomes. But seeing his childhood, and watching his interactions with Modesto, we can at least begin to understand some of Andrew’s behavior.
Now that we’ve gone as far back into Andrew’s life as we can possibly go, there’s only one place American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace can go: back to the future. Back to the aftermath of Versace’s murder. The event that launched us on this violent, unsettling journey through the life of Andrew Cunanan. The end is near.
I was expecting a little more from the penultimate episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Instead, we continue our journey backward through the life of Andrew Cunanan. This time, we traced his early childhood and high school years. With only one episode left to go, I don’t think we’ll follow him back to the womb, and I, for one, am glad.
I’ve been lamenting this storytelling technique all season. With Cunanan, so few details are known that it feels disingenuous to portray the series as an exploration of why he did what he did. I don’t think I’m coming away with more of a sense of sympathy for Cunanan, nor do I want to.
The focus on Cunanan’s formative years also robbed us of spending time with Versace. All the decadence and luxury the promos promised feels a bit like a bait and switch. Remember the bungled manhunt for Cunanan that started in the premiere? I guess we’re only getting the bulk of that in the last episode.
It’s a strange choice considering how little happened in last night’s 90-minute episode. “Creator/Destroyer” was directed by Matt Bomer, who did a serviceable job of it, although it could have been condensed, for sure.
It was another mostly Versace-less installment, with just a quick glimpse of a young Versace being bullied at school, but showered with support and adoration at home. His sexuality and his passion for fashion were encouraged by his mother.
Andrew, on the other hand, didn’t enjoy the same level of acceptance or comfort. As a young boy, his father, Modesto, treated him like a prince. (He actually had the master bedroom, turns out.) He groomed him to be “special.” Modesto is all about projecting success to help blend in with white, suburban life. He’s thrilled when Andrew gets into a prestigious private school, so much so he buys young Andrew a car he’s not even old enough to drive.
Although he’s beloved at home, he faces a bit more trouble at school. Fitting in isn’t Andrew’s strongest suit. He’s got style and flair. Whether he’s bemoaning the staid yearbook photo setup or rocking a red leather jumpsuit to a house party, he’s very, very extra.
It draws a few side-eyes and name-calling from classmates, but even then Andrew did better with an older audience (including the married man he was seeing while he was a teen). At the aforementioned house party, he connects with Lizzie, the female friend we’ve seen him with later in California. Apparently, they met at this high school house party she crashed because she missed being young.
She calls it being an “impostor” which is a pretty heavy-handed way of characterizing her actions as a means of forcing a connection to Andrew’s later lies.
Modesto’s lies had much more impact. His pathological obsession with keeping up with the Joneses drove him to start swindling. After trying to get more cash out of a 90-year-old woman, the feds are on his tail. As they close in on him, he flees the office, grabs cash from under the floorboards of the house and flees the country.
Modesto’s spiral from Merrill Lynch broker to sleazy con artist destroyed the family and left them with nothing. Andrew can’t accept his father being a fraud, so he tracks him down in Manila. His father is shacking up in an actual shack. He’s still spinning lies about having millions of dollars hidden from the feds.
It’s one lie too many. Andrew traveled around the globe to find his father, and he’s not leaving without facing a hard truth. He confronts his father in a heated scene wherein Modesto calls him a “sissy” multiple times before spitting in his own son’s face.
This is the moment, American Crime Story seems to suggest, that Cunanan snapped. Upon his return to the States, facing homelessness and bankruptcy, he applies for the job at the pharmacy. He tells the boss his father is in Manila running pineapple plantations, a first step into the twisted world-building we’ve seen Andrew master over time.
Next week the story comes to an end with Gianni’s funeral and the climax of the manhunt for Cunanan.
Just about every episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace has provided a different possible answer to the question of why? Did Andrew Cunanan murder five men because he was a sociopath, or because his heart was broken? Was he lashing out because he’d failed at life, or did he see his killing spree as a way of attaining immortality? (If so, unfortunately, he was correct.) Was he a victim of widespread homophobia, or the living embodiment of it? Should we blame his fragile, mentally ill mother or, as last night’s penultimate episode, “Creator/Destroyer,” suggests, his defrauder dad?
We’ve heard so much about Modesto “Pete” Cunanan in the season’s first seven episodes that his appearance this week qualifies as a reveal. Andrew mentions this mythical figure in the crucial, if also fantastical, scene from the pilot where he and Gianni have a heart-to-heart at the San Francisco Opera. By then, a few years after we leave him in “Creator/Destroyer,” he’s perfected his story about the pineapple plantations and the boyfriend and Imelda Marcos. Now we know that Andrew learned to lie so shamelessly from his father, whose entire life was a con.
Pete grew up in the village of Baliuag, in the Philippines. As we hear him mention in his Merrill Lynch interview, he began his career in the US Navy. In 1961, he met Andrew’s mom, MaryAnn. Although he was a short, squat man 11 years her senior, she fell for him immediately. As she recalls to Maureen Orth in Vulgar Favors, “He was dressed in a white tuxedo, and I thought he looked like a Filipino Errol Flynn.” By the time they married, the same year they met, MaryAnn was six months pregnant. The kids we see in the episode are all ostensibly the products of that union—although Pete, who was constantly paranoid that his wife was cheating on him, maintained that their blonde, blue-eyed elder daughter, Elena, wasn’t his.
From here, the show’s timeline gets messy. It’s true that the Cunanans bought their first home, in the working-class San Diego suburb National City, for around $12,000, or roughly $90k today. Andrew was born two years later, in 1969. But when he was four, they moved to a fancier house in middle-class Bonita. Paid for with an inheritance MaryAnn received after her father died, the new place would have cost more than $550,000 in 2018.
The mini-mansion they bought when Andrew was a teenager was a third, even more expensive, home—the one we see them move into at the beginning of “Creator/Destroyer,” except that Versace suggests that he was just a precocious ten- or 11-year-old at the time. (Shout out to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a classic novel of wealth, war, and homoeroticism that Andrew started obsessing over after he caught the equally beloved 1981 PBS miniseries.)
His dad did, in fact, give him the master bedroom and buy him a sports car before he was old enough to drive it. There’s a peculiar, uncharacteristically context-free passage in Vulgar Favors where Orth notes, “People have wondered whether Pete and Andrew could possibly have had an intimate relationship while Andrew was growing up,” then reports that, “Pete is not upset by the question. He coolly takes a drag on his cigarette, and says no.” And that’s the end of that.
In any case, it was MaryAnn’s idea to send Andrew to La Jolla’s exclusive Bishop’s School. Although he hid his sexuality from his family, at school he cultivated a gregarious, pretentious, preppy, and extremely effeminate persona inspired by the aristocratic, queer Brideshead character Sebastian Flyte. He dated older men who showered him with gifts—including one named Antoine, who supposedly paid for that insane red leather suit Andrew wears to the house party. (That Antoine was a married closet-case is pure speculation on the show’s part.) The details about his yearbook, in which classmates voted him “Most Likely to Be Remembered” and he captioned his senior photo “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”), an ominous quote attributed to either King Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, are accurate.
Meanwhile, Pete had retired from the Navy in 1977, earned his bachelor’s degree and MBA, and entered a stockbroker training program at Merrill Lynch. He left two years later, going on to work at five other firms between 1981 and 1988. One former employer told Orth that Pete had stolen money from clients, including at least one nonagenarian like the elderly woman we see him talking to on the phone, at many of those companies. “There is no disclosable disciplinary action with the [National Association of Securities Dealers] on record,” Orth writes, “but Pete was let go more than once.” There was never any dramatic FBI chase, but Pete did secretly sell the Cunanan home and flee to the Philippines. MaryAnn spiraled, her kids dropped out of college, and Andrew spent five uncomfortable days in his dad’s homeland. As Versace suggests, he’d bought in to Pete’s lies about their prosperity as much as anyone else.
