Those tuning into Ryan Murphy’s latest prestige series looking for camp and circumstance may find themselves, at first, disappointed. From the dream-like beginnings of the show’s first episode – which opens on Gianni Versace sprawled in a gilt-colored bed staring at a ceiling that could rival the Sistine Chapel for detail – we get a sense that season two will be a lot closer to the ideal Murphy aesthetic than the first, which presented the O.J. Simpson case in the cold, stark light of realism. However, as we’re led into the nightmarish unfolding of events of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” it becomes clear that we’re not here to lounge around in Versace splendor for an entire season. We’re here to see the Versace splendor splattered with blood.
Fashion icon Gianni Versace’s murder in 1997 was sudden, random, and grim. His killer, Andrew Cunanan, shot him outside of his palatial Miami Beach home, claiming the fashion icon as his fifth victim. While the relationship between the two men – the transparently gay Versace and the much younger, closeted Cunanan – remains a point of speculation, Murphy has chosen to believe that a relationship between the two, however scant, did exist in order to tell the story the way he wants to tell it. And the way he wants to tell it is, in typical Murphy fashion, a little bit overblown, bloody, fantastical, and oddly moralistic.
From the opening scene alone, where we follow Versace as he winds through his gigantic estate, built to resemble an Italian villa, in between shots of a desperate Cunanan trekking around Miami Beach with a dirty backpack, throwing up violently in public toilets, Murphy is clearly trying to say something about the relationship between the two. Whether it’s the more obvious comment about American excess – the land where the haves have everything and the have-nots have absolutely nothing – or whether he’s building up to something a bit more subtle is unclear thus far. What is clear is that subtlety is not and has never been one of Murphy’s strong suits, which is why his work is so hilariously great. Exhibit A: Penelope Cruz’s lisping performance as Donatella Versace, who from the moment she leaves the tarmac of her private jet is all business when it comes to her brother’s death. And of course, the much-anticipated performance of Ricky Martin as Versace’s long term partner, a man who was robbed of his rightful inheritance by the Versace estate. At the center of everything is the very unsubtle, and very seductive, interpretation of the killer Cunanan by Darren Criss, in whose hands the character is shown as ambitious, lost, vulnerable, psychotic, and romantic all in one take.
As with “American Crime Story” Season 1, “Versace” is playing the long game. Murphy uses the serialized format of television to ramp up the drama of a story that most of the world already knows. In Season 1, however, the O.J. Simpson trials were tied to something more personal for most viewers. It will be interesting to see whether or not “Versace,” with its unsympathetic characters and seemingly straightforward plot, will be able to achieve this same kind of nuance in the re-telling.
The titular event of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story happens within the first 10 minutes of the nine-hour show. It’s a beautiful day in South Beach, i.e., a normal day in South Beach, and the legendary designer is on his way home to the man he loves. He’s returned from his daily outing to fetch some magazines, unlocking the gates to a mansion that’s unabashedly ostentatious, just like him. Then there are two gunshots, and in between, Versace’s final word: “No.”
And so Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series dispatches with the version of the story many critics and viewers anticipated: a celebration of a proudly over-the-top titan of fashion, brought to you by a proudly over-the-top titan of TV. That was the expectation set by an Entertainment Weekly cover showcasing Edgar Ramírez as Versace, Penélope Cruz as his sister Donatella, and Ricky Martin as his longtime partner Antonio D’Amico; long before that, it was the reputation afforded by Murphy’s decade-plus of vamping, shark jumping, and general sensibility offending. From the mind that conceived of Nip/Tuck, a retro-ish Florida crime romp even felt like a return to the very form that gave Murphy his start in prestige TV.
Instead, it turns out, Assasination is less about Versace than the five-murder spree that concluded in his gruesome death in July 1997 at the hands of a disturbed young gay man named Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). This season of American Crime Story begins with the splashiest, most tabloid-friendly part of its narrative and pulls the audience backward into a deeper, sadder story, the majority of whose casualties are much less famous than Versace but no less deserving of our grief and admiration.
“All I knew — as, I think, will be true for most of the audience — was that Versace was shot in Miami on the steps of his house, and I knew the houseboat siege [where Cunanan died by suicide after an eight-day manhunt]. And that was it,” recalls screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who wrote all nine chapters of Assassination. Then producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson approached him about adapting the Versace story for the second season of the nascent American Crime Story, which had yet to achieve blockbuster success with its first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson. The more Smith researched the Cunanan story, the more he found lying beyond its infamous climax: “I was really taken aback at how [the Versace murder] was really just the tip of this iceberglike structure that went down into this road movie across America, the American Dream, ambition, [and] homophobia.”
Such a broad focus doesn’t mean that Assassination has been warmly received by the Versace family itself, which has greeted the series with the same condemnation it extended to Vulgar Favors, the 1999 book about the Cunanan killings by Vanity Fair contributing writer Maureen Orth. “As we have said, the Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about the death of Mr. Gianni Versace, which should only be considered as a work of fiction,” read a statement issued last week. “Of all the possible portrayals of his life and legacy, it is sad and reprehensible that the producers have chosen to present the distorted and bogus version created by Maureen Orth.”
Long before the family denounced the series, however, Smith had to figure out how to replicate his own experience of being drawn into the Cunanan saga for a larger audience, presumably as ignorant of the lead-up to the Versace killing as he was. So he decided to leverage that ignorance to his advantage, using Versace’s murder as an entry point into a larger story rather than an end in itself. “You start with the thing that everyone knows, and then you guide them backward through the bits that they don’t know,” Smith explains. His approach to the script “became about how we understand the case, myself included, which was that we didn’t understand it.”
Such thinking gave rise to Assassination’s highly unorthodox structure: a reverse-chronological account of Cunanan’s unraveling and its consequences, with every episode moving further back in time from the eponymous event. Along the way, most of Cunanan’s victims get their own spotlight installments, making Assassination almost an anthology within an anthology: A Chicago real estate titan’s dedicated wife throws herself into preserving his legacy. A promising Minneapolis architect comes to terms with his father, who loves his son even as he struggles to understand him. A gay ex-soldier wrestles with the dual identities that the Clinton-era military has ruled to be mutually exclusive.
The result is the only Murphy-associated production that could conceivably be described as “slow,” methodically pausing and pulling apart the action to make space for people whose names have largely been lost to history, except as a footnote to Versace’s sensational death. Though Cunanan is the thread that unites these men and undoubtedly Assassination’s central figure, it isn’t quite accurate to say the show is a character study, at least until its final stretch of episodes, because the viewer watches his monstrous actions without any background information that can excuse or even explain them. “We wanted to say that the victims are the heroes of those episodes. They are the central characters,” Smith says. “Cunanan, in a weird way, is this kind of vortex, a dark abyss. Once he starts killing people, he crosses a line, and he isn’t really human in a way that we understand.” Cunanan’s inscrutability can make Assassination an excruciating watch, but the show consistently foregrounds the killed over their killer.
Versace remains in the picture via flashback throughout the season, albeit mostly as a foil to Cunanan, a habitual liar who uses his looks and extravagant inventions to place himself in proximity to wealth and power. “To me, the shape of the story was always how these two people grow up to be so different,” Smith observes. “They struggle with many of the same issues: homophobia, ambition, being the outsider. One conquers all these problems and becomes this great creator and great celebrator of life. One is beaten and ends up ripping down other people’s success.” Assassination’s view of Versace is almost beatific, holding up the designer as a paragon of vivacity, commitment, and creative genius. Cunanan is a parasite — in the words of one astute observer, “too lazy to work, too proud to be kept.” Versace, on the other hand, is both generative and generous.
Assassination’s flattering presentation of Versace represents an expansion of his presence in Orth’s report, which Smith was tasked with fictionalizing into compelling dramatic television while also doing justice to his real subjects. “It weighs very heavily on you,” Smith says of his first experience writing true crime. (Smith has written four crime novels, including Child 44, and a BBC miniseries, London Spy.) “It’s a great responsibility. These are such amazing people, and I always felt a great sense of privilege to get to know them a little.” Still, there were passages when Smith was obligated to make use of creative license, like the multiday stretch from David Madson’s abduction to his eventual murder. In those cases, Smith says, he did his best to extrapolate from the known facts “in support of those larger truths.” We may not know exactly what Madson and Cunanan said to each other, but we know where each man was coming from, and where they ended up. On Cunanan’s end, “There was some sense that he was in some upside-down, sick way trying to extend the relationship that had long since ended”; on Madson’s, “that was a mix of both fear for your life, but also a sense of, If you go to the police, will they believe you?” From that dynamic, Smith draws almost the entirety of Assassination’s horrific, elegiac fourth episode.
