The tragic drama “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” (2018) poses at least one lucid thesis: that work in our society is necessarily going to be embodied as a terrifying antagonism. In this case, work is embodied by the antitheses of celebrated designer Gianni Versace, and his murderer Andrew Cunanan. Versace is the hard-working immigrant, Cunanan is the spoiled brat. 

TAGV seems like a cautionary tale about our tendency (since the 80s) to spoil children by telling them they’re special. It seems to say, “See what happens if you don’t work hard and think you’re above it, you become a serial killer like Andrew Cunanan!” Cunanan is portrayed as the most extreme expression of this: his wolfish stockbroking father ignores his siblings and grooms Andrew, he gives him the master bedroom while his siblings sleep like sardines sharing a bed; he indoctrinates Andrew to think he should wake up everyday and tell himself he’s special and better than everyone else, that he is above work, that he is destined for greatness. He is permitted to sit around reading Evelyn Waugh while his siblings labor. It’s not as strange as it seems; it’s become somewhat natural, and that is what is so haunting about it, “it could be anyone” in our generation, not in the sense of it could be your neighbor, but that the killer can be you! Better watch yourself and also watch others! Likewise, as Andrew grows up, he is the most acute embodiment of the notion of faking it until you make it, which is familiar to everyone, as it’s a part of the nature of work and the self-made man. The commonality of character masks is well-documented and supported in psychology. Indeed, the complete identity crisis that is the core of Andrew’s character — an anti-core so to speak — poses a real problem — a narratively productive problem — for how to represent him in this drama. His emptiness is the muse. At times he is portrayed as the cold and emotionless psychopath, at others, as in the opening scenes, a suffering lost boy trying to make sense of his own life, and his failure to become what he wants. Throughout the series, his desires and wants are unclear — when he is an affable and exceptionally intelligent adolescent, his best friend asks what he wants: he doesn’t know, he just says he wants to seek out his heroes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, and Versace. To a large extent, Cunanan’s inarticulation of desire or passion can be seen as the still-hidden motive in his murders. Again, this is not a sociopathic character trait: the vast majority of people do not know what they want to do. Only after shopping the moth-eaten bourgeois catalog of options — chef, artist, stockbroker, etc. — do most settle on something and rationalize that it as an intrinsic passion. The character of the artist, however, poses a special case in that artists have a tendency to hear a calling, so to speak. Andrew early on expresses his desire to be a writer, which he actually had a natural facility for, as he was constantly making up stories and telling them in compelling ways. We know very well that wherever there are lies, art is near. But his father rejected this, would not allow it. It was a missed opportunity with tragic consequences.

Cunanan was constantly in search of an artful life, but was unable to feel comfortable in his own skin exploring it in a productive way. Ultimately, he had to explore his creative potential — which is also always destructive as well — in the real world, not in the protected, healing realm of art. Symbolically, the drama culminates — or should have culminated — not in the assassination of Versace, but in Cunanan’s Oedipal confrontation with his father in a dank Manila hut, wielding a knife while his father taunts him to finally “be a man for once” and kill him. Cunanan cannot kill his father; he’s the Oedipal loser. The unfinished drama between father and son is deferred to men who are as hardworking, ambitious, and successful as Cunanan’s father gave the appearance of being. Cunanan is portrayed throughout the drama as transitioning from a liar — someone who lies — to someone who is the lie itself. His breakdown, his caesura moment earlier in life but later in the series, is his confession that his life is a lie if everything his father taught him is false, because he was produced in his father’s  image. His next act, however, pathologically resumes the lie. When he finally seems to accept his fate as a common citizen, the interrogation by his employer into his father is too much to bear, and he begins lying in an attempt to overcome being the lie itself. His downfall is not the lying itself, but rather the inability to sublimate the lies artistically. As the drama unfolds, he is shown to have an issue with the lies of life, and what lurks beneath.

Versace is represented as the opposite case: the bootstrapped bourgeois artist who is endlessly curious, innately passionate and hardworking, and drunkenly in love with beauty. His theme song is the beautiful Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. He swims against the grain — like Cunanan — a youth curious about dressmaking, for which he was chastised by classmates but soothed and supported by his mother, who helped him learn to draw, literally and touchingly in the image of her and Gianni holding the same drawing utensil and tracing shapes in unison. It was an expression of love — love for family, and also the sharing of love for and commitment to meaningful work — that Versace is represented as cultivating throughout his life, most evidently with his younger sister, Donatella, who is not portrayed as having innate artistic talent. It is a riposte to the notion that art cannot be taught, and is a representation of the idea that if artists don’t teach other artists then their work is nothing in the sort of world we live in. It is an image of the social power of art: nurturing, comradely, and transformative. Versace’s work ethic and passion is elaborated in scenes where he stays up late drawing instead of getting into bed with lovers. Though, the coexistence of sex and and drawing implies some connection. Versace’s shyness and gentle demeanor could be likened to Baudelaire’s description of Edgar Allen Poe as a sort of character whose convalescent spirit brings forth the most luxurious art.