The connection to Gianni Versace’s childhood, in a rare dive into the designer’s history that actually works on the show, is obvious. Versace’s mother, Francesca, really did want to be a doctor before yielding to the sexism of the the family’s Southern Italian home city of Calabria and starting a prosperous dressmaking business instead. In her book House of Versace, Deborah Ball writes that Franca had opened her own shop by age 20. That Andrew’s beloved dad bought his son everything he wanted and encouraged him to see himself as special, while Gianni’s beloved mom preached hard work and taught him to sew, is too telling a contrast to ignore.
There were other important differences between Cunanan’s and Versace’s beginnings, of course. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has been taken to task for erasing Andrew’s biracial identity. Although she praises Ryan Murphy’s decision to cast Darren Criss, a half-Filipino Glee alum, in the starring role, Slate critic Inkoo Kang points out that, “A few character details here and there suggest Andrew’s racial self-hatred and the prevalence of anti-Asian racism within the gay community, but the relative sparseness of these implications is all the more noteworthy in contrast with the richly developed portrait of the decade’s homophobia.”
Last night’s episode goes a long way toward justifying the omission. Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith aren’t blithely erasing Andrew’s Filipino identity so much as depicting the way he denied his Asian-American side because he was ashamed of his father. In an interview with Vulture, Smith said, “It’s interesting that [Andrew] excludes his own racial identity, which is why you don’t get to it until a later part of the episodes, because he lies about it.” Pete’s story, which highlights how he talked his way into the overwhelmingly white world of banking and implies that racism kept him from excelling there, is the story of the role Andrew’s nonwhite heritage played in his life. By the end of the episode, he’s rejected his dad, left the Philippines, and applied for a job with a Filipino drugstore owner whose modest success elicits only condescension from Andrew.
So! Next week is the series finale. No telling what can be expected. There isn’t much left to tell about Cunanan’s life before the murders, so maybe Versace will flash forward to the period immediately after them, when Andrew was on the run again and Donatella was struggling to carry on her brother’s company as the family mourned. Maybe, like the premiere, it will alternate between that story and the characters’ pasts. Either way, it should be an exciting final chapter of such an elegant, if misunderstood, season.
The episode is a little too long and delves further into Andrew’s past while only showing Gianni before the cold open.
Gianni and Andrew had very different childhoods.
“Creator/Destroyer” shows Gianni as being very close to his mother and being encouraged at a young age to do what he loves as his mother did. She tells Gianni that success only comes from hard work. It’s not easy but it’s worth it.
How funny that for Andrew, he is told the exact opposite. Andrew expects everything without hard work because he is “special.”
Andrew’s father, Modesto “Pete” Cunanan, is doting but in an over-the-top and threatening way. He is certainly an interesting character played amazingly well by Jon Jon Briones. We get a glimpse into perhaps why Andrew became the person he did.
For one, Andrew is completely spoiled by Modesto and even his siblings call him “Prince Andrew.” While they all suffer in a small, shared bedroom, Andrew gets the master suite to himself.
After Andrew gets accepted into an elite private school, Modesto buys young Andrew a car, which is utterly ridiculous. He’s about twelve.
Modesto often calls Maryanne, his wife, weak and abuses her verbally and physically. From previous episodes, Maryanne seems unstable, but from “Creator/Destroyer,” I definitely feel a little sorry for her.
Modesto also turns Andrew against her–or he at least shuts her out.
Modesto is a wheeler and dealer who spins lies and who wants the most from his American Dream. After beating out hundreds of Ivy-leaguers for a job at Merrill Lynch, we see Modesto isn’t quite as good as finding clients to invest as he once bragged.
He’s a liar and ultimately a con-man who leaves his family broke as he runs off to the Philippines.
Andrew is distraught when his father leaves but still believes that Modesto has money and that he’s just in hiding from the FBI. So, he goes to Manila to find him.
The confrontation between Modesto and Andrew is the highlight of the episode and showcases the acting talents of both Jon Jon Briones and Darren Criss. The whole scene between them is utterly mesmerizing and difficult to watch.
Modesto berates Andrew and says that he’s just like Maryanne—weak. He spits on Andrew and for a moment, as Andrew holds a knife in his hand, it seems plausible that Andrew could begin his spree of violence here.
Instead, Andrew presses the knife in his hand and cries.
Andrew returns to the US and nearly shrinks in embarrassment as neighbors watch them move out of their grand home. He’s broken.
Andrew reluctantly goes to his local pharmacy to apply for a job. The pharmacist is a Filipino man and presses Andrew about his father.
It is there where Andrew begins the big lie—he says that his father owns pineapple plantations:
Andrew: As far as the eye can see.
And this is the Andrew we know.
“Creator/Destroyer” shows us that Andrew had seen violence in his home and that he was taught that things should be given to him without actually putting the work in. It’s also alluded to that Andrew was sexually abused by his father.
We can see why Andrew is obsessed with portraying a certain image, but his childhood does not give absolve him for the brutal murders. Andrew could have taken the Gianni route by working hard to earn money, but instead chose the wrong path.
“Creator/Destroyer” is the penultimate episode of the series, so we should see Andrew’s demise on the last episode. Just like Modesto, he will be hunted down by the FBI.
Overall, “Creator/Destroyer” is an insightful episode with some great scenes (including Andrew owning the dance floor to “Whip It”) but it’s not the most compelling. I do appreciate though, that we see Andrew before he sets out on his path of lies.
1957, Calabria. Gianni Versace’s mother fits a dress to a client as, in a corner of the shop, little Gianni watches and works on a sketch of the dress. After the client leaves, Mama confronts Gianni: she sees him observing her, and “there is no need to hide.” She asks to see his notebook; seeing the drawings inside, she smiles fondly and tells him – in English, idiotically the language in which this and the other Italian scenes take place, leavened only with the occasional “ciao” and a handful of offensive Chef Boyardee pronunciations, which we will get to – that as a girl, she hoped to become a doctor. Her father told her that’s not a job for a woman, so she became a dressmaker, and promised herself she would never tell her children what job they should do. Gianni should do what he loves, what he feels in his heart. Not how I think parents talked to their kids about their future careers in the fifties, but okay. She goes on that it will take hard work, practice, educating himself about sewing and the fabrics…she’ll teach him if he wants her to. Gianni nods happily. | 15 March 2018
1957, Calabria. Gianni Versace’s mother fits a dress to a client as, in a corner of the shop, little Gianni watches and works on a sketch of the dress. After the client leaves, Mama confronts Gianni: she sees him observing her, and “there is no need to hide.” She asks to see his notebook; seeing the drawings inside, she smiles fondly and tells him – in English, idiotically the language in which this and the other Italian scenes take place, leavened only with the occasional “ciao” and a handful of offensive Chef Boyardee pronunciations, which we will get to – that as a girl, she hoped to become a doctor. Her father told her that’s not a job for a woman, so she became a dressmaker, and promised herself she would never tell her children what job they should do. Gianni should do what he loves, what he feels in his heart. Not how I think parents talked to their kids about their future careers in the fifties, but okay. She goes on that it will take hard work, practice, educating himself about sewing and the fabrics…she’ll teach him if he wants her to. Gianni nods happily.
