Episode 8: “Creator/ Destroyer”

Though the penultimate episode is a deeper origin story for Andrew, we open again a Versace vignette: their only appearance in the episode. But this one does not feature Edgar Ramirez, or Penelope Cruz. We see Gianni as a young boy in Italy, developing a passion for dressmaking. His mother is supportive enough to not only understand this passion, but fosters it. “You can do whatever you want in life, but you have to work for it.” Despite his classmates’ teasing and the repression of other adults, Gianni takes on the craft from his mother.

The show continues to make thematic connections between Andrew Cunanan and Gianni Versace, implying that their life paths and goals were remarkably similar. They are both immigrant stories chasing the American Dream against a system and a society that constantly looks down upon and underestimates them. They are two different sides of the same coin. I think the show is oversimplifying a much more complex issue and boiling it down to thematic parallels, but it is effective in the context of a somewhat fictional miniseries…

We then go to 1980s San Diego, to Andrew’s childhood. His family is moving into an up-and-coming neighborhood. His three older siblings and his mother are helping with the furniture, while Andrew reads a fashion magazine. We quickly see that he is given overt and outlandish special treatment by his father Modesto (played by Jon Jon Briones, in a remarkable one-episode showcase). Modesto has placed his dreams and ideals of success into Andrew: he is special, he deserves only the best, and the world owes it to him.

It is here where we see the origin of Andrew’s delusion about what he thinks his life should be, and his inextinguishable desire to attain the unattainable. It’s all he ever learned from his father. He was given the master bedroom while his other siblings had to share a single room. His father buys him a car before he is old enough to drive. He inherits this entitlement just as he would inherit the cycle of abuse toward his mother.

We can also trace Andrew’s magnetic charisma and talent of spinning lies into entrancing stories back to Modesto. There is another sequence that juxtaposes two interviews, replicating the device in episode five, where Versace’s coming out profile in The Advocate was paired with Jeff Trail’s CBS piece about the military. Andrew applies for the best private school in the state while his father applies for a job at Merrill-Lynch. Modesto sells his life story as the ultimate American Dream narrative: he was born in the Philippines, joined the U.S. army in hopes of moving there, and took himself and his family from poverty into one of the best neighborhoods. He sells himself as a success story, just like Andrew will do countless time in the future. The firm buys it, and hires him.

Andrew is also accepted into the school. But he is aware of the enormous pressure that this means for him and his family. His father only sees him in terms of potential, of how much money he will be able to earn, and what he will be able to achieve.

As his father is putting Andrew to bed, the series heavily implies that he constantly molested him, and that his favoritism and endearment for him had much deeper roots, and consequences. There is no real-life evidence that supports this claim that the show makes. It’s something that makes narrative sense and adds a layer of complexity to Andrew’s actions, but at the same time feels like an effort to justify them. Villains are scarier when we can’t understand them, and the show continues to make an effort to make us try to empathize with him.

We catch up with Andrew in high school. He is much closer to the charisma machine that we’ve come to know all these episodes. He’s fully in charge of the image he projects, not caring if the appears flamboyant, queer, or different. He’s just interested in appearing at all.

He has been keeping a secret relationship with an older man, that he desperately wants to make public. He dumps Andrew when he tries to take him to a high school party, which Andrew decides to attend on his own. As he walks through the sea of judgmental teenagers, he takes control of the dancefloor in the most head-turning red leather jumpsuit, fully aware that every glance in the room is upon him.

Feeling bad for him, Lizzie (the delightful Annaleigh Ashford returns again) joins him to try and save him. We see them striking up a real connection, until she has to confess that she is in fact a married woman who has tasked to chaperone this party. In a way, they are both putting up fronts. Andrew is intrigued with her. And what was perhaps his only true friendship starts then.

If the show has made something clear over and over, is that anything that flies too close to the sun will eventually crash and burn. The life that Modesto has made for himself and his family will crumble. He had been engaging in fraudulent stock investments for years. The police are now after him. In a matter of hours, he leaves his job and his family behind, running away to the Philippines.

Andrew refuses to believe that his father, this omniscient figure that has become the moral guiding light for every action that he has done or will do, would abandon them like that, with no plan. So he chases him down to the Philippines, and finds him hiding in the shed of an uncle he’s never met.

This final confrontation between Andrew and his father puts together all the themes of the show in a superbly acted showcase for both performers. It’s about immigrant sacrifice, it’s about the faults and privileges of the American Dream, it’s about abandoning your identity in pursuit of a better one, it’s about not being able to escape who you are and where you come from. It all escalates to a physical confrontation, in which Modesto dares Andrew to kill him, taunting him that he is not “man enough” to do it. Knowing that their relationship is now broken forever, Andrew returns to the U.S. He distances himself from his father, not realizing that he will still carry on everything he taught him for the rest of his life. He could not kill him.