Then there was the biography of Versace himself. One of the Versace family’s principal objections to Vulgar Favors is its assertion that Gianni was HIV-positive, a claim that Orth says is backed up by accounts from the Miami police and is written into the show as canon. “It’s interesting; the book was written in a certain period of time, when things were considered shameful which are now not,” Smith reflects. “I thought we were really trying to undermine [the stigma], and break away all those assumptions. … That was the reason we decided to put that in, as opposed to being salacious or engaging in gossip. Versace was this great breaker-down of convention. He was one of the first out gay celebrities, and he was living with his partner for 15 years. It’s something we celebrate. He represented love in a way that Andrew didn’t.”
Assassination’s handling of HIV is just one dimension of how the show sets out to tell a specifically gay story, looking back on the repression of the ’90s from the more progressive, though by no means perfect, climate of 2018. At the time, Cunanan’s and Versace’s sexuality gave the murder’s media coverage a condescending, almost sadistic edge. In his review of Vulgar Favors for The New York Times, Frank Bruni accused Orth of titillation, though Smith puts it more diplomatically: “At some point, [the book] reads very much like an outsider commenting on a world of which they’re not part, and sometimes that can make you seem quite removed from it. … It’s not contesting some of the descriptions of what’s going on; it’s just saying that some of the words lacked a sense of what the wider picture might have been, emotionally, behind some of these scenarios.”
Conversely, Assassination is not an outsider’s perspective on what it means to be gay in a culture openly hostile to your identity; with the benefit of Smith and Murphy’s insights, the show depicts both a broader culture of homophobia and the tools that helped Versace weather the storm of coming out (namely, his wealth and public acclaim). “The options were, either you’re as successful as Versace … [or] you have to be in the closet,” Smith says. “There were so few options and ways of exploring in this world. I think fundamentally, if you boil it down, it’s a survival show: What decisions do you make to survive in society?” Many people didn’t, and with empathy and hindsight, Assassination aims to explore why.
With two gay men serving as writer and executive producer, Assassination stands out even in TV’s rapidly diversifying landscape for the specificity of its story and the nuance of its psychological observations, however cut-and-dry Cunanan’s grandiose pathology. The season makes for a fascinating follow-up to Feud: Bette and Joan, another potentially high-camp Murphy production that surprised many with its grounded approach. Assassination is also an intriguing prelude to Pose, the ’80s-set New York drama that will break the record for the most trans actors in series regular roles on a single show and presents an opportunity to extend this more somber trend into a new phase of Murphy’s career. Whatever one thinks of Murphy’s infamously maximalist style, the mega-showrunner (Assassination is his second major launch of the month) has played an undeniable role in pluralizing the faces and voices on our televisions.
“I think Ryan is big on telling stories that aren’t told, that have been ignored by people,” Smith says early in our conversation. “This is certainly one of them.” In this sense, Assassination is the opposite of its predecessor. Nearly two years ago, The People v. O.J. took the most over-covered case in the world and confronted the audience with what it had still managed to miss. The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows us what’s allowed to fester when we condemn an entire segment of the population to the dark — and in the process, makes a forceful argument for bringing both bad and good into the light. “Andrew didn’t kill [these people] randomly,” Smith notes. “He was very much motivated by jealousy, and the good that they represented. When you’re telling the story, you feel like you’re celebrating their lives.”
Last night’s episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, titled “House by the Lake,” is a turning point in the season. If last week’s episode, “A Random Killing,” took a break from the Versace narrative to tell a contained story about the murder of wealthy, closeted Lee Miglin in Chicago, this episode sets the series even further down the dark and ultimately shattering path of Andrew Cunanan’s murder victims. Beginning with the most brutally horrific scene of the season and ending with the most heartbreaking, it’s an hour that holds the audience fully in its thrall. It’s also the hour that most clearly depicts Ryan Murphy’s big-picture vision for the season. This isn’t about Versace. It’s not even fully about Cunanan. It’s about the cold grip of societal homophobia that keeps these characters locked into the tragic paths they’re on: killer and victims, none willing or able to divert from the path.
Continuing the season’s backwards chronology, episode 4 backs up to show Cunanan’s first killing, the Minneapolis murder of his acquaintance, Jeff Trail. The nature of that acquaintance will get fleshed out in a further episode, as you might have guessed from the fact that Trail is played by Murphy repertory player Finn Wittrock. Leaving the reasons for the Trail murder almost entirely undefined in this episode gives the actual killing — which takes place in the film’s opening ten minutes — an even more terrifying edge. It also opens the rest of the episode up for the character of David Madson.
For anyone with a familiarity with the Cunanan case, Madson is the biggest question mark. The Trail murder occurred in his apartment, which is where Trail was found by police, wrapped up in a rug. By that point, both Cunanan and Madson had gone on the run. The finger of suspicion pointed to Madson as a possible accomplice (at least), and between that point and the time six days later that Madson’s body was found near a lake 60 miles north of Minneapolis, no one really knows what transpired. It’s a gap in the narrative, and Murphy — along with writer Tom Rob Smith and director Daniel Minahan — takes that blank canvass and fills it in with something altogether devastating. Does it take liberties? Sure. It would have to. But David Madson’s story, as depicted here, tells a bigger story than just his own.
After witnessing Cunanan murder Trail, Madson is in a state of shock, yes, but he still knows a murder when he’s seen it. His and Trail’s relationships with Cunanan — from the fragments we get of it — appear to have soured after initial closeness. Cunanan fancied himself in love with David, had asked him to get married, and was visibly jealous of Madson and Trail together. Madson was altogether over it with Andrew in the moments leading up to the murder. And then after the murder, with a gun-toting Andrew calling the shots, David accompanied Andrew on the run. There was a gun, yes, but we see Andrew using much more than just a weapon to coerce David’s cooperation. David wants to call the police, but Andrew convinces him that the cops — who hate people like them, a pair of fags — will throw him in jail. David wants to call his father, but Andrew also preys upon his insecurities there too. Does he really want to bring his father into this sordid gay murder he’s gotten himself into?
The first three episodes of Versace have done such a deft job of seeding the rest of the story with a pervasive, but low-key, hostility and fear of gay people. From the police questioning Versace’s lover about their trysts with other men to the incredulous looks on the faces of the detectives investigating Lee Miglin’s death, even to the way that Donatella Versace — fashionable icon of the gays, future Maya Rudolph character herself — bristles (maybe even sneers) at her brother’s lifestyle. The cops who show up to investigate the Trail killing are at best pitiless as they poke around David’s apartment (“a gay thing”). Here’s where those deep-rooted attitudes begin to bear their rancid fruit. Here’s where they start claiming lives.
Murphy and Smith sketch out Madson’s backstory: a smart, handsome, kind young architect who so sought his conservative father’s approval. We see David come out to his dad under the pretext of announcing an academic achievement. It’s an achingly recognizable portrait of the hidden tolls of a homophobic society. David’s father’s reaction to his coming out was far from the nightmare scenario, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a maelstrom of conflict and doubt and fear inside David that at any point it might be. His relationship with his father, clearly so important with him, rested upon a thin ice of tolerance.
So Cunanan takes David on the run with him and continues to spin out these fantasies of a life together, David growing increasingly horrified, then disgusted, finally arriving at a kind of scornful pity at the empty shell that Andrew is and has always been. Then we get to the moment that should devastate audiences (it sure devastated me). Andrew and David pit-stopping for the evening at some podunk bar, Andrew temporarily distracted by his own dark thoughts as a bar singer (Aimee Mann in a cameo that feels tacky at first but ultimately deeply affecting) covers The Cars’ “Drive.” This is David’s moment, as he excuses himself for the bathroom and spots a window. All he needs is to make a break for it; but all he can think about is his dad finding out what’s happened. With escape at hand, he freezes, with Aimee Mann darkly intoning “Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” on the soundtrack. On paper, it’s classic Too Much Ryan Murphy. The song, the cameo, the overly perfect lyrics giving the audience the message on a platter. But in its execution, with the heft of Mann’s vocal paired with the delicacy of the editing, and most especially Cody Fern’s revelatory performance in the role of David Madson, it’s nothing short of gutting.
Given the over-the-topness of pretty much every single episode of Ryan Murphy shows like American Horror Story, not to mention the frequent clumsiness of shows like Glee and The New Normal, it’s a surprise to see an episode like “House by the Lake” manage to hit so hard but with such precision. Murphy’s shows generally have a big impact but they almost always leave a bunch of collateral damage as well. With Versace, it’s been stunning to watch him bypass the temptation to wallow in the gaudy, the sordid, the Miami, the fashion of it all and instead to zero in on this particular story. The story of a world so hostile that it kept David Madson frozen in place inside that bathroom, wondering who would drive him home if he ever got out.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Season 2 Episode 4 “The House by the Lake” takes us to the very beginning of Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree. It’s another well-acted but upsetting episode which shows Andrew murdering two unsuspecting men.
The episode starts a week before the murder of Lee Miglin, in Minneapolis. Andrew is staying with David Madson, a successful architect and the man who he just proposed to.
Things are obviously tense between David and Andrew. David tells Andrew that they both said things over the weekend that they regret.
Andrew tells him he regrets nothing. They are also not engaged.
