‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 8: Prince Andrew

The vast majority of this whole series is made up, and not particularly good even as fiction. No evidence Versace and Cunanan ever met. No evidence Lee Miglin and Cunanan ever met. No evidence his father bought him a car when he was a little kid. No evidence he was ever abused. The whole scene with the Merrill interview is ridiculous. Brokers are not ivy league graduates. They're sales people. A lot of them were shoe salesmen before they became brokers. Look at the CEOs of Merrill -- all working class people who started as brokers. Some of them barely had college degrees. Modesto Cunanan is exactly who they would take in as a 'baby broker" -- but it's a brutal life of cold calling and most people don't succeed. The whole scene with the FBI was ridiculous too. Because he was accused of cheating an old woman? At best his license would be suspended pending an investigation and at some point he would be asked to make restitution. A bunch of guys wearing jackets that say "FBI" chasing him to his house? But what makes it even more absurd is that in reality, no charges were actually ever brought against the guy. He skipped the country because of his massive debts and a suit brought against him by his wife. Yes, he was a failure, yes he was a liar, and yes he lived way, way above his means. Did that made his son a murderer? the truth is, this is not actually all that interesting a story, so the writers just made it up.

I see an Emmy for Jon Jon Briones. Brilliant. As for Andrew, I think a big part of himself died with the lie that was his father.

Sewell- that the creators shoehorned in a bit of today’s progressive favorite obsession, identity politics, was actually the weakest part of a strong series. With determination, one can make it in this country. People wouldn’t flee their homes all over the world to come here if it weren’t true. The lie is to say otherwise. That the writers would try to “blame America” for the failures of this obviously flawed man is just not credible. This type garbage is creeping into more and more plots of tv and movies and the result will be less quality and less people watching..

Although I'm reserving my final opinion until the series is over, I don't think that assassination is the correct term either. An assassination is generally inspired by politics and the objective to destroy not just the victim but whatever he stands for. And I have another problem with the title. This series is really all about Andrew Cunanan, not Gianni Versace. Perhaps the title should be, The Unravelling of Andrew Cunanan.

'It is not, however, an entirely plausible explanation for how Andrew Cunanan became a mass murderer." I wish life were that simple, that we could explain why Cunanan or anybody else becomes a mass murderer. There is unlikely to be any "Rosebud" moment here. (Actually, when you think about it, that word in "Citizen Kane" was more a dying memory than an explanation.) Cunanan's past is context, not explanation. Having recently experienced a heinouis murder/suicide in my own family, I came to the same conclusion. The Past is instructive, not explanatory. And of course, as Faulkner said, it is not even past.

With the penultimate episode, we have the origins of Cunanan's extreme narcissism that ultimately traps him in serial lies and self-destruction. Cunanan's father has urged this passivity by heaping unearned advantages on him which his siblings naturally resent. Andrews is an isolated, entitled prince, except the Emperor has no clothes. Later, his father, exposed as a cheap crook and a phony, will taunt his youngest for being ineffectual and weak which is precisely what he wanted when he was overindulging him. Andrew can never threaten his father's essential dishonesty having profited from it, repeatedly, over the years. His father's dismissal is crushing for Andrew, of course, and for someone whose entire expectations of life are that it will always deliver for him, we can see that, minus any personal strength, he must lie and lie and lie to feel at all good about himself. However, narcissists also rage inside when life doesn't deliver. They never accept blame and can't stand to be frustrated, but frustration is what Cunanan is going to feel because he never tries. As a narcissist, he must always be at the center receiving accolades which we already know isn't going to happen and he's going to drive people away that he needs. Cunanan will find himself with fewer and fewer options to slide by on while reality gets uglier and he gets more dishonest. Violence is inevitable. He must punish all those whom he blames for his failures.

I still fail to understand why the show is called "The Assassination of..." Wouldn't "Murder of.." have been more appropriate? For some reason the word "assassination" implies something bigger and more calculated than cold blooded murder. There again, maybe the final episodes will prove me wrong.