With “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” the first electrifying episode to kick off the second season of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, those faithfully devoted to the Ryan Murphy canon will instantly recognize the recurring motif of his work: a dedication to calling out the hypocrisy of those who have mocked the gay community–whether from the outside or inside of it. In Andrew Cunanan’s (yes, it sounds a lot like poonanny when said aloud–ironic considering his love of peen) case, his perpetual deception–claiming to be straight to some people and gay–as he truly is–to others is part of the hypocrisy Murphy highlights. And yet, “I tell people what they need to hear” is Cunanan’s justification to one of his ostensible boyfriends.
The self-hating gay element is at play from the get-go, with Cunanan bandying the word “fag” as a black person would say “nigga” or a woman “bitch” and “slut.” All attempts to dilute the harshness of the slur. And, as Cunanan puts it, “What am I supposed to say? Homosexual? That sounds so scientific.” Majorly upgraded to look more Italian-American than Filipino-American, Darren Criss’ well-played, understatedly psychotic rendering of Cunanan makes it easy to believe in his success as a con artist. For it’s true, Cunanan’s primary profession was attracting the affections of older gay gentlemen as a means to “make a living.”
While this might have worked on your garden variety richies–most of them grotesquely unattractive by gay boy standards–it wasn’t going to work on a mogul like Gianni Versace (played by his apparent doppelganger, Édgar Ramírez). Hence Murphy positioning the narrative around Versace’s inherent unattainability. But it isn’t just Versace the man that is unattainable–it’s his entire lifestyle. This is, from where Cunanan sits, an affront. He, too, is gay, attractive and “talented,” so why shouldn’t he also benefit from a similar level of success? It sounds psychotic, sure, but that’s what Cunanan was. And, as usual, a traumatic family event only heightened this psychoticness, for it was at nineteen that his father, Modesto, abandoned the family so as to evade being arrested for embezzlement. The same year, 1988, Cunanan’s sexuality also came out of the bag to his mother, resulting in a physical altercation between the two. His combined lack of empathy and lust for celebrity was, at this point, pretty much solidified, and signifies yet another tale of bloodshed in America that has resulted solely as a result of worshipping false idols and ideals.
Cunanan’s obsession from an early age with fashion magazines and name brands inevitably signaled a lust for the superficial that can only come with stacks on stacks, ergo his eventual foray into becoming, for all intents and purposes, a gigolo for hire to only the highest bidders. Versace, on the other hand, is an entirely different narrative. Rising to the top of the fashion industry from modest beginnings in his mother’s sewing business in Calabria, Versace epitomized the rewards of good old-fashioned hard work, determination and a little bit of elbow grease. Though Cunanan’s background was humble as well (at least by American excess standards), he, as biographer Maureen Orth puts it, “always wanted more. More drugs, kinkier sex, better wine. Somehow he had come to believe that they were his due. And why not? He had always been the life of the party, the smartest boy at the table. But at twenty-seven he was also a narcissistic nightmare of vainglorious self-absorption, a practiced pathological liar who created alternate realities for himself and was clever enough to pull off his deceptions.”
Arguably his best deception of all was in getting those whose circles he ingratiated himself in to believe that he was indispensable. Only Cunanan could say when it was time for things to end. Except, naturally, with Versace, who only took a small stock flirtatious line he used on just about everyone he found attractive (“Lago di Como, no?”) so far. Cunanan wasn’t worth anointing into his model-filled, color-saturated, drug-drenched, highly exclusive inner circle. And so it became just another thing for Cunanan to resent about his station in life, being stuck forever down at heel no matter how smart or attractive he was. And there Versace was–more flamboyant and, perhaps in Cunanan’s eyes, less intelligent, yet still somehow more prosperous. It was someone to hone in on, someone to misplace blame on.
Though the Versace family has made multiple statements regarding Murphy’s “work of fiction” based on the “second-hand hearsay” of the so-called scandalous plot points of Versace’s life derived from Maureen Orth’s 2000 biography, Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, viewers will likely fall down the rabbit hole of all this speculation in spite of being told to take it with a grain of salt. Including the part where Cunanan encountered Versace at a nightclub in San Francisco in 1990 while the designer was working on the costumes for the opera, specifically a production of Capriccio.
Playing up Cunanan’s known predilection for pathological lying, the scene when he has champagne with Versace after the show (during which, of course, he cries) is likely intended to be viewed from Cunanan’s own extremely skewed and deranged perspective–the lies he tells often seemingly becoming ones he vehemently believes in as a means to pretend that everything is as hunky dory as he always imagined it could be.
Other licenses taken by the show, one perspicacious Italian eye can’t help but noticing, is the largely Latino as opposed to Italian cast–which could be yet another reason the Versace family–Italian and therefore inherently “purist” (I guess that’s a euphemism for racist)–takes issue with the series. And then there’s Penelope Cruz’s often over-the-top imitation of Donatella’s accent (yes, you read right) coming across as added assurance that she’ll win an award of some sort for kowtowing to the TV world.
Even so, Cruz takes on the dramatic aura of a grieving Italian woman with fierce aplomb from the first moment we see her, as she descends out of her private jet to behold the carnage in Miami Beach. And as the series continues to unfold and we try, as best as we can, to fathom the motives behind Cunanan’s irrational actions, the words from Capriccio will likely linger from Orth’s book: “Just look at the vulgar favors that give the crowds of the capital such delight… Its amusements are insolent, obscene, clumsy and boorish…You despise these lewd doings and yet you suffer them.”