In the last scene, Andrew applies for the job at the pharmacy that we saw him miserably working at the start of the last episode. When the manager asks him what his father does, Andrew tells him he owns pineapple plantations in the Philippines, shedding him from his life, but effectively becoming him, as well.

While last week’s episode felt satisfying in that it neatly tied all the plot points that we’ve seen through the show together, this week felt emotionally satisfying in offering a deeper look into Andrew’s psychology and motivations. The show’s tendency to portray him a victim of circumstance rather than someone fully accountable is questionable. But, as a character study, this is nevertheless an episode with plenty of nuance and outstanding moments.

Episode 9: “Alone”

On the season finale for the show, Andrew’s life finally gets to a crossroads that for once he can’t charm, con or murder his way out of. As we focus on the final day of his life, with the cops slowly encircling him until he decided to take his own life, we also see the lasting effects that his actions had on every character that he came across; and how he was left to die, as the title indicates, all alone.

The episode opens with Gianni Versace’s assassination. After eight previous backtracking episodes, we now understand the emotional baggage that led Andrew to the steps of that mansion, and suddenly that scene (which also opened the series), is charged with deeper meaning.

Andrew savors his “victory” for a few hours before his dire reality sets in. He struts around the city with a proud smirk on his face; he treats himself to a bottle of champagne. He then watches on TV that the police have successfully identified him, and for a moment, is also proud of that. But he now needs to be on the move.

He tries to leave Florida, but there’s a police checkpoint on every exit out of Miami Beach. In a first display of the desperation that would stick with him from then until his very end, he screams under a bridge, trapped and realizing he is being cornered. He stays at an empty boat for some time, and eventually breaks into a house that would become the place of his death.

From the moment he sees his face on television, to the final pull of the trigger, images of every person whose life he forever changed appear both to him and in separate scattered scenes for the audience. For him they are the ghosts of his past coming back to haunt him. For us, they are reminders that even though we’ve been watching mostly fractured, episodic and self-contained parts of this story, it’s all one whole narrative, where one action led to the next and its consequences rippled throughout.

We get the triumphant return of Judith Light as Marilyn Miglin. The FBI has tracked her down to Tampa to let her know that the man who killed Versace is also the main suspect in her husband’s murder. She is outraged at how the police is only starting to act now that a famous person was involved, even if they’ve had Andrew’s information for months.

This is a sentiment that has been brought up since the first episode through the various depictions of police negligence and incompetence, and it’s brought up again when Ronnie (Max Greenfield) is taken into custody and accused of protecting Andrew. Yes, they talked about Versace together, he says. All the time. They fantasized about having his life, about not being constantly overlooked and tossed to a corner.

The ghosts of his actions also appear to Andrew in the confinement he has created for himself. He catches Marilyn’s appearance in the Shopping Network, where she delivers yet another impassioned speech about creating a perfume for her mother. As she says this, we see the police barge into Andrew’s own mother’s house; another relationship he has destroyed.

Pictures of Jeff Trail and David Madson appear on television, in what is basically now a 24-hour news cycle coverage of the manhunt for Andrew. This is the only mention or appearance we get from them. This speaks to the act of turning victims of a serial killer into mere statistics, which the show actively tried to contradict by showing us their backstories. The fact that this is all the screen time they get makes this even more resonant; we know the people that they were.

Weaved through the episode it’s the Versace family dealing with Gianni’s sudden loss. Donatella and Antonio are two other people (along with Marilyn Miglin, and even his own mother) whose life Andrew indirectly and forever changed by the murders.

We see Antonio’s deep mourning and pain over the loss of his life partner, and Donatella’s steel front against it all. She needs to keep her composure, and take the reins of the company, like her brother pushed her to. We also see how the family dynamic is irreparably broken. Without Gianni, Donatella and Antonio have nothing to offer each other. Donatella goes as far as to refuse to let him stay in one of the Versace houses. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she tells him, as if they both had lost different people.

Andrew watches Versace’s funeral on television. The more time he spends trapped in this house, and with himself, the more confined the spaces feel, the sweatier he is, the more claustrophobic and suffocating the filmmaking became. Andrew takes in the grief of the packed cathedral, and grieves himself. He also watches Liz Cote give an on-air testimony about still caring for him, knowing that what he cares most is what other people think of him. Liz truly was the only person in Andrew’s life who ever made a true connection with him.