In a Cunanan dream sequence, bathed in luxuriant red light, he is being fitted by Versace, who attentively measures Cunanan in his dressing room, too absorbed in his work to pay heed to Cunanan’s vain speech, or be troubled by his identity as a servant. Cunanan doesn’t seem to notice that Versace doesn’t mind being in such a lowly position. On the one hand it is portrayed as an inversion of real life, where Cunanan is the important and celebrated one and Versace is the lowly worker who is mute. But it also represents the hidden truth: Cunanan is vain and wants to be served, whereas Versace is the one who serves. Some of our best artists are those who recognize that service is more artful than being served: Robert Walser’s entire literary oeuvre theorized the secret joys of service and gratitude; Andy Kaufman took a busboy job at the height of his fame; of all the things that could be said about Jim Morrison his generosity is the quality that those who knew him best remember most vividly; giving is the intention of relational aesthetics (though in my opinion it has nothing of substance to give and so is merely redistributed nihilism). And so on and so on.

To give oneself probably has a lot to do aesthetically with the ingrained practice of heroic sacrifice: the hero sacrifices himself for the development of society, for “a new harvest of humanity”, to quote Benjamin. Catholics symbolically ‘eat’ the body of Christ in communion, Dionysus sacrificed his own body in rituals of dismemberment. There is as yet, and can’t ever be, a form of communal art that does not represent sacrifice of some sort. Cunanan, who is the protagonist of this drama, not Versace, knows this implicitly, he is always picking up the tabs, flying people around, etc., and in a tense scene he argues about all the love he needs to give, before he is again rebuked by his friend that “nobody wants your love.” Ultimately he kills himself and others. The tragedy is not that he doesn’t have enough, the tragedy is that he isn’t able to give enough. He never finds a medium — because he has no aesthetic education — adequate to the insatiable longing to sacrifice himself. For his aesthetic failure he is consigned to the endless mortuary halls of the vanquished. 

But the vanquished are not merely the dead, they are those who struggled. Despite his spoiledness, Cunanan struggled in a way the ‘living’ unspoiled often do not. In a sense, he unmasked the essence of work today as hustle. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” seems like it wants to offer a moralist cautionary tale about raising spoiled children, and the tragic effect it will have on ‘good’ culture — as if anyone can live a good life so long as the majority are impoverished. Some of Cunanan’s victims are the most acute embodiments of self-righteous culture. They are those who are deeply caring and moral about humanity, and work hard to ensure their success. Miglin was making a monument taller than the Sears Tower for the unfortunate ‘children.’ Cunanan doesn’t care, not because he is a coldblooded psychopath, but because he sees through the superficial sanctimony of it all. Where many don’t look at all, he inscrutably and correctly sees a series of affectations. Make no mistake, Cunanan is presented, at least in part, as the heroic character who, deprived of the necessary faculties to pursue beauty, hacks his way into whatever sliver of heaven appears to exist in society. What hell he must have seen lurking behind heaven! And for this transgression of socially imposed limitations, his eternal commitment to being out of the place society has arbitrarily assigned him, everybody suffers. His human ingenuity and steely will permitted him entry through the backdoor of society to expose the saintly character masks of his victims as nihilism dressed up in royal purple. In Miglin he must have seen the true savagery lurking behind the lie, as it was also revealed by his relationship with his father. In this aspect there is also a positive aspect of the drama: Cunanan rehearses the possibilities and hopes of hacking fate. If he’s a psychopath, he might be considered a noble psychopath. It is a challenge to the socially conditioned fate of humans in this society, and if blood weren’t shed over it, no one would remember it (The comedic version of this story is Catch Me If You Can, where the mask-wearing conman is reconciled—falsely—with law). Morality is forever immaterial in the realm of aesthetics. Cunanan acted according to the insoluble image of making one’s own way in life at whatever cost. His tragic character opens the floodgates for the new harvest of humans that are roaming the streets and being cultivated right now.

Within the drama’s world, the galvanization of Versace and Cunanan is ideological in its intellectual imagery: Versace symbolizes transparency, Cunanan symbolizes murkiness. Versace shares his knowledge and passion, Cunanan is unable to share. Cunanan wants to be seen but the cameras can’t find him, Versace tries to evade the cameras but they follow him everywhere. Versace is the creator of beauty, Cunanan dreams of being made beautiful. The antithesis can also be expressed like this: Versace is committed to art as form, Cunanan is resigned to act out art in life.

Contemporary commonsense says that the preservation of art — as art — is not a life and death situation, but consider the case of Andrew Cunanan. This may sound extreme, but suffering seeks expression in various ways. If suffering does not achieve representation in the healing realm of art, it is doomed to be repeated in life. Tragic art — that holy grail or still-standing Sphinx — by its very definition demands sacrifice. How, in any relational type aesthetic, is it possible to represent death, sacrifice, suffering? It’s not. In the world of this drama, suffering is the matrix of experience, as it is in all drama and all life everywhere. Both Versace and Cunanan existed in the same culture, a culture which in their time vilified and brutally repressed homosexuality. The suppression of homosexuality forms the matrix of suffering that determined the lives of each. But this is where that thread ends, for each were compelled to do something to change it, either in the river of art history or the river of the everyday. Each longed to sublimate suffering through beauty. In one of the final scenes to their conversation in the San Francisco Opera House (a flashback typical of how the show bends temporal events to make a point), Cunanan asks, nearly begs Versace to take him on as a student. Versace declines, not because he doesn’t want to, but because he’s overburdened with work and does not have the energy. Cunanan represents what it means to live in a tragic culture: the inability of Versace to teach Cunanan the ways of  aesthetics, paired with the absolute necessity for aesthetic education. Such a profoundly necessary task, the aesthetic education of humanity remains.  //