In a classroom, a teacher is reviewing Latin verb conjugations, and naturally she’s using the verb “to love,” which is both the standard and on the nose. Less standard, again, is that a language lesson in an Italian classroom would be conducted in English, which might explain why young Gianni is doing another dress drawing instead of paying attention. Walking the rows of desks, the teacher spots Gianni’s sketch and snatches it up, Super-Mario-ing, “What arrrre you, a perrrrverrrt?” Fuck’s sake, show. “Not a pervert, miss – a pansy!” another kid chimes in, because we could have assumed a pervasive homophobia and claustrophobic gendering of everything in this time period, but sure, underline it, if only to distract us from the Hey Mambo caricature of Italian accents. The teacher tears his sketch in four and puts it on his schoolbook as the class continues droning the plurals. “We love; you love; they love.”
At home, Mama gets Gianni to admit that he’s downcast because the teacher called him a pervert. Mama sternly reassembles his drawing, tells him it’s beautiful, and hands him a piece of patterning chalk: “We make it for real, yes?” He starts to trace, then stops, saying it’s too hard. Mama takes his shoulders and gives him the Jimmy Dugan “the hard is what makes it great” speech from A League Of Their Own, basically, the script emphasizing that success is special because it comes from hard work to point up the contrast between the lessons Gianni learned as a child and the lessons we’ll see Andrew Cunanan learning. …Just in case you didn’t get it, which I’m sure you did, because the whole scene was in English. Mama tells Gianni to try again. He does, with more confidence this time.
1980, San Diego. Modesto “Pete” Cunanan is presiding over the family’s move out of a modest house on the edge of town, and by “presiding” I mean he’s expounding on how they can save five hundred bucks doing it themselves, a five hundred he can turn into ten thousand, while his older children heave items into a truck and roll their eyes at him. Mary Ann and her mom jeans chuckle indulgently. Pete asks where Andrew is.
Andrew and his teddy bear have parked it in a lawn chair in his room to read Brideshead Revisited. Very interesting choice, given what I remember of the Waugh, including but not limited to a barely subtextual relationship between Charles and Sebastian; the narrator on the outside looking in, at a family, at a system of inherited influence, and feeling like he could, and also must, belong to it; Sebastian’s teddy bear. It’s been a long time; mostly the beautifully evocative prose stayed with me, so if you’ve never read any Waugh, quit hanging around my workmanlike shit and go get you some Decline And Fall. Andrew finally responds to his father’s calls, marching out of the room with that odd Starman gait – the casting of Edouard Holdener as young Cunanan is stellar, and Holdener and episode director Matt Bomer have done a great job capturing certain bits of Darren Criss’s portrayal, but just enough of them – and is told to say goodbye to their squatty home. “This is not for you.”
The rest of the family is then closed into the back of the truck. Andrew and his Izod shorts and his bear get to ride shotgun with Pete.
The truck pulls up at a noticeably grander home, Benzes arrayed on the street out front. Pete takes Andrew’s hand and leads him upstairs as, outside, the others haul their belongings off the truck. Mary Ann wonders where Pete is. “With Prince Andrew,” Christopher snarks. “He’s being given the tour,” Elena adds (she’s played by Isa Briones, daughter of Jon Jon, the longtime Miss Saigon actor playing Pete here). Mary Ann’s smile fades, but she only urges the other kids to keep unpacking. Upstairs, Pete is introducing Andrew to the biggest bedroom, the master bedroom – his new room. It’s his because he’s special. Pete wants him to remember that he’s special every night before he goes to sleep, and every morning when he wakes up. If he feels special, “success will follow.” Pete will need the closet “for all [his] suits,” but otherwise, it’s all Andrew’s. The camera moves to a ground-level shot to show them surveying it in all its empty, beige-wall-to-walled glory.
Nighttime. The other kids sleep crammed head-to-foot in another, tiny bedroom. Mary Ann, kneeling by a twin bed in a spartan room, says a rosary (I think? she’s holding one, in any case), then cries. Alone in his king-size bed in his king-size room, Andrew sits waiting, then clambers down to investigate a noise: Pete, raising the American flag in front of the house, up a pole lit by little spotlights. I was under the impression that this was Not Done, but according to a quick Google, it’s okay to display the flag after sunset if it is lit, which it is. Pete spots Andrew watching him and salutes. Andrew salutes back. A breeze picks up the flag and blows it out straight, in reverse, obscuring Andrew from view. Nice shot comp, Bomer. I see you.
After the title card, we find father and son laying out their suits, then carefully armoring up with jacket, fancy cufflinks, neatly tied neckties, and suspenders. They’re both en route to interviews, Andrew at the Bishop’s School, Pete at Merrill Lynch. We cut back and forth between the paternal and filial hustles, Pete taking in the founders’ wall of photos, Andrew the case of athletic trophies; Andrew contemplating his hopeful future classmates, Pete the forbidding row of dark-suited white dudes who want the same job he does. Mary Ann covers Andrew’s hand with hers, though he doesn’t really respond. Pete corrects his interviewers on his name, the Americanized “Pete” and not the other-sounding (and inaccurate) “Modesto”; he’s told they don’t call in many prospective hires like him, night-school bootstrap-pullers. As Andrew’s called in for his interview, Pete says he knows there’s a long line of Ivy Leaguers waiting to talk to them, but he’s unique in that he came from nothing.
Andrew’s asked why he wants to come to Bishop’s. He chirps that it’s the best school in the state, one of the best in the country. “Who told you that?”, one of his interviewers asks skeptically. “My father.”
Said father isn’t trying to hear the interviewer who wants to talk more about business and less about his biography. Business is biography, Pete slicks, starting a showy self-selling monologue with, “My life is a tale told in dollars.” Good line, but that’s what it is, and he goes on about his poor upbringing in the Philippines, serving in the Navy so he could live and work in the U.S., etc. The interviewers suppress eye-rolls and thank him, as they clearly feel cornered into doing, for his service, but Pete’s all, nooooo, I thank this great country, and talks about going from a 12K house to an 80K one: “Now, is that biography? Or business?” It’s boring and studied, is what it is, but Pete goes on about growing investors’ money and taking it to new lands.
Meanwhile, his equally studied son answers a question about what he’d do with one wish. A house with an ocean view, two Mercedes, four “beautiful children,” three “beautiful dogs,” and a good relationship with God. The ladies interviewing him know that smell.
“Is that one wish or five?” one of them asks gently. Andrew immediately asks if he made a mistake. No, not at all; she’ll give him another crack at it. It doesn’t take him long to come up with a single wish, which he delivers with that signature arrogant chin tilt. “To be special.”
Andrew and Mary Ann come home, Mary Ann teaching Andrew some rudimentary Italian, to find Pete scowling at a pizza. Mary Ann’s confused that he heard so soon, and says she’s sorry, and Pete whips around, glares at each of them briefly, then busts out a scary ringmaster smile to say that he’s joking – he did get hired. It’s Andrew he hugs, congratulating himself on his arrival in corporate America and bragging about his salary. He unveils a luxurious spread, including lobster, and announces that every night from now on, “we eat like kings.” Mary Ann is also celebrating, but Pete’s ignoring her to serve Andrew. Well, until a couple of the other kids wander in to ask what the commotion is and Mary Ann yodels that Pete got the job. Then Pete’s like, but you didn’t think I did. You believed my joke. There’s no right thing to say here, which Mary Ann clearly understands, but she tries to put her hands to his face and say how happy she is. Pete swats her away and continues setting the table for Andrew, saying Andrew knew, before Pete even played his “joke.” He sits down and begins loading Andrew’s plate, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t check Mary Ann’s medication again, “see if your thoughts are confused.” They don’t want her going back into the hospital, do they? “Modesto,” she says, and takes a breath. The older kids watch nervously. Mary Ann settles on “let’s celebrate,” waving the other kids towards the table and grabbing plates for everyone else outside the charmed circle. “Like kings, just like you said,” Mary Ann says breathlessly. Andrew studies his father.