At this point, Andrew has not killed anyone, but that changes very quickly. We already know what Andrew is capable of, so from the very start, his very presence is menacing.
Finn Wittrock makes a very quick guest appearance as Jeff Trail, a mutual friend (and supposed secret lover of David) before he is promptly and viciously murdered by Andrew.
It’s interesting to see how Andrew’s murders become less and less intimate or involved as his spree continues. Considering how Jeff Trail’s murder is a crime of passion, where Andrew is out of control and covered in blood, Versace’s assassination almost seems impersonal.
Where is Versace by the way? By traveling back in time to see Andrew’s previous murders, we miss out on the Miami storyline and the aftermath of Gianni Versace’s death.
The murders of William Reese, Lee Miglin, David Madson, and Jeff Trail could have been intercut with the investigation surrounding Versace’s death in Miami. We didn’t need two whole episodes without the Versace storyline.
However, I appreciate the Versace-less episodes. Gianni may have been the most famous of the victims, but that doesn’t mean the other four men weren’t as important or as loved.
“The House by the Lake” is a little clunky with David’s flashbacks of hunting with his father and then coming out to him.
But, the final scene with David as he imagines he makes it into the house by the lake and sits down to have coffee with his father is just so heart-breaking that it really packs a punch.
Although Andrew has been the predominant character in each episode, I’m glad that we’re no closer to knowing the real Andrew. The writers aren’t trying to find reasons as to why he is the way he is, nor are they trying to make him relatable.
“The House by the Lake” shows Andrew in a slightly different light—he’s still threatening (even singing “Pump Up the Jams”) and a master manipulator, but he shows some tenderness and emotion towards David.
That still doesn’t make us feel for Andrew, though.
The murder of Jeff Trail seems to be premeditated, although Andrew says it wasn’t. Whether or not it was, Andrew still saw that he would be able to confuse law enforcement. By putting out David’s pornography on his bed, the cops thought that it was a hook-up that went wrong.
They also thought David was the murderer for a short time.
It really is fascinating to see how Andrew was able to commit the murders he did and be on the run for more than two months in plain sight.
Overall, “The House by the Lake” is a sad chapter that starts off Andrew Cunanan’s murderous spree that leads him to the assassination of Gianni Versace. Darren Criss impresses again as does Cody Fern who plays David Madson.
At its core, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is a pointedly sad show. Gianni Versace‘s murder was a needless and hurtful crime, but the show’s last two episodes — “A Random Killing” and “House by the Lake” — have taken the show’s sad tone a step further, recreating the imagined final moments of Lee Miglin and David Madson. However, there’s another side to the story about Andrew Cunanan‘s murders that makes this moment in history so much more powerful and devastating. For all of the excellent work The Assassination of Gianni Versace has done to transform Cunanan’s victims from merely names into people who were sadly taken before their times, the FX series glosses over the police fumbles that ultimately led to Vesace’s death as well as the callous media circus this story became.
Whereas the first season of American Crime Story, The People v. O.J. Simpson, felt like a modern recreation of a well-known story, The Assassination of Gianni Versace feels far more character focused. Between detailed plot points taken directly from real life, the series spends most of its time imagining the emotions and relationships between everyone connected to Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) and Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez). It’s a touching approach, one which makes the deaths of these murdered men feel far more painful and humanizing than the more scandalous news cycle from this time ever did. However, in between examining the shocking similarities between Versace and the life Cunanan imagined for himself, it’s sometimes difficult to remember one of the main reasons why this story is being told in the first place. Versace’s murder was an almost completely preventable crime.
“I think it’s more than why he was killed. It was sort of why it was allowed to happen,” show creator Ryan Murphy said during FX’s panel for The Assassination of Gianni Versace during TCA’s summer tour in 2017. “Part of the thing that we talk about in the show is one of the reasons Andrew Cunanan was able to make his way across the country and pick off these victims, many of whom were gay, was because of homophobia at the time. Homophobia, particularly within the various police organizations that refused in Miami to put up ‘wanted’ posters, even though they knew that Andrew Cunanan had probably committed many of these murders and was probably headed that way, all of which we deal with in the show. So I thought that that was a really interesting thing to examine, to look at again, particularly with the president we have and the world that we live in.”
There are instances of this overwhelming police incompetence in American Crime Story, but the most compelling moments in Versace often don’t point them out. However, they are absolutely worth exploring because they are largely what transform this story from a serial killer’s spree to a crime of cultural significance. One of the most glaring examples of incompetence from law enforcement happened early in Cunanan’s killing spree. Following the murders of Jeff Trail and David Madson, who were believed to have been murdered in Minnesota, Cunanan traveled to Lee Miglin’s home in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly after Miglin’s murder, there was a stalemate between Minnesota and Illinois authorities as both law enforcement agencies wanted to bring the serial killer to justice. Things only got more complicated with the murders of William Reesein New Jersey and Gianni Versace in Florida.
That is nothing to say of the subtle homophobia that characterized the case. In Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, Maureen Orth writes at length about how Cunanan’s sexuality affected how he was pursued. The most clear example of this is lack of flyers in Miami. The Assassination of Gianni Versace covers this oversight in its first two episodes. By the time Cunanan made it to Miami, he had already murdered four people and was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List. Instead of alerting all of the gay bars in the Miami area, authorities chose to target a few, believing that Cunanan’s status as a male escort would mean he would only visit certain nightclubs. This spoke to a misunderstanding of Cunanan’s character and the South Florida LBGT community that would come to haunt authorities. Cunanan visited several nightclubs while in Miami and even allegedly admitted he was a serial killer to one customer.
More than perhaps anything else, the failures of the Cunanan case boil down to homophobia. The fact that Versace’s murder happened highlights how little authorities understood and wanted to understand the LGBT community as well as how that same community mistrusted them. One one hand, Vulgar Favors takes care to note that the Miami Police Department is one of the busiest in the country, as it largely has to deal with cartel and drug-related crimes. But on the other hand, it’s hard to argue that Cunanan was anything resembling a criminal mastermind. Authorities suspected him of these murders almost immediately, and most of his murders were equally brutal and sloppy. Two of the only reasons he got away with so many deaths for so long are because he happened to cross state lines and because he targeted a population that needed protection from authorities the most but was overwhelmingly unprotected. That’s the real crime of Gianni Versace’s death. It could have been avoided at so many points if people would have paid attention.
During a recent interview with Decider, executive producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson revealed that the original scripts for The Assassination of Gianni Versace did focus more on missteps from authorities. However, that element was edited because of the lack of overarching narrative and to make more room to tell the victims’ stories. “Part of it was the difficulty that, because it was this national manhunt with different states involved, there wasn’t necessarily one person or one character story that you could tell of somebody who was on the hunt, putting the clues together,” Jacobson said. “So we didn’t feel as though we had as much character drama coming from the police investigation side.”
However, there’s a third party at least partially responsible for Versace’s murder — the mainstream media. The way Orth presents it, the media climate surrounding Andrew Cunanan’s crimes was initially nonexistent and then overwhelming. There was very little coverage around the murders of Jeff Trail and David Madson in publications not catered to LBGT audiences, but Lee Miglin’s status as a fairly well-known member of Chicago society changed that. After his murder, Cunanan started to be discussed more by the mainstream outlets, which took advantage of Chicago law enforcement’s many leaks. Specific details about the brutal way Miglin was murdered were published, but the leak that changed the course of history was the one connected to Lee Miglin’s car phone. After murdering the esteemed real estate developer, Cunanan stole his car, which authorities tried to track through the car phone’s GPS. It was later found that Cunanan had ripped out the phone’s antennae, an action he presumably took after learning about the tracking from the news.
Whatever interest there was in the case transformed into a media frenzy during the eight days between Versace’s murder and Cunanan’s suicide. In Vulgar Favors, Orth dedicates an entire chapter to the absurd amount of money that was thrown around by tabloids, the appropriately titled “Show Me the Money.” Enquire allegedly paid one of Cunanan’s old roommates $85,000 for a dubious story about Cunanan’s sexual fantasies about Tom Cruise. An old friend of the serial killer’s was allegedly offered anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 for an exclusive story and received 175 requests from press and television (he eventually turned them all down). One of Cunanan’s old acquaintances was paid $4,000 from Hard Copy to talk about Cunanan on TV. In the course of researching Vulgar Favors, Orth even reveals she was turned down for a few interviews from Cunanan’s more affluent friends because she didn’t pay.
Together, this is what makes the Cunanan case so truly horrific. Very early in the investigation, authorities knew that Andrew Cunanan was responsible for these murders. The killer even used his real name on at least one form that was supposed to be processed by the Miami PD (a pawn shop form) and used his real name during his daily life. Despite this transparency and despite the fact that Cunanan left a shocking trail of evidence in his wake, his killing spree lasted from April 27, 1997 until he killed himself on July 23, 1997. He was largely ignored when he was the most dangerous to the LGBT community, but after he claimed his most famous victim, he became, if only for a brief period of time, a must-watch spectacle. That’s the real tragedy buried at the center of The Assassination of Gianni Versace. It’s a story about how America failed a minority community when they needed it most, and it may be the saddest one Ryan Murphy has ever tackled.
