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This much has already been said about The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which premiered on FX on Wednesday night: It is not really about Gianni Versace. It’s not even predominantly about the aftermath of his assassination. Instead, the show should be named after the magazine article from which it came: “The Killer’s Trail” by Maureen Orth, published in Vanity Fair in 1997 (and which became her book Vulgar Favors). “The Killer’s Trail” would be the most literal descriptor for Versace: ACS, an unrelenting, nearly murder-an-episode, sleek slaughterfest that is actually about Andrew Cunanan, Versace’s murderer.
Ryan Murphy’s latest American Crime Story installment does begin with Gianni Versace, who was gunned down by Cunanan in front of his Miami mansion in 1997. But the anthology series is much more about the four murders committed by Cunanan in the two months he spent on the run preceding that act. Cunanan—an equal parts charismatic and off-putting poseur who crafted outlandish stories about himself and his family for the better part of his life; a gay man who traveled in some of the highest and lowest echelons of closeted, clandestine, and out society during the years of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—is a fascinating, gruesome figure. Orth had plenty of material for her exhaustive book about him. So why is this show named for Versace?
I’m willing to posit that it’s because, along with a recent crop of similar television shows and films we could call “prestige true crime,” Versace: ACS doesn’t want to admit what it really is. For one thing, like its predecessor The People v. O.J. Simpson, the show arrives amid a glut of ’90s nostalgia, glammed-up with Day-Glo fashion, questionable hairstyles, and beloved dance beats, as if to staunch the spilled blood with spandex and hairspray. Content creators, we’ll call them, since these productions are available streaming, airing weekly, or playing at the movie theater, have struck gold with crime stories from the ’90s, catering to millennials who were too young to really understand them, and to those older who are eager to relive the era they personified. Versace: ACS is part of the explosion of a centuries-old genre that used to be synonymous with trash, or pulp, and has now, by trend and circumstance, been elevated to prestige entertainment, where it bleeds onto our screens small and large.
True crime has always been about details, about feeding a streak of voyeurism with any and all facts about a past case (think of all the Murderpedia-type sites online, and their Reddit offshoots for discussing endless theories and motives). Of course, the more unbelievable the details the better, which means that the most notorious crimes catch the most attention. Serial killers, like Cunanan, provide multiple crime scenes and victims to pore over; sensational incidents with no resolution, like the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, can provide fixation forever; and crimes involving attractive young women, like Amanda Knox’s indictment, imprisonment, and release for the slaying of Meredith Kercher, invite ample opportunities for lurid dime-store analysis.
It’s not difficult to see why Cunanan’s story gripped the country in 1997, when he ended his murder spree by shooting Versace and, eventually, himself in the head, and why it would titillate any true crime fan today. Versace: ACS does nearly the deepest dive it possibly could on the murderer’s life over nine episodes: from his childhood in La Jolla, California, with a grifter father who left his wife and four children destitute when his job as a stockbroker turned to embezzling; through years drifting through gay scenes in San Francisco and San Diego, where he cultivated a series of older men who paid for a lavish if precarious lifestyle, and eventually—whether due to being dumped by his last rich boyfriend, or the fact that two of his former friends moved away to the same city (and thus on without him)—to his development into a homicidal sociopath. He traveled to Minneapolis and killed his old friends there, followed by another wealthy older gentleman in Chicago, a cemetery caretaker whose car he needed in New Jersey, and, finally, Versace in Miami; but not before living there, undetected by police for weeks, watching his name appear in headlines all over the world.
Yet, despite having all the hallmarks of true crime, Versace: ACS’s showrunners, its marketing campaign, and the industry buzz surrounding it are trying to sell it as something bigger—instead of the low-down, dirty details, of which there is an abundance, Murphy et al want us to know that they are speaking to much larger issues in their work, primarily homophobia, even feminism, which Murphy has attached to Gianni’s sister Donatella Versace. This rhetoric has heightened as the Versace family has come out staunchly against the production, and Murphy, as well as stars Penélope Cruz and Ricky Martin, has had to defend the show’s existence and its splashy rollout.
Screenwriter Tom Rob Smith has said Versace: ACS’s purpose is “supporting the bigger truth,” which is “celebrating Versace.” “We are exploring why he was a genius,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered—both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.” This is true to the extent that the iconic designer is portrayed with empathy by Edgar Ramírez (though his estate disputes several details of the show, including his health status), but he is only central to the show in the first few episodes. In many of them, he barely features at all; one early, pivotal scene with Versace and Cunanan, a date at the San Francisco Opera, was the invention of screenwriters. Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s lover, Antonio D’Amico, told Vanity Fair, “We’re not making a photo; we’re making a painting. We add color, etc.” But compared to Cunanan, in an eerie and meticulous performance by Glee’s Darren Criss, whose sadistic murders are punishingly graphic, everyone else is shades of gray.
We don’t have to hold all creative works about real-life suffering to the standards of what would hurt or offend surviving family members, but after watching a fictional Cunanan—whose real-life counterpart craved perhaps nothing so much as the type of fame bestowed by a prestige TV series—sadistically torture and humiliate his victims in fine detail, it’s hard not to feel like maybe we should.
Earlier this year I, Tonya, another prestige project inspired by a ’90s crime that captured the public imagination, made headlines when Tonya Harding appeared at the Golden Globes. Observers, already unsure of how to consider the slapstick-style domestic violence in the film, remarked how disturbing it was to celebrate the disgraced skating champion during a ceremony focused on the #MeToo campaign, finding the conflation of women’s empowerment with what happened to Tonya Harding offensive, when what happened to her involved the beating of another woman, who was not in attendance in a gown that night. Even, or especially, if you consider Harding herself a victim—of abuse, misogyny, mistreatment by the media—her presence felt like that of a prop. We saw Harding, we did not hear from her.
There is a difference between the hundreds of Investigation Discovery recreations or Lifetime movies dedicated to unspeakably brutal crimes and Versace: American Crime Story; I, Tonya; the soapy Menendez Murders and their ilk. One crop I’m writing about and the other I’m not, and probably would never. The marks of prestige—lots of money, lavish sets, tons of marketing, huge stars, discussions of America, fame, power, and sex, and, the big one, “the truth”—give these works weight that they don’t always deserve. And, wrapped up in all of it, we forget that there are people out there to whom some of these horrible events really happened, and who are not making money or winning awards for reliving them.
It’s getting difficult to separate these entertainers from the flocks of vultures they depict. The particularly despicable one that stuck out to me in Versace: ACS was a woman who, cordoned outside of the designer’s mansion where his body had lain on the steps, rips out one of his ads from a magazine. As she breaks the police line, you think she might be running up to place it beside Versace, as a kind of benediction; instead, she uses the paper to soak up his blood, holding it above her head like a trophy.