At bedtime, Pete resumes reading to Andrew from Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book Of Etiquette. Andrew asks if they have to read the whole thing. Yes, Pete tells him. “It’s not enough to be smart. You need to fit in.” He begins to read about the art of conversation – “there are two types of conversation: polite, and real” – but Andrew blurts, “What happens if I don’t get accepted to Bishop’s School?” Don’t be ridiculous, Pete says, adding that they moved to that house so Andrew could be close to Bishop’s, so of course he’s going to get in. This failure-is-not-an-option answer isn’t comforting, and Andrew stares into the middle distance as Pete digs into the topic of polite conversation.
Andrew does get in, but only after a typically self-absorbed display of snatching the mail from the letter carrier, dumping items not addressed to him on the floor, and ripping the envelope open like an animal. He’s so relieved to have gotten accepted that he’s weeping, a reaction Mary Ann somehow doesn’t understand despite the abuse Pete’s evidently heaped on her for years now. Pete comes in, snatches the letter from her, reads it, and breaks down in an unsettling mixture of victorious laughter and tears, and kneels to kiss Andrew’s feet, literally. Andrew tolerates this, expressionlessly, a tear still clinging to his cheek.
Pete comes onto the trading floor at Merrill; he’s feeling the pressure, having beaten out 500 other guys for the job, but feigns cockiness to a colleague. It doesn’t translate to his sales call, which is more of the same hitting the Navy-service button, then following up with a self-help money-management book cliché, to wit: if the customer feels comfortable about a stock, it’s probably one everyone already knows about. The customer’s like, good point, but no thanks, and hangs up. Pete pretends he still on the line and performatively bellows over the din of the floor about needing to get started with the customer’s financial information, a “HEY LOOK LOOK AT ME NOT FAILING” look we’ve seen on his son many times in the series to date. Nobody hears the ernh ernh ernh of the disconnected line in Pete’s ear, but then, nobody pays Pete much mind at all.
To self-soothe, Pete comes in to undermine Mary Ann’s authority while she’s helping Andrew with homework, and to show Andrew the gold Datsun ZX he’s bought the prince. Andrew is still a tween in these scenes, mind you, but is notably not terribly surprised that his father has bought him a car. Mary Ann’s like, fuck out of here with that, he’s like eleven, and Pete grits that he’s “not an idiot,” he knows Andrew can’t drive it but he can learn to dream, which is just as important. “You can’t give him a car!” Mary Ann exasps. Pete advances on her; she backs away, babbling that he should think of Elena and Chris, who are old enough to drive. Focus pull to Andrew watching from the driver’s seat as Pete ask-snarls if Mary Ann has gone mad again; when she makes the mistake of asking what the car is a gift for, that getting into Bishop’s is a beginning, not a goal, Pete grabs her around the neck and tells her he’s trying to make sure Andrew doesn’t end up like her. He releases her with a shove, and she falls between a couple of hedges. “Don’t overreact,” he mutters, then turns back to Andrew with his customary showman’s grin.
He hops into the passenger seat all, “Let’s play!” Neither of them acknowledges what just happened. Pete muses that, while he loves the other kids, they aren’t special like Andrew, who is the best friend Pete ever had. Andrew blinks, discomfited, and if this is what it was between them, it goes a long way to explaining how Andrew became what he did: inordinate pressure to live up to his father’s ideals, no ability to manage normal setbacks or disappointments, set against/apart from the siblings who could otherwise integrate his expectations but understandably have little use for the little one-percenter in their midst, and taught that the way to meet any challenge to your version of reality is to cow the challenger, not to adjust your own thinking. Pete is still talking, poisoning Andrew with tales of Mary Ann’s post-partum depression cast as a “weak mind.” Pete looked after him when he was an infant. “I was your mother and your father.” He fiddles smugly with the radio as Mary Ann comes around to Andrew’s side of the car and rests her hands on the windowsill. Without looking at his mother, Andrew rolls up the window against her, nearly catching her fingers in the mechanism.
At bedtime, Andrew works a Rubik’s cube – a comparatively unsubtle signifier, for this show – and asks if Pete always wanted to become a stockbroker. Pete half-answers that he took the opportunities that came his way; he’s “the world’s greatest opportunist.” It’s the only way to get ahead, he says mostly to himself, taking off his pants. Andrew says he likes reading, and stories: “Maybe I could write books!” Pete snorts that if someone gives him a million dollars to write a book, that’s one thing; otherwise, no. He turns off a bedside lamp and sits in his underwear beside Andrew, whose grip on the Rubik’s cube has tightened. Pete pries it out of his hands and croons that, when Andrew was little, he burned his foot on a heater. “I picked you up, and kissed you better. And you didn’t make a sound.” Pete reaches for the other lamp’s switch. “Not a sound.” Click; darkness.
If the implication is that Pete molested Andrew, a theory I haven’t seen elsewhere (although some sources suggest Andrew was assaulted by a priest, during his time as an altar boy), I’m even happier than I’d otherwise be to linger on the next shot, a mouth-watering row of vintage Benzes in the Bishop’s parking lot accompanied by the opening strains of the Bangles’ version of “Hazy Shade Of Winter.”
When the guitar kicks in, we’re told it’s 1987, and Andrew wheels into a parking spot in the Datsun and alights, in slo-mo, slinging his blazer over his shoulder with a little Foley whoosh. It’s picture day at Bishop’s, and Andrew’s being a noisy theater kid in the line for the photographer, wake-up-sheeple-ing showily to his schoolmates about all doing the same thing for their photos. A football douche wheels around to eye-roll, “Shut up. F**.” Andrew is unfazed by this, unbuttoning his shirt and snitting, “If being a f** means being different.” He brushes to the front of the line and seats himself in front of the camera, tie still tied but shirt open. “Sign me up!” He strikes a pose. “Take a photograph, my good man!” he shouts at the photographer, cocking a hip. Sixteen: it’s exhausting. Not least for the 16-year-old.
Pete stews in the car, then goes in to his current office, a boiler room operation running out of a repurposed furniture store. A wan piano line follows him into a cube warren to his desk. His cubicle wall is festooned with pictures of Andrew, and Andrew only. He gets on the phone, using the same patter that clearly didn’t work at Merrill, only this time he’s apologizing for “world events” fouling up their last trade and selling the client on liquidating her late husband’s pension. The client, hooked up to an oxygen tank and frowning silently as she listens, is in her nineties, and her grandson comes upon the conversation and is not having it. Pete hangs up hastily when the grandson gets to the threatening part of the kiss-off. He wrenches his jacket off, his eyes darting, looking for a way out…or up.
Mary Ann puts down a plate of food and asks when she gets to meet Andrew’s “special lady.” She’s no fool, she knows Andrew doesn’t “smell this nice” for her. Andrew, leafing through a Vogue, weighs whether to scandalize Mary Ann, then asks what if “she’s” “older than thirty”? Mary Ann pours him a glass of milk and says a young man should “always be” with an older woman. She teaches him how to be a man, Mary Ann adds, asking how they met. “Babysitting?” Andrew lies.
