Andrew Cunanan Type Beat

Heather Jewett

I was scared of Gian until I heard him confide to someone after workshop one day, “Everything I say sounds fucking stupid.” And I thought, oh wait, he’s all of us. He’s me.

On the way back from the ruins of the Villa di Tiberio, Gian played Aimee Mann’s version of “Drive” by the Cars. I recognized it from the soundtrack of the 2018 true crime drama, The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Gian and I agreed the show was a perfect piece of art, especially the soundtrack. After he died I watched it again.

The nine-part series opens with Versace admiring the ocean from his palatial Miami villa, but it’s not really his story. It’s his murderer’s: a fantasy-addicted pathological liar and self-hating gay named Andrew Cunanan. Down the beach, he wades into the same waves Versace stares at. He’s screaming and we don’t know why. It could be the four men he’s killed, or it could be the smaller horrors of other things, like getting caught lying, or biffing romantic prospects, or just saying things that sound fucking stupid – all of which he does constantly, in ways more painful to watch than most things I’ve seen on TV.

Versace never knows Cunanan is trudging toward him that morning. It’s unclear if they had ever even met before. I think about other strangers who have “randomly” come together, and wonder if the events of their lives were just pit stops on hidden roads leading them directly to one another. We talk about romantic partners that way, as soulmates destined to meet, but what about Versace and Cunanan? The DC snipers? The homeless guy in Miami and the guy on bath salts who ate his face?

The music on Versace is relentless. Lovelorn classics by Billie Holiday and Doris Day get the job done, but sound less like open wounds than the simpering pop songs do. Deceptively passive sex jams beg and bottom alongside operatic interludes. It all lulls us into a narcotic state of longing.

I remember three times I walked into rooms where a certain song played and healed everything that ever happened in my life up to that point: once with Sylvester, once with the KLF, and once with motherfucking “Contigo” by Enrique Iglesias featuring Sean Paul. Versace has a lot more. Over and over, Andrew is bashed by rejection, we feel it acutely, then we’re swaddled by a song that hits just perfect. Early on, we’re scooped up and swung around in a nightclub by “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.” Later, in the horny haze of “Fascinated” by Company B, Andrew holds court at the gay bar and seduces a closeted ex-naval officer. He really thinks he’s doing something. But the way the song feels tells the truth: he’s just spun out on delusion again.

Some songs are outstretched arms we run into, like “Freedom 90” and “Pump Up the Jam.” They’re reliable and familiar. But also hungry, like Andrew as he prowls in cheap suits through mauve-and-mint lit Miami hotspots, and as he forces down cat food to survive his last brutal days on the run. The songs ultimately make promises they can’t keep, their exhilaration a brief high for Andrew and for us. But still a high worth chasing.

Andrew reminds me of my ex-boyfriend who would lunge around naked in this demented, hyper-feminine way, animated by God knows what (probably vanity). When an elderly man pays him for sex, Andrew dances in his undies while asphyxiating him under a mask of duct tape. But nothing matters because “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins comes on, rubbing your shoulders like your friend’s hot dad, or maybe the hot dad of the whole world. You’re in heaven, and there is still nowhere to go but up. Andrew prances and struts, as alive as he’ll ever be. No one dies, not this time.

To me the heart of the series is when Andrew shows up to a party in a red vinyl jumpsuit and spazzes out to “Whip It” (a song I could never get it up for until I saw this). I relate to his vibe: high on humiliation, speedballing anxiety and joy, facing fears to annihilate death. Onlookers are mostly horrified, and the people he does impress are, of course, the wrong ones. But I really relate because Andrew just got ready for the night listening to one of my favorite songs ever: “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” by Samantha Fox, a real cum rag of a song on its surface, but to me a prayer. Or at least a sermon on desperation.

Besides the murders (unwatchable for me on this viewing), one of the most unsettling scenes has Andrew floundering in romantic obsession over David, a longtime conquest who turns him down. Useless piles of lobster and champagne stink up a five-star hotel room as David gently says no. It’s like Andrew’s been abandoned by the false hope he’s been using to shoot himself into another stratosphere of intoxication. There’s no music. You wish there were. Earlier, he’d demanded a friend hand him a fake Tiffany gift in front of David:

“I just need him to see that I’m loved.”
“I do love you, buddy.”
“I need him to know that.”

Versace breathes new life into other songs for me, too. “Been around the world and I-I-I, I can’t find my baby” is newly hopeless, even though I’ve heard it a million times and made fun of the “Aye aye aye”. “Be My Lover”s intro gathers like a storm and reminds me LaBouche died in a plane crash, even though she gifted a million nostalgia DJs the ironic fave required to bring a crowd to total numbed-out nihilism. Andrew’s solo car sing-along to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” brings to mind being nervous before a show I ran at a gay bar, and then that song came on and the whole bar screamed, “GLORY HOLE! GLORY HOLE!!” and I was instantly totally fine. (It’s crazy how “Gloria” ALWAYS hits and ALWAYS lets you off the hook.)

I remember from MTVM: being at that high altitude restaurant in the sky eating weirdly floral cheeses and a hunk of meat that arrived at the table still sizzling, dead but alive. Drinking all day and night and never getting really drunk, just primed for the next cigarette or the next burst of laughter or just the shared feeling that something was being unearthed.

At the villa there were slim moments of silence when I thought I was being haunted but probably not, even though the statues' cracked faces whispered otherwise. I watched the pool at night like Andrew Cunanan lording over a rich man’s home he’d wormed his way into. The older queens at the garden party saw right through him, just like I fear everyone can see right through me. I have a lot in common with him. So many moments where I’ve felt like a god, and then nothing, and nights I’ve woken up with a murderer’s guilt, only to have the euphoric realization that it was just a dream.

I feel like anyone who loved The Assassination of Gianni Versace could probably identify with its tragic vision of Andrew – young but old, drunk on potential one minute and then stunningly impotent the next. Suffering when we don’t have to. Scrambling for a piece of the pie. Taking ourselves way too seriously every step of the way. And then “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” comes on and reminds us that we’re all just bimbos in a bar scene, drawn like magpies to the shiniest baubles. We need love from the most fleeting and arbitrary sources, and everything we say is so fucking stupid, so we have a drink to that and mingle around.