Before writing Vulgar Favors, Orth covered the Cunanan case for Vanity Fair in the article “The Killer’s Trail.” You can read that piece in full here.
Fade up on a cheery tourist video for Minneapolis, lit with contemporaneously cheese-ish overbrightness, then cut to a title card telling us it’s April 27, 1997 – one week before Lee Miglin’s murder. Then we’re at the gorgeous, massive loft of David Madson. He’s on the cordless, pitching himself for a project, and he promises he won’t let the caller down as Andrew Cunanan looms into the frame, and this probably isn’t the first time he’s done this, but he has his t-shirt tucked into his jeans and no belt, like, why is this a thing on TV? | 8 February 2018
Fade up on a cheery tourist video for Minneapolis, lit with contemporaneously cheese-ish overbrightness, then cut to a title card telling us it’s April 27, 1997 – one week before Lee Miglin’s murder. Then we’re at the gorgeous, massive loft of David Madson. He’s on the cordless, pitching himself for a project, and he promises he won’t let the caller down as Andrew Cunanan looms into the frame, and this probably isn’t the first time he’s done this, but he has his t-shirt tucked into his jeans and no belt, like, why is this a thing on TV?
Cunanan awkwards up to David’s workspace, his arms stiffly at his sides, as David hangs up and celebrates: “They said yes!” “I’m so happy for you,” Cunanan oozes, sounding about as sincere as Siri. David looks doubtful, but out loud he accepts Cunanan’s well wishes, then softens and notes that, “this weekend,” they both said things they regret. Can they put it behind them – “just be friends”? “I don’t regret anything I said,” Cunanan says. David manages not to roll his eyes and asks if they can move on, then. “Sure,” Cunanan says flatly. David heads off to shower. Cunanan continues to stand, immobile, by David’s desk, the smile leaking off his face.
David relaxes under the water, and while this isn’t the Psycho shot set-up – and while I know David is not killed in this scene – it’s still tense. Way in the back of the shot, you can see Cunanan start to come into the bathroom, then, when David turns the water off, hastily withdraw. David comes out to find the apartment empty, he thinks, but then at the end of the bedroom hallway, there’s Cunanan, David’s dog Prints on a leash. (The real-life dog was a Dalmatian, which the dog playing him is not, so at first I assumed thanks to the location of the episode’s events that the dog’s name was Prince, as in “Rogers Nelson.”) Here again, I know the actual Prints came to no harm, at least from Cunanan, and I don’t think the production would depart from the generally accepted timeline to make us watch a pet suffer, but Cunanan is already acting so lights-on-nobody-home two minutes into the episode that I don’t want him anywhere near the hound, fictionalized narrative or no. Anyway, Cunanan doesn’t say anything, so David has to prompt him as one does a child: “Taking Prints for a walk?” “Yeah,” Cunanan tries to chirp, and heads for the door. David’s like, “…k,” and goes to get dressed.
When he comes out, though, he finds Prints tied to a leg of his desk…and Cunanan once again Nosferatus into the frame, his face a bland mask. So he’s…not taking Prints for a walk, David asks, untying the dog. The buzzer goes off, and David asks who it is. “It’s Jeff,” Cunanan duhs. David asks if they’re going out, and Cunanan duhs again that Jeff’s coming up. David has clearly been trying up to this point not to betray his impatience with Cunanan’s toddleresquely obtuse behavior – no doubt because one of the things he said “this weekend,” which he is going to regret more than he could ever have imagined, is that he isn’t into Cunanan that way anymore – but finally snaps that he has work to do. “It won’t take long,” Cunanan says, continuing to stand like a mannequin as the buzzer sounds several more times.
Then he snots, “Could you get the door?” Fern loses control of the accent somewhat as David eye-rolls that he doesn’t have time for this, but gets up to answer. Cunanan’s Manson lamps flip on as he hurries to say that it’ll give them a chance to talk about him. David’s given pause: “What did you just say?” Cunanan repeats that, when he brings Jeff up, it’ll give them a chance. To talk about him. (The buzzer doesn’t admit people from the loft; David has to go down in the elevator and physically open the building’s front door. I lived in an apartment with that “set-up” for a while, so I didn’t think much about this on first viewing, except to clock Cunanan’s rudeness, but it’s made more of later.) David shoots Cunanan a silent “you wish” look and storms out. Prints goes the front door when he’s left and whines a little.
Downstairs, David lets Jeff in with a familiar “hey.” It’s nice to see Finn Wittrock as Jeff Trail at last, but like everyone else, he’s coming in at the miserable end to his own story, so I’m bracing for that as Jeff asks grimly, “How’s he?” Equally grimly, David says Cunanan proposed. “Are you serious?”
“Said I was the man of his dreams…his last chance at happiness.” Jeff pulls another ffs face as the elevator arrives and asks how David got out of it. “Told him it was illegal for us to get married,” David sighs. In the elevator, David adds that Cunanan thinks Jeff’s why David says no: “Thinks I’m in love with you.” Jeff snorts, “D’you tell him he’s the reason you said no?” “He has no one,” David says sadly, almost to himself, and Jeff snarks that he should ask himself why, but David warns Jeff, “He knows about us.” What this means is debatable; per Maureen Orth’s Vanity Fair piece, Jeff “was known to have warned” David that Cunanan “was a liar,” but I can’t find any indication in contemporary news accounts or elsewhere that David and Jeff were romantically involved, except in Cunanan’s resentful fantasies. Jeff’s say-WHAAAAAT head turn suggests that that’s the implication here, though, as he adds in disbelief that “no one knows!” “He has this feline intuition,” David says.
Coming down the hall, Jeff urges David not to feel sorry for Cunanan. Why not? Jeff does. “Not anymore,” Jeff says. In fact, he never wants to see Cunanan again, and he’s only there because Cunanan stole Jeff’s gun.
Inside, Cunanan is lying in wait behind a bookcase, holding a hammer and wearing no expression. David finds Prints once again tied up to some furniture and angrily calls for Cunanan, but Cunanan is busy lunging at Jeff as he’s closing the front door. Cut to David watching in horror and Prints barking as we hear the squelchy sounds of Cunanan beating Jeff to death. Jeff hollers. Prints barks. David backs away along the sectional as stripes of overkill blood spatter hit him and the walls of the entryway. Finally Cunanan subsides and stands up, in an odd hunchy posture reminiscent of Karl from Sling Blade. He whips some blood off the hammer and walks towards David, who crab-walks away from him along the couch. Hard to see how even Cunanan would think stroking David’s face with his bloody hands, one of which is still holding the hammer, is comforting, but that’s what he does while whispering that it’s okay.
He touches his forehead to David’s, then cradles him, covered in Jeff’s gore. David somehow does not vomit all over this delusional creeper, instead allowing Cunanan to escort him as though he’s an aging invalid to the bathroom; seat him; start getting undressed, removing his blood-caked glasses but still taking care not to touch the lenses; partially undress David; and move them both into the shower to wash off the blood. David is in shock throughout this oogy process but occasionally flinches away from Cunanan’s affectionate ministrations. He finally manages to ask if Cunanan’s going to kill him. Cunanan sounds surprised: “No!” But you killed Jeff, David says, twice. “Why?” “I lost control,” Cunanan murmurs, not sounding like that’s the case at all. But he loves David. David, shivering with revulsion, pushes Cunanan’s hand away: “No. No! Call the police!” Cunanan tries to calm him but David scrabbles away, repeating, “Call them! Do it now!”
Cunanan puts Prints in his crate, like, could someone actually walk that poor pup? David, dry and dressed, pads fearfully out of the bedroom and into the loft’s main area, where Cunanan is sitting in the dark. “Andrew?” David quavers. Cunanan melodramatically switches on the lamp on David’s desk. The cordless is in front of him. “Did you call?” “I’ll call them if you want me too,” Cunanan says, fidgeting. “You haven’t called,” David says, despairingly. Cunanan says he’s been worrying – about David, who asks for the phone, but Cunanan has prepared his manipulation carefully, and goes into a disingenuous presentation about how it’s David’s apartment, David let Jeff in…what will the police think? David, in tears, demands the phone again, and gets an utterly chilling stare in response.
Cunanan sighs actorishly, gets up, and makes a big show of “giving in” to David’s wishes by handing him the phone. David calls 911, but Cunanan is musing that he’ll get 30 years, but David will get 10, and he just can’t allow that to happen. He draws the gun out of his waistband. The 911 operator has answered by now, but David is ensorcelled by Cunanan massaging his own temple with the butt of the gun and whining that he can’t let “this” destroy David’s life. Slowly David hits the off button and hands the phone back. Cunanan beams. I distract myself from the urge to reach through the monitor and flick Cunanan in the eyeball by trying to figure out who Cody Fern looks like – it’s partly Dax Shepard, but it’s someone else too, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.