Later, he puts a Samantha Fox tape into the stereo and blasts it while guzzling from a flask and dancing self-consciously around the master bedroom he’s still occupying. He goes through a few shirts in the closet, then comes upon an outfit that makes him twinkle.
Cut to Andrew emerging from the house in a black raincoat, which he’s clutching around him to hide what’s underneath. He climbs into an older man’s Benz coupe, and is greeted with a smooch, but refuses to show what he’s wearing underneath. There’s a gift for him in the glove box, a bottle of cologne, and Andrew stagily announces that he knows the guy buys him things, but that’s “not what this is about” for Andrew. The guy’s like, Andrew, chill out, and asks where they’re headed. To the IMDb and Google image search, in my case, because the screener I’m working with doesn’t have end credits and the guy playing his boyf cannot be Michael Badalucco, yet really looks like him.
Y’all tell me who this is, it’s driving me nuts. Andrew, meanwhile, isn’t telling Fauxdalucco where they’re going, and Faux isn’t happy when he finds out it’s a house party. It’ll be fun, Andrew tries to shrug, but Faux isn’t about it; he’s married. “We’re a secret.” Andrew doesn’t want them to be a secret anymore, and Faux has to tell him how shit is, namely that their thing is “strictly on the side.” Did Andrew think it could be more, Faux asks kindly, just as a couple of dingles on their way into the party pound on the hood, at which time Faux has had enough, and hands Andrew some cash and tells him to get out, now. Andrew ignores the money and stalks into the party, whipping off the trench to reveal a red pleather sweat-suit/suit situation underneath. As Devo orders him to “whip it, whip it good,” Andrew does so, sending the trench into the bushes next to the driveway, and stalks into the house, where he finds the dance floor and grimly and immediately dominates it, driving the other partygoers to the sidelines with his big movements. As the friend we saw in the first episode, the one who tried to sell Andrew on being with a nice guy like him, tells another friend that he’s gearing up to ask Andrew out and worries that he doesn’t have the right look, Andrew continues dancing, not-that-surreptitiously checking to see who’s watching him and why.
The friend, Jerome, watches him with an eloquent combination of terror and turgidity. Elsewhere in the room, Lizzie Coté comes upon this performance and pulls a “well will you look at this guy” face, but the longer she observes, the clearer it becomes that he’s drowning out there,
so she plunges in to join/save him, telling him he looks fabulous. “What, this thing? This little thing?” Later, on the couch, they bond, although she has a secret to share. “Can we only ever speak in secrets?” Andrew asks, probably not entirely joking. Lizzie reveals she’s an impostor – a married lady the owners of the house, the DeSilvas (hmm), asked to keep an eye on things. He’s fine with that, saying he gets on far better with older people; they can still be friends. She confides that she missed this whole scene thanks to being home-schooled, but Andrew can’t wait to get out of school. What will he do? Seek out his heroes, he says: Basquiat, Keith Haring…Versace.
At Pete’s job, a secretary who seems to have a crush on him gets up to tell him, “They’re waiting for you.” In a conference room, Pete tries to joke with his three interlocutors about whether he’s getting promoted, but it’s actually about an accusation from the grandson that he took Nana’s life savings and, well, just took it, telling her he’d lost the money on a non-existent stock. That’s illegal, Pete is reminded, and his protest that it’s just a misunderstanding doesn’t go over well either; there have evidently been quite a few of those over the years, not to mention his frequent job changes, and the fact that guys don’t tend to come to this outfit from Merrill “voluntarily.” The feds are on the case now, and the company is cooperating, because they have nothing to hide. Does Pete? He says that he does not. He walks as casually as he can to his cubicle, then begins frantically shredding, crumpling, etc., although it seems like if the issue is that the equities didn’t exist, he should be creating a paper trail saying they do, not destroying spreadsheets that are irrelevant in that case, but what do I know. The shredder jams on him anyway, and when he realizes his colleagues are prairie-dogging in his direction, he sinks into his chair and freaks out quietly to himself, trying to come up with a plan. What he lands on: booking a flight for that day.
The FBI – not the SEC? You know what, who cares. It doesn’t matter which agency “should” show up to handle the Pete situation; the point is, one of them is coming in the front door, and Pete, tipped by his crush at the front desk, is bolting out the back.
At school, Andrew is basking in his yearbook triumph:
He’s thrilled. His friend teases him that nobody cares about yearbook awards. “Says the man that didn’t get one,” Andrew shoots back, but he’s not mad. The friend looks at Andrew’s real page, not the semi-shirtless Most Likely To Be Remembered snap, and asks of the caption, “Apres moi, le deluge?” “After me, destruction,” Andrew translates, shrugging that it sounded cool.
Pete screeches up to the house and dashes inside, then upstairs, where he pries up a board in the closet and grabs a Ziploc of cash and passports from underneath. Mary Ann comes in to ask what’s happening, and is shoved to the ground once again as Pete dashes towards the front door…only to find the FBI already there, announcing a warrant for his arrest. Back up he goes, out what I guess is an upstairs porch door, and over a side wall into a neighbor’s property. Outside, Andrew pulls up and gets out down the street, frowning at the FBI cars and commotion, as Mary Ann opens the door to the agents, who demand to know where he is. She just stares at them. Andrew, walking back to the car, sees Pete hurdling a fence. “Dad…?” Pete grabs Andrew’s car keys, tells him not to believe a word they say, and takes off in the Datsun. Andrew watches him peel away, completely unable to incorporate this turn of events into his understanding of the world and his life.
Mary Ann is telling Andrew the extent of Pete’s deluge: he emptied the bank accounts, sold the house out from under them and transferred the money…he knew the feds were coming. Andrew stares into space, in forlorn shock…
…then does the same at the ceiling in the master bedroom that night, before getting up and packing. He’s going to find Pete, he grimly tells Mary Ann, who wails that he’s gone – he fled to Manila, “like a dirty rat.” She goes on that she knew he was stealing, and should have said something, but Andrew quickly writes a note and holds it up to shush her: “They’re listening.” He scribbles that “Dad has money hidden,” with “hidden” underlined, and she has to tell him that there is no plan, no secret stash. Pete left them, left them with nothing. Andrew isn’t going to believe that, and when she starts screeching that he can’t go, Pete’s dangerous, she’s scared, he clamps a hand over her mouth and tells her she’s “wrong about him.” He pushes past her…
…and after the break, he’s getting a cab at the airport in Manila. The driver’s like, you sure you want to go to this address? Maybe a nice hotel? Andrew’s sweatily insistent, even when they pull up to a nondescript and overgrown address on a dirt road; he doesn’t even ask the driver to stay, just gathers his nads and knocks on the front door. His uncle answers. He’s thrilled to meet Andrew, but Andrew’s focused on finding Pete, so Tito directs him through heavy underbrush to an outbuilding, just as overgrown…with metaphor, what with the palm fronds and mosquito netting obscuring everything, nature too strong to keep at bay. Andrew knocks the door open and steps hesitantly inside his father’s lair, which is sizable and well kept under the circumstances. Pete is behind a newspaper, and gets up to hug Andrew, laughing, “I knew you’d come.” Andrew relaxes into his embrace.
Pete puts down a plate of chicharrones, apologizing for their frumpiness, “but with a cold beer…” Andrew is rigid at the table. “Long flight?” Pete asks. Andrew nods. Pete says Andrew must have questions. “Mom says there’s no money,” Andrew blurts. Pete grouses that Mary Ann has “a weak mind,” always did, and explains selling the house by saying he had to move assets “out of reach” so the feds wouldn’t get it. “So, there’s money,” Andrew confirms. “Millions!” Pete says. Andrew’s like, great, so…where is it? “I told you,” Pete says, beginning to darken. “Did you?” Pete glares. “Out of reach,” he repeats. “Oh,” Andrew says, his face falling. Pete exclaims with a salesman smile that he’s so happy Andrew’s there.
