@ipwarn
replied to your post “The Man Who Would Be Vogue”
It’s so nice seeing walls of text from you that are about shows I know. Up until now they have been bewildering passages about swords and robes and shit (I admit I didn’t retain many of the details). But I hope you continue to write up your thoughts on this show.
Oh come on, I occasionally talk about dragons and punk silver princes too. Yay diversity! (I talked about robes?!)
While a compelling take featuring some pretty stellar performances, a couple of things did not work for me: the first is that the difference in tonality between current time and the interfering flashback which jarred me when we transferred from the dream-like sequence of the opera “date” to the stressing aftermath of the shooting and the ensuing panic and chase. The thematic link is there for a man who was taking a bow in the spotlight a few minutes ago and being told he’ll be an important person now choosing to achieve his notoriety by using the man he fantasized telling him about his future relevance as a tool to achieve that relevance. But while this works on a thematic level, the cut between two starkly different atmospheres made me feel unbalanced through Antonio’s friend chasing Cunanan and the initial police arrival.
The second element was, surprisingly, Versace himself. In a lot of ways, I felt like he is treated like an icon more than a person in this episode. The continued repetition of “he was a genius” felt undermining in a way, especially from Antonio, his partner of 15 years who, while trying to convey Versace’s appeal, somehow thought of his genius as the first thing distinguishing the man he loved. That’s a distinction for Versace the Designer, not Versace the Person. Sure, Versace’s vision permeated all aspects of his life but I don’t think that’s a proper way for the personality of Versace to come across? The show clearly means to portray him as a warm charming personality but I don’t know if I connected with him all that much. Perhaps that’s why I reacted more to the pool of blood on his villa’s steps than to the shots of his bloodied face, because that was linked to Antonio and Donatella’s grief which I felt keenly.
It was Antonio’s tennis white covered in his partner’s blood, it was
Donatella staring at the pool of blood while the surrounding media made a
spectacle of a human tragedy.
I felt their humanity even in Donatella’s frankly cruel treatment of Antonio. Versace, in contrast, felt like a sketch of a person taken over by the relevance of a public persona. That might very well be deliberate on the show’s part, part of making us feel uncomfortable as Versace is dehumanized as merely a vehicle of fame first by Cunanan then by other fans, and as his fame is treated as more relevant than his humanity, but it felt a bit strange that the people who loved him most talked about his talent first. While that might be normal in the case of Donatella since the context of her scenes and how she had to make business decisions right in the wake of the murder, that is not the case with Antonio.
But I keep thinking of how one reviewer commented about how we only get to know the victims after we see them as dead bodies, which I thought was a neat play with our perception when I first read that review. We don’t connect to these people beyond the basic loss of life and potential but then the show forces us to look closer and allow them their individuality transcending the usual blurriness that characterizes most victims of these crimes. But that’s not possible with Versace due to his fame so they switch it up by leaning into that and critiquing the intrusiveness that comes from it (as opposed to the detachment in the case of the non-famous victims) before bringing us to the same place of letting the person behind the name shine through. I’d really like it if this was a part of a larger theme that I just couldn’t determine this early on.
@korydweninterim
replied to your post “@korydweninterim replied to your post:
Of all the…”
thank you <3 it’s the creepyness that makes me a bit wary and some tiny stuff (like i hate explicit gore but some more subdued “gore” can be like way more disturbing ^^’) i’ll probably watch the first episode through my fingers XD
For what it’s worth, while some moments are downright chilling, they don’t prolong it to the point of being unbearable. It’s there and you’re disquieted (and desire to reach in and punch Cunanan in the nose as hard as you can.), but they are quick scenes so far, or a few moments in a longer scene. The Versace family stuff is just plain sad but infuriating in how the authorities treat the whole thing (Ricky Martin is golden in his interview with the cops) I was more affected by the reactions to the blood on the steps than I was by the shots of Versace’s bloodied face. From what I read, the real hardcore stuff is still to come but the premiere is fairly mellow.
how much trigger warning is there for this episode ? I really want to watch it but I’m also a bit scared ^^“
It’s far restrained in terms of gore than I expected (probably famous last words since episode three is said to be unsettling). The camera focus on Versace’s face (that has two bullet holes) a few times, once when he is in Antonio’s lap and a couple of times at the hospital. The blood pool on the steps is featured a lot, and there’s a moment where Andrew just stands over Versace’s fallen body when his fingers are still twitching. There’s one scene with vomit (and a very disgusting public bathroom) if that bothers you. Other than that it’s general creepiness with a side of casual cruelty, voyeuristic and exploitative fannish reaction, and psychopathic behavior. It’s that I found disturbing more than the shots of Versace or the blood, but I do have a higher tolerance to blood and dead bodies from all the procedurals I watch so YMMV.
World famous fashion designer Gianni Versace has been shot here on the steps outside his villa.
Of all the scenes people are talking about in Versace, I think my favorite is when Cunanan is called out on his lie by his friend who has a crush on him. That’s the scene that drove home just how very in his nature that continuous lying is and how, in his mind, someone confronting him over his lies translates to, more or less, an attack on him personally. That’s a slice of who Andrew is in his normal day-to-day life that resonated with me more than that flip-the-switch-from-creepy-to-playful in his friends’ bed. (Though, I kept staring the screen wondering how Elizabeth Cote wasn’t creeped out to hell to open her eyes to him standing over her husband half-naked, and for him to just plop in the middle of their bed only heightened the invasiveness of his actions. But between the fabricated story about the molestation and his pathetic “I have nothing” to Cote, you get a sense of how he managed to make people sympathize with him, albeit brief and as of yet not coming across properly.)
I also like how that scene and the discrepancy between what he told his friend in that scene and what he told the Cotes blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. You get to a point where you just don’t know how much of what you’re seeing with Versace actually happened (my interpretation is the scene in the club happened. Cunanan went to the opera but not on Versace’ invitation, and the “date” was 100% fantasy. Even the dialogue did not seem natural in that scene. Who talks like that?)
Another favorite of mine is that moment where he looks to how the woman in front of him is reacting to Versace’s death and just mimics her reaction. Beyond the creepiness of him copying her as if he needed a model for normal human emotions to imitate, there was a moment when the light reflected on his glasses and I wondered if he was tearing up, if his performances went so deep that he was able to tear on command, so immersed he was in the role he was playing. That’s essentially what Cunanan is, a performer enacting roles of his own creation chasing the high of the spotlight (I’m not going to talk about RM’s themes but…..yeah, I can see where his interest came from.) It’s really hard, in that context, to believe anything that comes out of Cunanan easily because you’re always wondering if it’s just another performance.
But it’s a sharp focus to have Cunanan so desperate for that spotlight and that fame, while the dark side of that (and the commentary on fannish (and media) behavior that can turn exploitative, and wow, the show ain’t angry about that at all) plays out outside the Versace mansion where Cunanan’s “masterpiece” is being wrought in blood, exploitative and voyeuristic
frenzy, and a police presence that is the realization of the attitude behind the slur Cunanan read in that bathroom. Of all the themes in this show, it’s the invasiveness and cold-blooded cruelty that isn’t coming from the murderer that hit me the most.
Sam speaks 