…Andrew McCarthy! Man, that was bugging me. Not as much as Cunanan’s bugging me, as he comes into the bedroom where David is sitting, becalmed by horror, on the bed and starts digging through David’s drawers for Damning Gay Stuff: porn with titles like Bear Love, some S&M gear. He comes to the bed with it; David withdraws, terrified, but Cunanan is focused on arraying all of it neatly on the duvet and informing David that the cops won’t see victims in him and David – they’ll see suspects. David’s like, but you’ll tell them I didn’t do anything, I’m not a killer. Cunanan blares that “they hate us, David,” they’ve always hated us: “You’re a [F word].” David moves to the edge of the bed and babbles that he needs to talk to his father, ask him what to do. Cunanan condescends that in that case his dad would have to turn him in, or he’d be committing a crime. Does David want to put him in that position? David has had it, and announces he’s leaving; Cunanan gets between him and the door, but says David can, once he’s “thought this through.” David looks at the space between Cunanan and the door and repeats that he wants to leave. “Once you’ve thought it through,” Cunanan repeats, blocking the door and fixing David with another chilling stare.
With no real choice, David exhales, and Cunanan closes the door on the camera, leaving me to think about what I would do in that situation, how I might escape, how effectively Cunanan leveraged his own self-loathing into a loathsome trap to keep Madson under control.
Later. Cunanan has seated himself near the door, on the floor, and appears to be asleep. David eases himself up off the bed and is about to try to slink out when Cunanan’s eyes open and he asks with a Starman head-cock, “Were you going to leave me?” David says no, but Cunanan’s on his feet in an instant, protesting that he was going to leave. David thinks fast and says Prints needs a walk – he’ll shit everywhere, start barking, draw attention. Cunanan, who seems to have forgotten there’s a dead body moldering directly beside the front door, chooses to believe this more-flattering-to-him excuse, and lets David out of the bedroom…
…but once David has retrieved Prints, there’s still the matter of Jeff’s remains, the lake of blood in which they’re resting, and their location, which makes egress basically impossible without one creature stepping on or in the crime scene. Cunanan comes up beside David and pulls an inappropriately snotty what-a-hassle face, then drags David’s entryway rug over to the body and tells David to turn away. David does, but soon can’t resist watching Cunanan awkwardly rolling Jeff up in the rug and just as awkwardly trying to heave him out of sight, a task he’s eventually obliged to ask for David’s help with. David manages not to openly gag as they drag the body around behind part of the sectional; he also manages not to snark at Cunanan that a mere four paper towels and no cleanser is not going to do anything except smear the gallons of blood on the floor around, but when Cunanan semi-realizes this and leaves off bothering to go wipe his hands, David grabs the dog and makes for the door. Cunanan cheerily offers to come along. David says he doesn’t have to, and Cunanan immediately sours: “You don’t want me to come?” David stammers that if he’s tired…"Do you want to walk him without me?“ David has to say no, he doesn’t, like, obviously he does, and you obviously know why, so maybe have one moment of emotional generosity and skip the fucking playacting, but no, Cunanan strides over and repeats that he thinks David wants to go without him. David thought he might be tired. "Do I seem tired?” Cunanan grits, and David’s like, jfc, fine, let’s walk the dog.
On the elevator, of course a neighbor has to get on with the two men and Prints, and Karen cheerily greets both David, who very obviously looks like he just ate a handful of bugs, and Andrew, who doesn’t respond or even blink.
I can’t say I “applaud,” exactly, the show’s and Darren Criss’s choices, which make Cunanan not just scary and weird but also an asocial and annoying asshole – but they’re certainly effective. I want to punch the kid in the dick. As Cunanan blouses his sweatshirt over the gun once again stashed in his waistband, Karen croons at a whingy Prints that “someone’s not having fun on the elevator today.” “No. Guess not,” David grunts. On the ground floor, David wishes her a pointed nice day, then pauses before disembarking: “Are you gonna hurt anyone else?” “N…o?” Cunanan says. David needs him to promise, which of course Cunanan has no problem doing because: compulsive liar. “Nobody else will get hurt! As long as you’re by my side.”
On the sidewalk, David makes nervous eye contact with a fellow dog-walker while rambling about a story he just thought of, that he wasn’t home last night and he can pretend to be discovering the body for the first time – and by then, Cunanan will be “long gone.” Cunanan, already not having it, pulls up: “On my own?” David sees a mother and child approaching on the sidewalk and gulps. “Let’s go back.” They turn back to the building, Cunanan possessively patting David’s neck.
As Cunanan is packing them up, there’s a knock at the door. Inside, David looks stricken; outside, David’s co-worker Melinda is telling the building manager David would never miss work. Prints is barking and whining as David starts for the door but Cunanan grabs his arm, asking if he really wants to be there when they open the door and see what’s inside. The manager bustles off to get the keys, but when she opens the door, it’s clear the two sides of the door aren’t in the same timeline, because Prints bolts the loft, and the women find it empty. Well, except for all the blood, some of it drag marks leading to the rolled-up rug. Melinda gasps. David and Cunanan, meanwhile, buckle up for the worst road trip ever.
MPD homicide detectives Tichich and Jackson arrive at the loft building, and Tichich is struck right away by the fact that the patrol officer has to come down to let them in. Outside the loft, the women brief the detectives: the manager, Jennifer, used her key because the dog sounded “distressed,” and Melinda chimes in that David never misses work. She’s trying to say she found David’s body when Tichich interrupts to ask if it’s David’s apartment and what she can tell them about David. He’s nice, he’s 33, he’s a talented architect…does he have a wife, Jackson asks. He’s gay, Melinda shrugs, and Tichich frowns and passes a pair of rubber gloves to Jackson, which I guess could be something they were going to do anyway but, in the context of the season’s continuing commentary on how far we’ve come (or…haven’t) in our cultural assumptions about the queer community, is probably something we’re meant to notice.
Tichich squats down and sort of peers into the end of the rolled-up rug, but doesn’t unroll it. He opens the wallet on the counter with a pen; it’s David’s. “Wasn’t a robbery,” Tichich remarks. A patrolman notes there was no sign of forced entry. Tichich clocks the heaps of dirty clothes in the bathroom, the blood spatter on the floor, the hammer in the sink where Cunanan dumped it. I’ll note here that, while reporting on Trail’s murder describes the weapon as a “claw hammer,” this is what you or I would merely call a…hammer, with a blunt head for nailing and a bifurcated “claw” for prying. Based on what we later see of Trail’s scalp and skull – or what Cunanan left him of it – it’s clear Cunanan used the claw end of the hammer; I’m not pointing this out as an inaccuracy. I do think it’s noteworthy that, in accounts of murder/true-crime writing, bad acts committed with what would be described only as a “hammer” in literally any other situation will always have involved a “claw hammer,” because it sounds so much more brutal. And…is much more brutal, obviously, but I think the idea takes root subliminally, as it had with me until I took a second to confirm it on Google, that there is a specific, discrete tool that looks more like a scythe and seems only to exist for homicidal purposes, versus the garden-variety rubber-grip hammer we all have in the junk drawer.
…This has been Tool Time with Sarah D. Bunting. Insert your own urg urg Tim Allen noises here and let’s move on to the detectives finding Cunanan’s carefully arranged tableau o’ porn ‘n’ lube. Jackson seems not to know what he’s looking at; Tichich does, but evinces little judgment, except in the typically narrow-minded scenario he spins, in which “a guy turns up” whom David “probably” didn’t know, “they do what they do…this extreme stuff,” shit goes south, and David “ends up in a rug” while the other guy runs. So, note here that they assume at this time it’s David in the rug – and that Jackson has just found the ammunition Cunanan is using. Tichich wonders where the gun is, but the short version is, they’re already behind.
The coroner arrives. Tichich continues obsessing about the buzzer situation until Melinda asks for a word: David had a friend staying with him that weekend, an Andrew “Cone-onan or something.” She describes him to Tichich, adding that Cunanan did a lot of bragging that “didn’t sound right.” Tichich confirms that Cunanan had dark hair – and that David has blond hair. Inside, the coroner is saying he doesn’t want to unroll the rug there, lest valuable evidence fall out, and on a side table, Tichich spots a Polaroid of David and (we’ll see later) his dad, and carries it over to the rug, asking the others what color they think the victim’s hair is. Cut to a truly gruesome shot of the ruins of Trail’s head as they confirm that guy’s hair is black. So now they understand it’s not David in the rug…but they think it’s “a man named Andrew Coo-nay-noon,” and Tichich is now preoccupied with the fact that, if David is alive, that means they entered the premises illegally, so they have to go back and get a search warrant so they don’t screw the pooch in court later. So now they’re even further behind, and given Tichich’s sticklering about the warrant, it’s dumb and shitty of him to inform Melinda and Jennifer that David isn’t the victim, “he’s the killer,” but okay.