Andrew’s not; he can’t sleep. He gets up and turns on the light next to Pete’s bed; Pete startles awake, into a defensive posture, and says he’s not surprised Andrew can’t fall asleep. His “body remembers” the heat there, but Andrew isn’t used to it, didn’t grow up in it, playing in it. Pete doesn’t move his gaze from Andrew’s as he says that you can pretend you belong somewhere else, “but the body knows.” There’s no money, is there, Andrew grunts. Pete allows that no, there isn’t. “No plan. No…millions,” Andrew snarks, and is told to watch his tone; Pete’s still his father. “My father. My father,” Andrew muses, and here’s where the dialogue gets rull stagey and over-externalized, so I’ll boil it down: Andrew calls Pete a thief and a liar; Pete delivers a monologue about his “real crime,” that he didn’t steal big enough, that if he’d stolen hundreds of millions they’d have given him a corner office but the grubby amounts he took meant he didn’t get it, didn’t belong (and this is not a bad insight; nor is his note that, actually, going to America with nothing and making it big is a lie too; this is just a little Death Of A Salesman in the execution, and in a way that’s landing more “needed another draft” than “homage” to me).
“I can’t be this,” Andrew says bleakly. Pete is offended that Andrew doesn’t want to be him, but Andrew points out that he bragged to his friends about Pete – and it turns out everything he said was a lie, and he can’t “be a lie,” he just can’t. He’s nothing but, of course, and nothing about that is going to change for him, but it’s how badly he wants to be a true thing, one of substance, that turns everything upside down for him and his victims. Andrew then delivers a monologue of his own, not terribly credible in my opinion at least as far as 1) how people are with damaging information they’ve found or 2) how kids deal with their parents’ humanity, about going to the library to research Manila and finding out that not only is Pete not in the top 500 stockbrokers in California; that list, as I posited in a previous recap, isn’t even a thing. Criss acts it very well, but is told to pair it with a bit of business chopping up some fruit or something that’s a little much, and mostly an excuse to get a knife into the scene. Pete doesn’t respond to the accusation, turning Andrew’s tears around on him instead and calling him weak, like his mother – who, Pete bitterly notes, didn’t care that he stole “as long as there was money.” Why didn’t Andrew bring up the book earlier? Because he thought there was money. He’s not upset that Pete stole; he’s upset that Pete stopped. Not a bad point, but not one Pete really has standing to make, either. Pete must have not finished that polite-conversation chapter, though, because he snarks that now Andrew has to work, “a sissy kid with a sissy mind!”, and punctuates it by spitting in Andrew’s face. Andrew doesn’t get to come there and judge him; he judges Andrew. He’s ashamed of Andrew, his “special sissy boy.”
Andrew couldn’t get from one street to another, never mind from the Philippines to America. “And back again!” Andrew snits, and gets slapped across the face, so he grabs the knife, but Pete has his number: “Do it. BE A MAN! FOR ONCE!” Andrew flinches away from him; he’s clinging to the knife, the blade slicing into his palm, his face a childish mask of pain and paralysis. No, Pete smugs as Andrew sobs. “You don’t have it in you.” Blood drips onto the floor, and Andrew drops the knife and whispers that he’ll never be like Pete. Pete stares at him, utterly disgusted.
Back in San Diego, Andrew arrives to find the house getting packed up by a collection service. He slowly counts out the cab fare with a bandaged hand, reluctant to part with what’s left of his money. Looky-loo neighbors watch the movers. Andrew heads inside, ignoring his mother, to find the master bedroom emptied, except for the bare-mattressed bed and a few stacks of books. He stands at the window for a moment, then attacks the books, strewing them about. The Amy Vanderbilt undergoes an especially vicious attack, as he rips it apart and hurls the pieces around.
At the pharmacy, Andrew asks for a job application. Mercado asks if he’s Filipino, and presses him on his family name and where they come from; Andrew is barely polite, but that doesn’t stop the quizzing, and when Mercado asks what Pete does with his days, Andrew lies blandly that Pete owns “multiple pineapple plantations.” Mercado is skeptical, but merely says, “Is that so.” “As far as the eye can see,” Andrew says.
We go way back and are squarely situation in the 80s for this foundational episode of the Assassination of Gianni Versace. There’s no death, but plenty of destruction, as breadcrumbs are dropped, the hints of all of Andrew’s traits to come. His love of clothing, from his father’s enormous closet. His penchant for lying and swindling, also from his father. And of course the beginning of his history of violence, as he watched his father manipulate his mother, threaten her, and ring her neck. Dating much older men, receiving lavish gifts, manipulating them like he does with this man, pretending he thought they could go to the party together so he can get the gift and his night back, still spending it how he pleases.
The episode, which features the rise and fall of Modesto Cunanan’s American Dream, benefits greatly from an 80s-inspired soundtrack, including Devo and a great Jefferson Airplane cover. Andrew seems confident in a health way, and while his father obviously favors him, he hasn’t quite done a full psychological number on him yet. But Andrew’s still a mix of utter confidence and intense self-consciousness, and you better believe that yearbook pic, and the superlative “Most Likely to be Remembered,” are both real.
There have been a lot of shots of Andrew dancing throughout this series. Dancing at clubs, sure, but the best ones so far have been solo and incongruous, like jamming out alone in a car after murdering someone. But this sequence, two long, back to back shots of Andrew from exiting his lover’s car, ripping off the trench coat to unveil the white boy jazzercise instructor version of Eddie Murphy’s red leather outfit underneath, and a runway walk that Miss J would approve as he enters the party to his wrist-inflected entrance directly onto the dance floor, puts them all to shame.
It’s sort of like reverse-engineering a puzzle. We see the nervous blond friend, the man from the first episode who called out Andrew’s dishonesty about his sexuality. Wearing a fantastic 80s sweater (that’s what we’re calling them now instead of Cosby sweaters, right?) he wants to ask Andrew out, and we already know he’ll be disappointed. He’s far too earnest and normal for Andrew. He also meets Lizzie, the friend who has flitted in and out of his life since the first episode of the series. It’s easy to see how someone like Andrew would intrigue her, with his attention, lavish lifestyle, and au courrant sensibility. And of course, she’s friends with the da Silvas (!) who own the house.
Modesto is clearly abusive in many ways – physically, emotionally, and perhaps he’s even drugging his wife. At minimum he’s gaslighting her. At one point, after Modesto flees and Andrew wants to chase after him, it looks like Andrew might hit her, but he covers her mouth instead. He’s not that man yet. But he will be.
For most of the episode Andrew seems innocent, like he still believes in good things happening to good people. He clearly idolizes his father, who helped him stay innocent much longer than his older siblings, who seem to hold no illusions about their father’s favoritism and violent tendencies. Andrew bristles at being mocked for being gay, but he doesn’t back down. He could be any gay kid, or someone with less money than their peers, just trying to fit in. He wants to seek out his heroes, mostly LGBTQ and gender-bending icons like Basquiat, Patty Smith, Keith Herring and who else, but Versace.
Viewers looking for more Versace will once again be disappointed. The vignette here is informative, and tracks with Cunanan’s cruel, taunting schoolmates, but once again Versace’s story is in service to Cunanan’s, not the other way around. Even without factoring in screen time, which really speaks for itself when it comes to priorities, the Gianni story is used to make greater meaning for Andrew’s, episode after episode. One wonders why Gianni hasn’t been afforded the same humanity as Andrew’s other victims, with the dedicated episode(s) for Lee Miglin, David Madsen, and Jeff Trails.
