From Versace To Tonya, Toxic Certainty In Tabloid Stories

THE NEW FX SERIES THE ASSASSINAtion of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has a famous fashion designer in its title—but the show is much more interested in his killer.

- Daniel D'Addario

Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), before he goes to kill Versace in Miami in 1997, spends his young life in pursuit of status and material wealth. He’s fascinated by opera—or at least claims to be to meet rich men—and the association fits: the form’s unironically bold emotions seem to suit Cunanan’s roiling inner life, and its lavish stagings are a reminder of all he wants but can’t access when the curtain falls.

Versace wants to be an opera too. The show, cribbing from recent enough history to build a narrative of increasingly high dudgeon, is rigorous about its devotion to aesthetic and to its big ideas about culture and society. Along with the new movie I, Tonya, it’s among a recent wave of entertainment that repurposes the half-forgotten scandals of the 1990s into morally righteous art. Even when the result falls flat—which it often does—the impulse to create it makes sense: at a moment when offscreen life feels particularly unsettled, the media scandals of two decades ago are as suitably perverse a place as any to try to find something clear and certain.

There’s plenty of certitude in Versace, which is unabashed about underlining its theses over and over. One of these is the idea that a borderline-malicious lack of interest in gay men on the part of the police led them to miss out on apprehending Cunanan before he made his appointment with the doomed Versace. But the show’s bigger point is that the concept of the closet is a sickness that hurt Cunanan and hurts our culture on every level. Between their separate story lines, Cunanan and Versace (Édgar Ramírez) take a sort of Forrest Gump tour through every milestone for the gay community in the 1990s—coming out, the AIDS crisis, high society, crystal meth and “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”