Shot of a child’s hand running through reeds as young David and his dad, who’s toting a rifle and a thermos, hike alongside a lake. David dashes into a cabin, followed by Dad. Dad shares out coffee into two tin mugs, and they happily sip it. Later, David claps his hands over his ears as Dad takes a shot, then pulls David to the water’s edge and wades in to retrieve the duck he’s just killed. David sadly squats beside the bird and cradles its dead head in his hands. David runs off. Dad chases him, and kneels next to him, reminding him that they talked about this: “I explained. Okay?” At the end of the day, a brooding David asks if Dad is mad at him. Going against every expectation watching TV and movies has ingrained in us for this scene, Dad says of course he isn’t: hunting isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay. “We can still go on hikes,” he offers, adding that he enjoyed his coffee with David very much. Aw. It’s not entirely clear to me given what happens later whether this actually happened, but it’s still sweet. Dad takes David’s chin and says he doesn’t ever want David to be sad.
In the present day, David puts his hand out the window of Jeff’s Jeep and strokes the air the way he did the reeds as a kid. In the driver’s seat, Cunanan bugs out to Technotronic, car-dancing along to “Pump Up The Jam” and seeming legit wounded that David isn’t reacting positively to yet another tone-deaf response. Later on, Cunanan is boasting through a huge mouthful of sandwich that he’s “close” with Lee Miglin – “Maybe you’ve heard of him?” – and that the border won’t be a problem; they’ll get more than enough money from Lee to live in style in Mexico, plus he’s been “moving product across” “for years” and he knows people. Who knows whether his whole drug-dealer persona had any acquaintance with reality, but it was definitely something that was out there amongst his circle. David can’t with this fucker or with his sandwich, staring into the middle distance and not saying anything, at least until Cunanan glibs that David should start thinking about his “new life.” Cunanan lies that he respects that David probably wants to “part ways” once they get to Mexico, “but we make such a great team? And the truth is we have no one else.” Satisfied that he has now made this true of David as it is for himself, he takes another enormous bite.
Tichich returns with a warrant and the crime-scene team. Jeff’s body is taken out, then unwrapped at the morgue. His clothes are cut off as the camera pans up to his…well, it’s more tears and holes than face, now. Hideously on-point work by the production designer. Jeff’s jeans are folded away to reveal his tattoo (actually Marvin The Martian; here, the generic alien they could get the rights to). The coroner finds Jeff’s wallet, and ID, as the fellow dog-walker from earlier is telling the detectives that normally David would have Prints off the leash, so it was odd that he didn’t when she last saw him. She didn’t notice anything else about their demeanors, which is when Tichich gets a call on his Cornish-hen-sized flip phone that the victim is neither David nor Cunanan.
Those two are exiting a rest-stop men’s room, Cunanan slinging his arm with awkwardly chummy possessiveness around David’s shoulders.
David freezes up when a woman in a Benz gives them an icy look, paranoid that she recognizes him. Cunanan snorts that that’s impossible, but David is insistent; she looked at him like she hated him! Cunanan flips to psycho mode and suggests going after her, running her off the road, and asking her why she looked at “my friend,” “the nicest, kindest person” in the world like that. David yells at him to stop, that he promised nobody else gets hurt. “Whatever you say, David,” Cunanan says primly, peeling out, and although I’m physically becoming exhausted by it and him, I have to give it to this episode: it really gives you a sense of how firmly Cunanan must have had David pinned, mentally, and how slowly and awfully the last days of his life must have gone by, how he must have wanted to scream not only for help but also in Cunanan’s face that he’s a striving dickwad.
As the detectives arrive on Dad Madson’s doorstep, Cunanan burbles that he’s “so glad” David “decided” to come with him. David doesn’t dignify this version, saying through tears as he stares out the window that he keeps playing over what the cops will “find out about” him – and he realizes he’s done this his whole life, “playing over and over the moment people find out about me.” Presumably this is why we saw the hunting trip.
Dad insists David didn’t kill Jeff Trail. Tichich remarks that people saw him and Cunanan “calmly” walking the dog while Jeff’s body was rotting at the loft, riddled with holes from a claw hammer that belongs to David.
David is upset at the prospect of his parents having to endure gossip about him in their small town. Who’s “gonna buy from” Dad’s shop?
Dad is continuing to deny that David is capable of this. Tichich informs him that Cunanan’s friends in San Diego describe him as “reliable; intelligent. ‘Generous’ is a word they use.” We know him, Dad says. He didn’t do this. Tichich sighs that “there’s a great deal you don’t know about your son.”
David wonders aloud if he got in the car because he was afraid Cunanan would kill him, or if he was afraid “of the disgrace.” Cunanan murmurs that David knows he would never hurt David, which David rightly ignores. They stop at a roadside bar and Cunanan stashes the gun in his backpack as they head inside, where a woman and her guitar launch into an acoustic version of the Cars’ “Drive.” Cunanan urges David to eat something; he’ll feel better. David ignores this also and gets up to pee, which Cunanan allows. “Who’s gonna tell you when / it’s too late?” begins the singer, and on my first pass through the episode, I was like, dang, that sounds like Aimee Mann. The camera then pans around to a medium shot, and I was not looking 100 percent at the screen but said aloud to the cat, “Wow, they got someone who even looks like Aimee Mann. What are the odds?” Well, it is Aimee Mann, it turns out, so: pretty good odds, apparently. Anyway, David’s in the bathroom stall, contemplating his odds vis-à-vis breaking the window and shimmying out of it, and to my surprise, he does break out the window, then clear off the glass when nobody comes rushing in to stop him. “Who’s gonna pick you up / when you fall,” Aimee sings as David stares, terrified, out into the parking lot, probably thinking Cunanan’s “feline intuition” will have him waiting directly under the window to apprehend David.
It doesn’t. Cunanan’s other defining trait, self-pity, has him marinating in the parallels between the lyrics of “Drive” and his own situation. As I’ve said, I respect the line that Criss has to walk here with this character, who is both a psychopath and a brat, and if the decision was taken to give the viewer some so-called aid and comfort by tipping Cunanan towards “pitiably hateful” versus “opaquely charming,” I get it.
I also get…Crying Dawson.
Nobody’s going to drive Cunanan anywhere except crazier, and I don’t think we’re intended to feel sorry for him. And I do not. David reappears, alas, and Cunanan grabs his hands across the table. David shoots him a confused look.
Another flashback, this one to David showing his father a departmental award his thesis has won. Dad’s response is once again very explicitly, almost fantastically approving and warm: David put in the work, he deserves this. David then blurts that he’s gay, and after a long pause, Dad asks for a moment: “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.” I think this is what David means when he plays the moments over and over; what I still can’t quite nail down given the stylization of the dialogue in the two scenes is whether he’s playing back what really happened, or revising it to make it go right. What gives me pause in this second flash…something is that it doesn’t go all that well; Dad can’t lie and say it doesn’t matter, because “you know what I believe.” Maybe David wanted to hear that Dad doesn’t have a problem with it, but Dad “can’t say that.” What Dad can say is that he loves David more than he loves his own life. David’s eyes spill over. There’s no need for crying, Dad tells him, then asks why he waited to win the award to come out. David half-smiles. “Good news…bad news.”
Then he wakes up in the back of the Jeep, which…to my point. And it doesn’t really matter, but we’ll get into that later. For now, Cunanan is nowhere around. David emerges from the car in bare feet, and you still hope, even knowing that it won’t happen, that he’ll just climb a tree or melt into the woods silently, get away somehow, put those hikes he took with Dad to use and beat the story. But Cunanan appears, holding the gun, and greets him happily. “You’re not wearing any shoes!” He grabs David’s hand and leads him back to the Jeep, breathing in the country air, like it’s their third date.
At a diner, David asks if Cunanan remembers where they met – on Market Street in San Francisco, a year and a half ago. The fancy clothes Cunanan wore! His “high-society friends”! He sent David a drink; David thought, who does that, “in real life”! Cunanan had everyone laughing! You can see where this is going to go, that David’s reminiscence of admiring and envying Cunanan’s wealth and sophistication has a sneering top note to it, but Cunanan is oblivious, preening at the memory of their $1000-a-night hotel suite and how he swanned to David about changing rooms three times to get the view he wanted. “Except it was all a lie,” David finishes. “You’ve never worked for anything! It was all an act.” This serves two purposes, I would say – in the scene, there’s the sense of a suicide-by-cop maneuver on David’s part, a let’s-just-play-our-cards attitude, and outside it for the viewer, a tiny tiny measure of justice in David at least clocking Cunanan for all his grand bullshit – but you can imagine how Cunanan feels about it.
Cunanan, seeming really not to know: “What’s wrong with you?” David asks if that’s why he killed Jeff when he obviously loved Jeff – that “he figured you out in the end.”