I’d love to know more about the woman at work who twice warns Andrew’s father. Was that a sign of AAPI or Filipino camaraderie, was there something going on between them, or was it something else?
Village life, with its mosquito nets and exposed light bulbs, is not how Andrew wanted to see his father. He honestly seems more horrified by what he perceives as squalor than by his father’s apparent crimes, or the fact that his mother is afraid of him.
Again, Andrew seems to learn the wrong lesson, as does his father. While M says his mistake was stealing too little, Andrew learns from his father’s failed thievery that lying and stealing. His father turns on him, on a dime, like Andrew will one day turn on so many other people. And then his father does something that is at once unbelievable and completely credible, coming from the man who raised the person Andrew will one day become: he challenges his son to be a man and stab him.
While I had assumed that this episode had the tallest order to fill, the one going back furthest in Cunanan’s past, it’s far more successful than the previous episode. Perhaps that’s because this one contains all of the ingredients for who Cunanan will one day be. We see the violence, the lying, and the self-hatred. All of these seeds are planted, and rather than drawing weak connections between dots, like “Ascent” did, “Creator/Destroyer” allows us to imagine ourselves how a hard working boy who sees his father steal, abandon him, and pay no price for his actions, could then go on to live a life that seems deliberately fashioned to generate the appearance of vast wealth, with as little work as possible.
As we near the end of this series, we finally get to see a young Andrew Cunanan. A child born into an extremely dysfunctional family.
Within the first few minutes of the episode, it’s abundantly clear where Andrew’s sense of entitlement came from. Who gives their 10 year old child the master bedroom? Who gives that same child a car after they get into a stuffy private school?
Modesto has an unhealthy obsession with his youngest son. We don’t see enough of the older Cunanan children to see why they were unable to take the top spot in their father’s heart, but we do see that Andrew is every bit the smart and cunning person we know him to be as an adult.
Teacher: Andrew if you could have one wish, just one wish, what would it be? Andrew: To be special.
From a young age, Modesto starts grooming Andrew to believe that he is more important than everyone around him. He’s more important than his siblings. More important than his peers. Heck, he wants him to feel like he’s more important than his own mother.
It’s strongly hinted at that Modesto may be abusing Andrew both mentally and physically, adding another layer to the case study that is Andrew Cunanan. There was no one in those early days to protect him.
Modesto was an abusive, abrasive jerk and he was of the belief that he was owed something from this world. He came to America and wanted to work, but on his own terms. And he instilled those beliefs into his offspring.
Just like all the many ‘what ifs’ we’ve asked ourselves along the way, one has to wonder had Andrew not grown up in that household, what man he could have become? Free from a father who was almost co-dependent, would Andrew have been the same person?
This is of course something we will never know, but it’s interesting to think about. Every single thing that happens in Andrew’s life, leads him to the moment he shows up at Gianni’s doorstep to kill him.
By the time Andrew gets to high school, he acts a lot more like the Andrew we’ve come to know. He’s arrogant, talkative and bold. He’s the man that walks into a party demanding that all eyes be on him.
I kept wondering throughout the hour at what point would Modesto leave. We already know that Andrew is left to take care of his mother by himself, but it’s never clear what happens to his father, as he tells a different tale to everyone he meets.
Turns out Modesto stuck around until Andrew was in high shool and then at the first sign of trouble he fled. Abruptly and selfishly, Modesto was gone.
Don’t believe a word they say.
– Modesto [to Andrew]
Of all the events in his life, the trip to Manila may have been the moment that defined the path Andrew was destined to take. It was there that Andrew realized he did not want to be like his father.
His father was nothing. A shell of the man he once knew who had power and money and influence. He looked at this man living in the oppressive heat, with very little money to his name and saw someone who was no longer special.
It’s a tough realization to come to and yet as Andrew vows to never become someone like him, we all know what’s going to happen. Andrew is going to become a better liar than Modesto ever was. A better con artist. A better manipulator.
He will be the monster his father never believed he could be.
Okay guys, with only one episode to go, I need to know what you’re hoping to see on the finale and what you thought about ‘Creator/Destroyer’. Although this was another entry that was heavy on Andrew, we did get a brief scene of a young Versace in Italy.
There was a major contrast between Gianni’s relationship with his mother and the relationship between Andrew and his parents. I was hoping we’d see more Gianni as we’re so close to the end, but we did not. My hope for the finale is more Gianni and the Versace’s in general.
After the inertness of last week’s mostly-meandering “Ascent,” this week’s “Creator/Destroyer” is comparatively more interesting and has a clearer focus. And though Assassination is still into shoehorning in parallels between various characters, it works better here (and confined to the cold open) than it did with Donatella. A young Versace, in 1957 Italy, shows an interest in fashion design but is deemed a “pervert” by a teacher and a “pansy” by a classmate. At home, however, he finds encouragement from his mother to pursue his dreams which eventually led to, as we know, him becoming a success. A young Andrew, in 1980 California, is given special treatment (and a master bedroom!) by his father, and he’s explicitly told to always remember he is special because “when you feel special, success will follow.”
These similarities between younger Andrew and Versace—knowing they stand out, having interests that outside the norm of “typical” boyhoods (and being made fun of for it), the parental emphasis on encouragement and success, etc.—are displayed so we can take note of how the two diverged into entirely different paths (and ask why; Assassination has a lot to say about parents!): of how one became a murderer and the other his unfortunate victim. So, yes, some of this is certainly retreading well-worn territory (the season’s biggest problem) but it generally works this time, as “Creator/Destroyer” almost functions as a origin story, pulling us into the depths of Andrew’s adolescence. It’s the episode that paints the most sympathetic portrait of Andrew, but the reverse timeline engineering of the series has—fortunately—ensured that we can’t commit to the sympathy.
What’s also pretty compelling about “Creator/Destroyer” is its depiction of an immigrant’s story—parts of which may feel a little familiar to other children of immigrants, as it did to me—through Andrew’s father, Modesto “Pete” Cunanan. Modesto has that specific patriotism of someone who was born elsewhere (Philippines) and came here with the explicit purpose to make money, make a better life, support his family without stress, and provide his children (or, really, just Andrew) with the sort of life he never had for himself growing up. He served in the Navy, dealing with paltry paychecks just so he could be in the United States. He’s obsessed with success and with looking the part—an obsession that that is partly born from needing to assimilate with the privileged white men he’s surrounded by. There’s a neat juxtaposition of him and Andrew, first side-by-side putting on their suits in a giant mirror and then interviewing: Modesto for a fancy job at Merrill Lynch, Andrew for a spot at the prestigious Bishop school. Both are men who are aiming for much higher than what they have, and both are men who are willing to take the easier, cheating route to get there—which is why it’s no surprise when we learn that Modesto is wanted for embezzlement.
The Assassination Of Gianni Versace hasn’t been shy about its assertion that Andrew wasn’t simply born a murderer—he wasn’t some childhood animal killer who just snapped one day, which is the narrative that is often told around serial/spree killers (though a few experts have said he likely suffered from an antisocial personality disorder)—but that he was sort of created, molded, and shaped into one due to a combination of his upbringing, his family, homophobia (both internalized and otherwise), class, lack of opportunities, desperation, and so on. “Creator/Destroyer” hones in on this view as it relates to his adolescence and family, largely through the lens of Modesto. Modesto pulls the old pretending-I-didn’t-get-the-job sitcom routine but becomes actually pissed off when his wife, Mary Anne, believes it—even basically threatening her with going back to the mental hospital.