So then Andrew turns to his father for comfort. The man he tried so hard to deny and let go of on the last episode, but that eventually molded him into the man he became. He calls him in the Philippines, begging for help and rescue. Modesto says that he will be there immediately, charges against him be damned. He tells Andrew to be ready. He has a plan, the plan Andrew always knew and wished he had.

But then Modesto appears on Andrew’s television, bragging about the way he raised him, sharing intimate details about his childhood, saying that he will sell Andrew’s life rights to Hollywood (an ironic statement in a series made about him). He’s clearly not coming. In another display of rage and desperation, Andrew shoots the TV, right at his father image; finally killing him in his mind. Perhaps too little too late.

The police finally catch up to Andrew’s whereabouts. In a matter of hours, he is surrounded and out of options; out of places to hide, people to run towards, lies to tell. He heads to the bedroom, where he encounters the last person whose life he destroyed: his younger self. Both Andrews watch TV together, the young boy amazed and entranced at the coverage he is getting.

Andrew then shoots himself, after one last look in the mirror at the man he became. Immediately after pulling the trigger, we cut back to the opera sequence with Versace, all the way back from the premiere episode. In what now seems confirmed to be a fantasy scenario, Gianni and Andrew have one final conversation. Andrew admits that this (what was perhaps the pinnacle of his ideals: Versace’s life, feeling wanted and successful and accomplished) actually feels like hell.

The last sequence of the series is not of Andrew, but rather of how the survivors of this story are left to deal with the wreckage that Andrew left behind. Antonio has seemingly lost any will to live without his lover. Marilyn Miglin keeps slowly unveiling a whole new side of her husband’s life that was unknown to her. And Donatella, away from the funeral and the cameras and the business obligations, finally allows herself to grieve, and breaks down. These people had everything ripped away from them. The man responsible is dead. How to move on from here?

While this series was very much Andrew’s story, his actions had long-lasting consequences way past the murders and his own suicide.

The show is now over. I may need some time to fully sit with it as it was not an easy watch. It was a raw and often uncomfortable look at difficult issues that are still widely relevant inside the gay community, shown through the lens of a serial killer.

But I do think we will look back at it as a powerful piece of queer art. Its performances are incredible, especially Darren Criss’s, doing the best work of his career. The series was not at all the kitschy, soapy crime drama that was advertised. It was a necessary and beautifully crafted deep dive into a subculture of society that is never represented with such honesty, willing to portray the ugly side as brightly as what makes it soar. It wasn’t O.J., and perhaps it was a mistake to expect that. Versace is its own thing: ethereal, painful, a strange and unsettling product of beauty.

“ACS: The Assassination of Gianni Versace”, Finale – Blog – The Film Experience

Because of the backwards narrative style, the entire second season of American Crime Story has been one big origin story for Andrew Cunanan, his relationships, and the motives that eventually led to his string of murders. The seventh episode, titled “Ascent”, was the episode that we’ve been leading up to all along to fully get a changing point in Andrew’s life.

Last week’s episode (titled “Descent”, in parallels that were evident throughout) was about Andrew losing everything he built for himself. This week we get a peek into how he started putting it together…

Episode 7: “Ascent”

1992, Milan. The episode opens with Donatella Versace, which is always a welcome change. The the further we go back in time, the more the Versace appearances are more thematic tie-ins to Andrew’s journey than a look into their personal lives. But Penelope Cruz in a platinum blonde wig is always a vision to behold.

Donatella is anxious that she can’t seem to design a dress by himself. Gianni can see the potential and talent in his younger sister, and decides to guide her; he proposes they design a dress together. He will show her the ropes. Learning to adapt to your environment will be a big theme of the episode.

We then go to a San Diego pharmacy, where Andrew is working as a cashier. Every week, we see Andrew being stripped more and more of the egocentric, glamorized monster of the first episodes. He’s slightly less delusional, less hurt, less polished; somehow more human, which is reinforces the weird moral statement the show is making out about a murderer.

The Andrew we meet this week is an Andrew that is fueled by dreams. This is something that has always pushed him forward (and what eventually pushed him over the edge), but here we see someone who has yet to accomplish what he set out to do. He’s just a cashier reading a Vogue magazine.

We also see more of the relationship with his mother, who was first introduced last week. In real life, this woman was severely mentally ill, which the show hints at in small, hardly overt ways. We see a tremendous dependency she has not only on her son, but on her son’s success. His value under her eyes is measured on how much he can accomplish.