“Took him a few years but he finally saw the real you,” David adds. “And you killed him for it.” Cunanan swallows his dread and makes a flirty moue, saying that if David thinks that night in San Fran was great, just wait ’til they get to Mexico. He blathers on about staying for a month in a fancy hotel, a room with a patio, telling the cute waiters they’re movie stars from Los Angeles. David is disgusted: “You can’t do it, can you.” Cunanan’s face falls: “I can’t what?” “Stop.”
In the car, Cunanan stares out onto the road. David is sitting with his back to the door, and asks why Cunanan sent him down to get Jeff. Cunanan doesn’t want to talk about it. David snaps that he did it on purpose; he wanted David to see it, wanted to make David a part of it. He didn’t lose control at all; he planned the whole thing. Cunanan whines repeatedly in a tone usually reserved for, like, getting turned down for prom or something that he doesn’t want to talk about it. David keeps pushing: does he think they’re outlaws together or something? “I’m nothing like you.” Cunanan still won’t discuss it so David grabs the wheel, grunting at him to stop the car. Cunanan whips out the gun, points it at David’s chest, and wails that David needs to stop talking about the past, that they had a plan, they had a future.
He whips the car down a dirt side road, parks, and pulls David out, still ranting about the plan. David quavers that they still have a plan as Cunanan slings him onto his knees and, at gunpoint, bellows, “Convince me!” David begs for his life – to the detriment, I’m afraid, of Cody Fern’s American accent – and describes the adventure they’ll have together after they get money from Lee. Cunanan says David doesn’t believe that, but David word-paints the place they’ll live, and wisely throws in some details about Cunanan learning Spanish fast because he’s “so smart,” and how he’ll help David, because he’s always helped David. Cunanan is lulled by this for a moment, then raises the gun again: “It could have been true.” David seems to see that he has nothing to lose, and gets up, telling Cunanan to listen to him: it’s over. They have to contact the police. This has to stop. Cunanan’s face is a smear of self-loathing: “Why couldn’t you run away with me?” He’d have run away with Jeff, but not with Cunanan. He’d rather go to prison. “It’s not real,” David says, out of ways to explain. “It could have been,” Cunanan mumbles. “No,” David says, not willing to pretend now that it’s over. “It couldn’t.” Cunanan slumps and starts to turn away. David, almost in disbelief, turns and runs towards the decrepit trailer that’s near the Jeep. Cunanan turns back, sights the gun, and fires three times, but misses…
…and David lurches into the trailer, and locks the door of what is now the inside of the hunting cabin we saw earlier. He hears clinking, and turns to see Dad, unscrewing the thermoses and pouring coffee. David draws carefully near, and takes a cup from Dad, who smiles affably at him. David, delighted, smiles back and takes a seat. He takes a long sip of coffee and closes his eyes, and grins. What a lovely Jacob’s Ladder to give this young man to climb into a sense of peaceful homecoming and acceptance, amidst the utter and pointless terror of his last moments.
Because of course David doesn’t make the trailer. Cunanan shoots him in the back like the gutless shit he is. David manages to turn himself over and hold up his hands. His childhood hand strokes the reeds. Cunanan shoots him, through his hands, in the eye, and then as the sun goes down, snuggles with the body, finally able to possess him in death. Nestled on David’s dead chest, his head right under David’s unseeing shot-out eye, Cunanan looks at a cricket sitting on David’s shirt, then gets to his feet and uncricks his neck. The camera pans up to watch him drive away, then up farther, over the grass, over David’s body, over the darkening lake.
Entertainment doesn’t have to always be fun. Really, its main job is to provoke sensations in us that, even when unpleasant, help reframe our real experiences or bring insight into our lives. That is how fictional stories can feel not only true but essential.
The bulk of “House by the Lake” transpired between two now-dead men, so it’s impossible to know the thoughts, fears, or inner lives of either party leading up to their deaths. But in spending an hour exploring the final days of David Madson (via an incredible performance by Cody Fern), we know not only of his decency and humanity, but also about the life and (literal) death struggles of gay men in the 1990s. Aside from the camp value of the 1990s fashion scene (and Penelope Cruz’s instantly iconic performance) there has been almost no fun to derive from The Assassination of Gianni Versace. But that doesn’t mean it’s not great and important and endlessly heartbreaking. Let’s talk about this episode!
We began with what appeared to be a ’90s-era infomercial from the Minneapolis Tourism Board that strangely did not include any Prince music!
It looked like a nice place back then, and definitely not the kind of place where a senseless, gay-rage-fueled murder was about to take place.
This was one week before the Lee Miglin murder, explored in the previous episode. Andrew Cunanan was hanging out with his successful architect buddy David in David’s sweet loft. But apparently David had made two fatal mistakes: He didn’t like-like Andrew Cunanan back, and also he had openly talked about his successful career. Those are both Andrew Cunanan’s biggest turn-offs if we’re being frank.
Making matters worse, David was clearly in love with their other friend, Jeff. (Finn Wittrock had a free afternoon at some point apparently.) So when Andrew Cunanan summoned Jeff to the loft, it was not to hang out and watch Friends or ER. It was to murder him with a hammer right in front of David.
From this shocking and disgusting act onward, the episode became a tense hostage crisis in which a terrified (and heartbroken) David couldn’t seem to get away from Andrew Cunanan.
Andrew may not have been fully sane, but he fully had a gun. All David could really do was pretend things were normal, that they were still hanging out, and look for any opportunity to sneak off.
The horror and sadness of these scenes were so overwhelming that I was borderline relieved when we got to see a close-up of the latex dummy meant to be Finn Wittrock’s body. It was so bad and also it looked like Andrew McCarthy?
Thus concludes the only remotely fun thing about this otherwise heartbreaking episode.
After Andrew forced David to ditch the loft with him, a co-worker swung by to check in on David and found blood stains on the buffed concrete. Later, when detectives arrived, we got the sinking feeling that yet again the investigation would be hobbled by their evident discomfort and unfamiliarity with gay people. Certain immediate assumptions were just Occam’s Razor type mistakes, like the identities of the victim and killer. But when they came across some gay paraphernalia (including gay porn on DVD! In 1997!) it’s like they immediately wrote off the crime as part of some sick, gay underworld thing. When really it was just a psycho who murdered his friend out of jealousy, a thing that happens to 100% of straight people according to Investigation Discovery.
The episode also explored David’s background, in particular his relationship with (and coming out to) his father. This included touching flashbacks in which young David signaled that he was not like other boys (in that he hated murdering ducks) and his man’s-man father assured him that was okay. I was already tearing up.
As he sat trapped in Cunanan’s passenger seat, David even wept when he thought about how now the world would know he was gay, and he wondered what his parents would say, or what their friends would say. Again, if you are not a gay person who lived in the 1990s, try to imagine feeling so terrified of basic existence in society. And in addition to that, imagine there is a disease decimating your peers. If there’s one thing we can take away from this (admittedly hard-to-watch) series, it’s that life was truly hell for a lot of good people back then. Because, man. He is literally a hostage but is now most concerned that his parents’ store will lose business.
In a lovely surprise, Aimee Mann ended up playing the folk singer at a dive bar Andrew and David stopped at. While David considered attempting to escape through the bathroom window, Mann sang a cover of The Cars’ “Drive” and it verged on sublime. This guy knows what I’m talking about:
It had been a while since we’d seen Cunanan expressing anything resembling a human emotion, so this was unsettling. Part of him must have known he was past the point of no return. Yes he had successfully gotten the man he loved to go on the open road with him. But if we’re being real, he did not achieve this by very honest means.
In another flashback we learned that David had worked extremely hard in architecture school and won a prestigious award, perhaps mainly to impress his father enough so that when he came out to him, his father wouldn’t be overly angry. And in the scene where he finally did it, his father did express disappointment, but even more devastatingly, he seemed disappointed that his son couldn’t tell him this without also delivering “good news.” The whole thing would have seemed unbearably sad if the father hadn’t seemed like a decent, loving man at his core. So many weren’t/aren’t as lucky to have dads like that. Ugh, the ’90s.
In the episode’s final heartbreak (which we knew was coming), David attempted to finally rebuke Cunanan and run away from him. The episode allowed us to think he’d dodged Cunanan’s bullets and taken cover in a lake side cabin, where he enjoyed one last visit with his father.
But no. He had not outrun the bullets. He’d been struck down right there, and then finished off by a reprehensible madman.
Cunanan laid down to cuddle his slaughtered friend, but from our perspective he did not deserve the companionship even a corpse would afford. Just ask this cricket:
For the past two weeks we’ve seen Andrew Cunanan embody every gay fear and insecurity (both society’s and gay peoples’ own) and use his warped mind to destroy upstanding, good men. Good men, the kind he could never be and never would be. A smarter person than me could write an articulate essay about how Cunanan was a product of his time, or a symbol, or whatever. But the more important take-away from these two episodes, I think, was the greatness and dignity of Lee Miglin and David Madson. Though Cunanan ultimately wielded the tools by which they died, The Assassination of Gianni Versace wants to remind us that the world they existed in was at the very least complicit. It’s a dark thought, but a necessary one. And that’s how a show as complicated and frankly stomach-churning as this one is as essential as television gets.