Modesto sets up the family as adversaries: Modesto and Andrew vs. Mary Anne (and Andrew’s siblings, who rarely appear); the soon-to-be-successful dreamers vs. the stale realists; the “special” Cunanans vs. the ordinary ones. (And, as we’ve learned through Andrew, there’s not much worse than being ordinary.) Modesto not only uses Mary Anne’s mental illness (depression, and maybe specifically postpartum after Andrew was born) against her by bringing it up as a means to shut her up or scare her into complying, but he also uses it as a way to bring Andrew closer to his side, effectively widening the gap between Andrew and his mother. After Modesto buys a car for Andrew (before he can even drive, and ignoring his older siblings), he basically warns Andrew about his own mother, saying she has “weak mind,” and that Modesto is tasked with making sure Andrew doesn’t end up the same way. He speaks about Mary Anne’s time in the hospital as a time when Modesto was both Andrew’s mother and father, as if wanting to make sure Andrew knows which one to take sides with. Modesto is also, unsurprisingly, abusive to his wife on more than one occasion, and in front of Andrew, which puts Andrew’s later sudden abuse to his mother in a different context: It’s what he saw growing up.
Turns out, Modesto does desperately need someone on his side because it isn’t long after the FBI show up on his front door, forcing Modesto to flee all the way back to the Philippines, leaving his family with nothing—no money, no security, not even the house. “Don’t believe a word they say,” he tells Andrew who takes it to heart enough to also leave the country and track him down. The scene in Manila is the most tense as the two essentially confront each other. It turns out the two were stuck in a cycle that Andrew didn’t know about: Modesto lied and cheated to get money for the family, Andrew bragged about Modesto’s success and needed the money to keep up appearances, Modesto fulfilled Andrew’s demand for money and appearances by lying and cheating, and Andrew would brag and, well, you get it. Andrew’s concerns seem to mostly be about how he’s going to keep on being Andrew—“If you’re a lie, then I’m a lie, and I can’t be a lie. I can’t”—which Modesto quickly seizes, retorting “You’re not upset that I stole. You’re upset because I stopped.”
The conversation quickly grows more contentious, with Modesto calling Andrew a “sissy kid with a sissy mind,” literally spitting on him, and smacking his son. It’s this violence—and Modesto explicitly saying “I’m ashamed of you”—that seems to flick a switch in Andrew, who grabs a knife (almost instinctively) but ends up only cutting into his own palm. It’s interesting to note the difference in how Andrew deals with these insults throughout the episode, depending on where they’re coming from: when a classmate calls him a “fag,” Andrew runs with it (“If being a fag means being different, then sign me up!”) and turns it into an opportunity to demand attention; when his father calls him a “sissy,” Andrew turns cold, quiet, and eyes violence.
The end of “Creator/Destroyer,” which is tasked with setting us up for the final episode, finds Andrew with his tail between his legs and applying for a job at the pharmacy. When he’s asked about his father by a fellow Filipino, Andrew lies to make Modesto seem better than he is—and we know that he hasn’t stopped lying since—which is a little neat. But “Creator/Destroyer” also leaves us in a weird spot: Where does the show go for the season finale? I’m assuming/hoping it’ll jump forward again, bringing us to Andrew’s end, but it seems like one hell of a leap.
Stray observations
Hey, it’s Magic Mike’s Matt Bomer’s directorial debut! Pretty solid job, if nothing too special, but he’ll likely expand his on-screen relationship with Ryan Murphy’s shows to behind-the-scenes as well.
Variety has an interview with Bomer about the experience that’s a neat read. I didn’t check it out until way after I finished writing this but this point has stuck with me since: “I wanted that to give you the sense that if Andrew could’ve just killed his dad, he wouldn’t have killed anybody else. That was a big part of the dynamic I was trying to create in the story.”
Also in this episode: Andrew meeting Lizzie for the first time, learning the name DiSilvia which he’ll later adopt for his own, and that admittedly-fantastic red jumpsuit.
That was a pretty drastic jump from
Some key songs: “Hazy Shade Of Winter” by The Bangles, “Touch Me (I Want Your Body” by Samantha Fox, and, of course, “Whip It” by Devo.
All season long, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has filled in blanks. Why did Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) become a spree killer? Why did he kill Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez)? Why did he kill David Madson (Cody Fern)? Creator Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith have used a blend of what we know and some fiction to weave a compelling narrative — one that gave us a much more challenging series than we first expected.
But The Assassination of Gianni Versace hasn’t contented itself with examining Cunanan as a killer; it’s also fascinated by Andrew the gay man, and all that led to how he became himself. Wednesday’s penultimate episode of the season took that train of thought to its organic conclusion, introducing us to Andrew’s father, Modesto Cunanan (Jon Jon Briones).
Modesto, like his son, is an impressively persuasive fabulist. He talks his way into a high-powered job on a lack of experience and a lot of charm. He moves his family into a neighborhood and home beyond their means, convinced he can build them the American Dream he (an immigrant from the Philippines) so desperately craves.
For a while, it works, just like we’ve seen Andrew’s plans briefly succeed. But soon enough, Modesto is committing major fraud crimes just to keep his American Dream afloat. When it all comes crashing down on him, instead of owning his errors, he flees, leaving his wife and children to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Briones is nothing short of fantastic as Modesto, winning the audience over just as much as he does the people he meets in the show. He’s so damn determined and positive, you can’t help but put faith in his mission. It helps that he’s crazy about Andrew, supporting him and making him feel loved.
Then you see Modesto verbally abuse his wife, and ignore his other kids to fully pin his hopes on Andrew. You see him take the cowardly way out after he’s discovered. And you see him later in life, when Andrew goes to meet him in the Philippines as a teenager, expressing no remorse but plenty of anger. It’s in that moment that you can feel the Andrew Cunanan we know now being formed. His father, perhaps the only man who truly expressed love for Andrew, can’t take responsibility for his crimes, and instead rages out at his son for daring to question him.
Maybe there was no saving Andrew Cunanan, no decision in his life that could have stopped what was coming. Maybe this is all a fable American Crime Story is telling us to feel like our lives are more in our control than they actually are. But in that moment, it feels like Modesto could have stopped what came after by teaching his son a lesson: that pathological lying and deceiving people have consequences. But he didn’t.
There’s a terror in the relatability of Andrew Cunanan’s story. A complicated relationship with his father. A need to feel validated by the world. A thirst for the fabulous things in life. An insecurity with the things we actually have. A desperation to be loved for how we look to the world because we’re too ashamed of who we are. Murphy and Smith’s greatest trick with this season was making a spree killer’s story strike so close to home for gay men.
I’ve not seen the finale of this miniseries — it was the only episode not furnished for critics ahead of the season premiere — but I find myself both eager and nervous to find out how this story ends. Not because I don’t know what happens; the hunt for Cunanan will end, as will Cunanan’s life. There’s no surprise in the straightforward narrative of it, which is perhaps why Murphy and Smith presented Cunanan’s life in reverse, to give viewers the feeling of unwrapping a package versus taking a road trip to an obvious destination.
Despite that lack of suspense, I want to know how this story, in this particular presentation, comes to a close. I want to see the full realization of The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s thesis. I want to feel some measure of closure with Cunanan, to walk away from this miniseries enlightened not just about his motives, but about how he became the man he was.
Judging from everything we’ve seen thus far, the finale should be a devastating experience. But hopefully, it will also be an enlightening one.
ACS news 