“You can tell lies, but you either have money or you don’t”, a man at his regular dive bar tells Andrew, perhaps pulling the final trigger inside him to activate him and make him go pursue his dream life. For Andrew, this naturally means to join an escort service. After all, he is well-versed, can carry a conversation, and older guys are keen on him.

The following scene, where Andrew interviews for an escort position, is the only scene so far in the series in which Andrew’s Asian-American identity takes a hard toll on him. “I can’t sell a smartass Filipino,” the escort manager tells him, after she’s asked him to put himself in every box the potential clients might check. “Then I will sell myself.” The idea of not being desired or wanted is something that will chase him for life.

Andrew insinuates himself into the life of Lincoln Ascot, an older millionaire, by charming him and his group of wealthy gays in an opera playhouse. Soon, they have reached an arrangement; he will get monthly allowances, expense credits, and travel benefits, in exchange for redecorating Lincoln’s house and social life. A bargain that benefits both of them.

And then we finally witness the fated encounter between Andrew and David Madson in San Francisco; the night that has been hinted to since David’s introduction in episode four, and that would define the rest of their lives. What starts as Andrew buying a drink for the lonely blond gentlemen at the bar, ends as one of those nights; a night of endless conversation and opening yourself completely. Andrew is hooked. The way Cody Fern portrays David as a wide-eyed dreamer, talking endlessly about his goals, is so much painful and traffic knowing his end. The show has been very effective in highlighting the theme of hope and lost dreams via the backwards narrative.

But Lincoln is not pleased with Andrew taking in new lovers, and breaks off the arrangement. That very same night, he picks up a straight-identified man at a bar, perhaps for the sake of company and drowning his sorrows. But this man, terrified of Lincoln but more terrified at himself, freaks out at the slight touch of Lincoln’s hand, bashes his head, and brutally murders him. “An act of self-defense.” Andrew witnesses this from afar.

While this murder actually took place in reality (and the man later confessed to it to committing it out of gay panic), there is no evidence of Andrew ever being there, but his placement in the room makes for an interesting addition. It allowed Andrew to be a passive bystander for something that he would later commit himself more than once. He would also use this to underline the fatality of not being able to speak up as a gay man against a crime. We all had it coming; it’s always our fault.

Andrew mourns Lincoln with Norman, one of his closest friends and (because we’ve seen last week’s episode), the next man he will be kept under. As they work through their grief on a beach, Andrew offers Norman what he had with Lincoln. A dream that he can build for them.

But he’s not telling his mom he’s become a kept boy. He’s telling her that he’s going after a bigger dream; he’s travelling the world with Gianni Versace as his costuming assistant. His mother assumes that she’s coming along with them. But Andrew has to shed everything from his previous identity, including her. In what has now become the peak trope for selfish behavior, he ends up hurting his own mother, pushing her away and making her fracture her shoulder blade. But she still thinks he’s such a good boy. Andrew cries at this. He will never be a good boy again.

In between Andrew’s titular ascent, segments of the Versaces are peppered throughout. Donatella takes the red carpet spotlight for the first time and becomes a public face for the company. Gianni goes deeper into an illness he will never be cured off, and eventually has to leave Milan for Miami, and Donatella takes over the day-to-day operations. “If we are not talked about, we are nothing,” she says to her new employees after Gianni’s departure. This is another reminder that the Versace’s presence has mostly been used for thematic underlining.

There are two episodes of this season left. According to early critical coverage, next week’s episode we will go back in time one last time, to fully understand Andrew’s life motivation to social climb his way towards murder. And as much as I’ve enjoyed the backwards narrative and the emotional places it takes the audience, I hope the finale puts us back where the premiere left off, with Andrew after the last murder. There needs to be a conclusion to Andrew’s life, as he ended it shortly after.

It’s been a bittersweet journey to explore the lives of people whose fates we already know. I’m enjoying the deep exploration of their characters, but also question them. I get the necessity (and, in a way, the debt) to humanize the victims that have become footnotes in a larger story. I get the necessity of painting the world of prejudice around them, and the decisions that led them to meet and need this man. I thank that we’ve gotten to explores the themes of isolation, longing for connection, and community in the gay sphere that still permeate today. It’s almost a pity, though, that in the way we are also getting a human, almost relatable portrait of a killer. But I guess if there was a way to do it, taking all factors around it into consideration was the way to go.

ACS: Gianni Versace “Ascent” – Blog – The Film Experience

For the first time in a month’s worth of episodes about his victims, American Crime Story returns to an Andrew-centric episode. We’re going further back into the narrative, to the events and actions that led to his string of murders.  And as it has been teased all throughout the series, all it takes for a delusional man whose entire identity is built on a bubble of lies to break down, is to pop that bubble…

Episode 6: “Descent”
The sixth episode of the series takes place in 1996, one year before the murders. Andrew is living in San Diego in the mansion of gay millionaire Norman Blachford, under the pretenses of being his personal interior designer. Pretenses is all Andrew lives off of; he’s mooching off everything he can from the poor man, who only wants company.