But as the event leading up to Versace’s death play out, it’s very clear that no one knew just how twisted Andrew Cunanan really was.
While overall this series has been top notch in terms of casting and the overall look has been outstanding, isn’t hasn’t been without criticism. The pacing and general confusion being chief among them.
In the past two installments alone, we’ve been introduced to characters we know absolutely nothing about and we’re immediately expected to feel for them and their current situations. Having both episodes begin with a murder or the insinuation of one, does make the audience sympathetic but it doesn’t make it less confusing.
We’ve heard the names David Madson and Jeff Trail before in passing, but if you’re unfamiliar with the case in general, it may take a few moments to understand what’s happening when they first appear on screen.
Jeff: He took something from my new apartment. David: Yeah. What’d he take? Jeff: My gun.
Of all of Andrew’s victims, Jeff and David were the two h who had a relationship with Andrew. At the time of their deaths, Andrew was in town staying with David.
Through a brief conversation between David and Jeff, it sounds like a bit of a love triangle may be at play. Or just a heavy amount of jealously on Andrew’s part. Either way, Jeff doesn’t last ten seconds in David’s apartment before Andrew sneaks up and attacks him with a hammer.
It’s another brutal, brutal murder and shows again that these killings are very personal to Andrew. He wants these men to suffer.
Everything that comes after Jeff’s death is a chance for the actor playing David to shine. And he truly does.
David is shell-shocked and in a state of duress and panic for forty minutes straight. When Andrew pulled him into the shower so they could both wash the blood off their bodies, I desperately wanted David to just knock Andrew in the teeth and make a run for it.
There were several other times I just wanted David to run away or to just scream, but that’s so easy to say from the outside. David was panicked, scared for his life and standing face to face with a psychopath.
There’s no telling what anyone would do in that situation.
It doesn’t help that Andrew is a master manipulator and is able to slowly convince David that they could both be implicated in Jeff’s murder.
Or does he?
David: Are you gonna hurt anyone else? Andrew: No. David: I need you to promise me. Andrew: I promise you. No one else will get hurt as long as you’re by my side.
When they first set off on the run and David is given the chance to seek help while left alone for a few minutes, he chooses not to. Instead he returns to David and continues onward. It’s a puzzling thing to witness because there’s so many times you just want him to scream or yell that he’s in danger. But that moment never comes.
While running, David has a sort of epiphany about Andrew and Jeff’s death and it’s interesting to see that Andrew was able to run his con on people for so long.
We don’t spend enough time with Jeff to get a sense of who he was, but through flashbacks and almost hallucinations, we get to see David as a boy and his need to please his father.
Eventually Andrew has enough of David’s backhanded comments and unwillingness to go along with the plan and he snaps. We’ve seen Andrew snap before and even though I knew where this was headed, I desperately wanted it to be wrong.
Is that why you killed Jeff? You loved him. It was so obvious. But he figured you out, didn’t he? Took him a few years but he finally saw the real you. And you killed him for it. – David [to Andrew]
The episode ends right before Andrew heads to Chicago to see Lee Miglin. So, my assumption is the next week will lead us up to Jeff’s fateful trip to David’s apartment.
I’m still not sold on this style of storytelling, as at times things feel incredibly disjointed and the redundant the next. I’m saving my opinion on that until I see the series in its entirety.
Once again, we had an entry without the Versace’s. Considering the splashy casting moves and promotion has heavily involved the Versace name, they haven’t gotten nearly as much screen time as I would have thought so far.
And it feels like there is still more unfinished business with Andrew and his backstory, so it’s hard to say when they will be coming back.
Are you missing that element of the story? Do you like the standalone episodes that give us greater insight into Andrew’s other victims?
Like many a gay man, I have a fraught relationship with Ryan Murphy.
This isn’t exactly novel. Murphy is the man who gave Millennial gay boys their teen gay romance dreams in Glee with Kurt and Blaine. He routinely serves us gay icons in rotation on American Horror Story. And he turned Sarah Paulson into an honest-to-God star. But he also derailed Glee with too many guest stars and flights of fancy, and makes every season of American Horror Story unbearable by the end. That’s not even mentioning what a disaster shows like Nip/Tuck and The New Normal became under his supervision.
He gives and he takes with both hands, to say the least. Suffering through much of the toxic and unnecessaryAmerican Horror Story: Cult (which I could actually never bring myself to finish) only solidified my resolve: Murphy’s good work isn’t enough to cancel out his significant flaws. Save for maybe the Charles and Diana season of Feud (I did just finish bingeing The Crown, so I have needs), I was ready to wash my hands of him.
Specifically, then came the fourth episode of the miniseries, which does not feature Edgar Ramirez’s Gianni Versace at all — nor Penelope Cruz’s Donatella, for that matter. “House by the Lake” is a twist on a bottle episode: Instead of limiting locations, writer Tom Rob Smith and director Daniel Minahan limit storylines. The only people we spend substantial time with are Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), and his second victim, David Madson (Cody Fern). The story itself is compact: Andrew kills former friend Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), and forces David to escape with him through a combination of blackmail and manipulation. In the process, the team produces something truly extraordinary: an episode of TV that doesn’t just understand the damaging effects of internalized homophobia, but communicates them in a way that makes me reflect on my own gay shame.
But look at that: I said “the team.” And I highlighted the director and writer. Not Murphy. Because even now, after having watched this fantastic episode of TV twice, I still can’t quite square in my head that Ryan Murphy — the same Ryan Murphy who once had Kurt’s glee club teammates sing Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” to him, at his mother’s wedding — could produce such a vital gay work. But American Crime Story is his show, and his team works with him to make his vision real. Murphy deserves the credit.
He deserves the credit for the layered, surprisingly complex characterization of David. Though the Cunanan murders are all question marks in one way or another — be it motive or details about the victim that remain sketchy — David Madson is the biggest blank. So Smith and Murphy have fleshed him out into being a deconstruction, of sorts, of the Best Little Boy in the World stereotype. David is a clean-cut young man, an architect striving to be the best in his office. When he was younger, as we see in a flashback, he sought his dad’s approval by getting the best grades and academic awards. He only comes out to his father after presenting him with evidence of scholastic achievement.
“You waited until you won this award to tell me?” his father asks. David can only squeak out that he wanted to pair “good news” with “bad news.”
The irony is, David Madson was very good. As Murphy and Smith tell it, he was a sweet guy, patient to a fault with Andrew’s disturbing behavior, and good at his job. But he felt shame regardless. He felt embarrassed about having some sexual interests — nothing horrifying, just non-heteronormative. He felt he had to hide these parts of himself. He felt gay shame.
Andrew uses that shame to his advantage in this episode. He questions how David’s family might respond upon learning about David’s desires. He ponders whether they’ll actually believe that David had nothing to do with Jeff’s murder. He plants seeds of doubt that take hold in David’s mind, making the architect worry that the image of him as wholesome and good has been shattered.
For most of the episode’s runtime, Andrew is physically keeping David with him, either with hands or with threat of gun violence. The young architect has no choice; he’s stuck on the run. But there’s one moment, in a bathroom bar with a cracked window, that David has his chance to escape.
And he doesn’t take it.
Smith’s script zeroes in on a particularly insidious part of Andrew Cunanan’s spree: He, a gay man, uses his would-be lover’s insecurities about his own sexuality to trap David with him. We see David shift from resistant to angry to resigned through their trip out of Minneapolis. But because of the psychological damage Andrew does to him, he can’t take his way out when he has it. He’s too worried about the ways which his family won’t accept his dirty laundry, or won’t believe his innocence. The price of that choice, of course, is his life.
Heartbreakingly, David isn’t wrong in his assumption. Despite knowing the kind of man his son is, all it takes is detectives telling David’s father that there are things he and his wife “don’t know” about his son for him to grow suspicious. We don’t see more of his reaction, so it’s possible he’d have been fine. But the fear of his father’s reaction lingers, both for us and for David.
At the end of this installment, Andrew shoots and kill David. He would go on to kill three more, Lee Miglin being the next, before his killing spree ended in his own suicide. But because of the series’ reverse structure, in the next few episodes, viewers will learn more about both David and Jeff, the first man Andrew killed. We’ll get more of Fern’s extraordinary performance as David, for which he should almost certainly receive attention come Emmys time.
But there’s something about the end of this episode that feels final, largely because how Smith, Murphy, and Minahan structure it as a complete story. David is a tragic figure, undone by his own fears and shame thanks to the manipulations of a former fling-turned-spree killer. He’s hardly the only good man to fall victim to his own shame.
For this thoughtful, heartbreaking portrait of gay shame, Murphy has something I can honestly say I’ve never felt for him before: respect. He may be a frustrating creator, but any artist who can work with a team and execute a vision so nuanced and so vital deserves our attention. It’s my delight to say that the rest of this series is just as great, too.
ACS news 