Andrew throws a birthday party for himself, in house that he doesn’t own, with money that is not his, surrounded by people that don’t know him. And yet somehow this is the life that he always envisioned for himself. It’s a game of perception that he needs to keep playing in order to keep the fantasy alive.

Annaleigh Ashford, bubbly and buoyant as ever, returns as Andrew’s best friend Elizabeth, who does not believe that Andrew is living a genuine life with Norman. But he tells her that he won’t stay there for long. He’s now chasing after David (Cody Fern – it still hurts every time to seem him alive and well), a boy he met in San Francisco that now owns his heart. He will be attending the party, and Andrew wants to show him that he is a loved person. As we see through the episode, this is something Andrew desperately wants to believe in, too.

Jeff Trail seems to be his only genuine friend. They are still close after the initial bar encounter we saw last episode. Jeff comes to Andrew’s party, with real feelings of friendship and gratitude that Andrew brushes away in lieu of putting on a charade for David. He implores Jeff to pretend to have a life that goes more with what Andrew has created for his. Everyone around him needs to be part of his games in order for them to work.

Jeff and David meet in this party. Lee Miglin is also there. They all take a picture together. It has to be a creative decision to have all (or at least sixty percent) of Andrew’s victims gathered in the same place, appearing in the same picture. But it translates the theme of Andrew destroying those around him into visual terms.

But, as it has always been with Andrew, he doesn’t have enough. He needs more from Norman; a bigger allowance, first class flights, being named his sole heir. You know, reasonable petitions. And then Norman bursts the first of Andrew’s bubble, and reveals him he has had him investigated. All the stories he has told about himself are false. He’s still willing to keep Andrew around, as long as he makes himself useful. But Andrew doesn’t want to be useful. He doesn’t want to be ordinary. So he decides to leave Norman. Wanting more is slowly destroying him.

Living off the last credit he has left, Andrew invites David to LA under work pretenses. He woos him with fancy hotels, and expensive dinners, and lush gifts. But David cannot take this any longer, and makes him clear that he is not Andrew’s guy; never will be. In his last attempt to connect with him, he tries to ask about his past and his family, but Andrew won’t let go of the invented narratives he tells himself. So David leaves him.

And, as an incredibly aggressive way of asserting his territory with Jeff, Andrew sends a postcard to Jeff’s father, outing him to his family. Jeff confronts him and tells him he is leaving for a job in Minneapolis; the city where David lives. He assures him the two have nothing to do with each other, but Andrew doesn’t buy him. And just like that, Andrew has lost all the people he cared about, or that cared about him. So, as one does, he seeks refuge in a crystal meth from a pyromaniac at a local dive bar.

In one of his highs, we get the only Versace appearance of the episode in the form of a hallucination, a way for Andrew to confront this other person who embodies all of his ideals: the man who has everything he wished and fought for. They are the same person, only Versace got lucky. There is bitterness and deep resentment in Andrew, and the psychotic gears start to turn again.

Andrew hits rock bottom (in this episode, at least, not in his life), when he tries to break into Norman’s home so he can get money to pay for his drugs. Norman calls the cops on him. And then we get a final sequence where, having been stripped of everything, Andrew goes to visit his mother.

This is his real mother, not the thousand different women he has invented to strangers at parties. And we confirm what has been always strongly suggested but never confirmed until now. Andrew came from nothing. He had very humble beginnings, and wishing for more is something practically ingrained in the family emblem. “I am unhappy” he mutters to his mother, a cry for help that does deeply unheard. No one is going to help him anymore.

“Descent” was good in illuminating some aspects of Andrew’s character that has been hinted at before, but never expressly addressed; mainly the fabrications that he tells others (and, as it turns out, himself) in order to keep going. The further we go back into the narrative, the more human the characterization of Andrew is becoming, which is a weirdly amoral line to walk when depicting someone that killed five people.

I don’t know how farther back we will go in future episodes, or when we will pick up the murder narrative. The Versace part of the story is as behind from us as it can be, and the show has now made it explicitly clear that it is not about them, or that particular story, at all. I just hope in the last leg of the season we can start moving forward instead of keep looking back. Just like Andrew, if you look too far back, it’s hard to come back from that.

ACS: Gianni Versace: “Descent” – Blog – The Film Experience