Andrew Cunanan: Filipino Medusa

ANDREW CUNANAN: FILIPINO MEDUSA

I've been watching the above on Netflix for a few days after discovering it on YouTube (where you can see just the first 3 chapters), and from the first it blew me away.  I already knew about the crime, had watched a docu.  But the series is extremely compelling, mainly because the lead actor, also a Filipino American --Darren Criss-- (whose mom is a "firecracker from Cebu") is simply genius in the role of Andrew Cunanan.  The Venezuelan actor who is the spitting image of Versace and also amazing in the role, and all the rest of the cast make the series extremely hypnotic.

And this morning I came across (thank God, because it gave me a measure of understanding) a video of Krishnamurti in which he responded to a question regarding homosexuality, and he gave a beautiful explanation and description of desire, gave me important keys.

To state it briefly, Krishnamurti speaks of desire, of how the senses perceive beauty, the brain says, “I wish to have that”, and we reach for the object of desire. Whether it be physical or mental.  Indirectly he says, "Homosexuality exists.  Accept it, and move on."

His teaching inspired this reflection. 

Andrew Cunanan, son of a Filipino father and an Italian mother, born and raised in the U.S., murdered several people before he stalked and shot to death Versace as the famous designer walked back to his Miami Beach mansion in 1997. A few days later, Cunanan killed himself.

Cunanan and Versace were two faces of one coin:  desire.  Versace had the genius of calling forth desire in women, especially:  the desire to be beautiful and to wield power as a mortal woman transformed into goddess.  Cunanan was raised in desire by parents who turned him into an idol and trained in him the addiction to material objects and immediate self-gratification.  He was endowed with beauty, intelligence, charisma, and turned himself into a young god, a magnet for the old men who already possessed the objects of Cunanan's desire:  money, and luxury.  And he also had powerful desires for acceptance, friendship, romance, and used money and luxury, in addition to his personal charisma, to reel in and hang onto friends, lovers, and to exercise power over those whom the system considers powerful, winners:  older, wealthy, successful, white men.

Both Versace and Cunanan were geniuses of desire, in their own ways. The world brought them together and the chaos that was inside Cunanan and all around Versace produced the chemical reactions that destroyed them both.

Versace chose the Medusa as the logo of his fashion empire.  Cunanan became the Medusa and destroyed those he caught in his web of desire, seduction, illusion. 

The Filipino Angle

The series is successful because it humanizes the characters of this Greek drama. And no one is more humanized than the central characters: Versace and Cunanan.  Both are born of Italian mothers.  But while Versace is more “normal”, the son of a talented, devoted, magically dreamy and creative mother, Cunanan's mother is a dreamy religious fanatic who encourages narcissism and escapism in her son, and of a father who is a crass materialist, a social climber, probably sociopathic in his single-minded pursuit of money without compunctions about breaking the law to get it, then abandoning his family to escape the consequences of his actions, preferring squalor and invisibility in the Philippines. They single out their youngest son to become the vessel of their obsessions, their beautiful Frankenstein offspring, and set him loose on the world, a conquistador of the unconscious, the libidinous, the innocent. And in Cunanan's killing spree, why is Versace his ultimate target?  He is in love with Versace but knows he can never have such a man, because such a man is oblivious to his game, has too much power and real love by his side.  Versace is everything Cunanan knows he cannot and will never be.  And so he must die.

Cunanan’s Filipinoness, early on, he realizes, is an inconvenience and must be replaced by the glamorous Portuguese “da Silva”, after the encounter with the supreme cynic of human trafficking, the madam of an escort service who forces him to define himself taxonomically as an “Asian American”.  “My Latinos are hunks. No can do. I can’t sell a clever Filipino, even one with a big d__.”

The Cunanan story is very important for Filipinos to study and reflect on.  This is a real person who you could say lived the American Dream, of the immigrant who has everything it takes to succeed and is groomed for social success, then sinks into the dregs and becomes an avenging angelic demon.  

He destroys everything he is, he goes on a rampage to live out the dreams that everyone else is willing to go through hell to achieve, without making the slightest effort except to seduce the hell out of the entire world.  It’s the Hitlerian formula except focused on the Hollywood plot.  Beside Cunanan, the Richard Gere character in American Gigolo looks like a hardworking, respectable, and serious professional. Cunanan literally turns into the Id in human form, the Id we all must learn to sublimate by the time we are 8 years old.  

Nope, in Cunanan’s case it turns into a rampaging ephebus, a dazzling Adonis straight out of a Vogue ad (“You look like you’re dressed for church,” the escort madam blurts out at first sight of him). The greatest tragedy being that he became a deadly caricature of the spoiled brat who never grows up and reaches for nothing more than the most paltry of ambitions:  appearances.  He murdered for appearances.  He killed those who refused to keep up the farce.  Killing was easy, it erased reality, and he could continue to live in his pretend perfection.

But we can see that his intelligence, though it is of the most parrot-like, book-learning ilk, cannot block out the horror of his inner tragedy, which is that he has no home, no sane, secure, and loving stability in his life. He has done nothing with his life.  The ugliness in his world piles up around him and in his wake until he can no longer continue his self-delusion.

He does enjoy his fame. He derives satisfaction from seeing his photos splashed out on newspapers and magazines after Versace's murder.

Most of us learn to tolerate, bear, submit, resign ourselves to the impossibility or the destruction of the small worlds of perfection we have attempted or intended, hoped to create with others.  When we do get a slap on the face from life, we don’t respond by grabbing a magnum of champagne or a hammer and bashing someone’s face in.  We do it to ourselves, inside our bodies.  Our violent emotions gnaw at our organs and tissues for years, they turn into recurring nightmares, or we imbibe hard liquor, nibble at chocolate to sweeten the bitterness and find distractions from our background sorrow.  We must self-repress, because we fear the consequences of letting out the monster.  Cunanan had no such inhibitions. To me, his life is a master class in the true unity between us and the world that we believe is disconnected from ourselves.  No.  We are in truth, in reality, that world.  Whatever we do to it, we do to ourselves.  And Cunanan’s will to destroy inevitably had to destroy him.

As for Versace, he was a kind, lovable, creative soul who had the Midas touch for summoning beauty.  But there was ugliness in his life as well.  Not so much visual ugliness, but those forces that cannot be seen and that the unwise and simple become enmeshed in, even if in their essence they are not of the same warp or woof.  They still are captured in the same loom.

Versace was a creator of beauty and in the background we see in his mother the genius of Italy and the struggles of its people with the injustices of an old society founded over power and wealth for the few and misery for the many.  His genius creates wealth and his sister is the materialist, the strategist, the generalissima who wants to ensure that their family will become securely ensconced in the elite, never to fall back into poverty and invisibility again.  The artist and the business magnate.  Master creators of image. Such is the aristocracy of the Age of Appearances.

We all live in the Empire of Appearances, and although it is in the midst of its swansong, the final moments before its collapse, collective hypnosis is at its peak, even though the cognitive dissonance is growing, growing, and already approaches the threshold at which it can no longer be suppressed.

I cannot deny that Versace in his secure Italian identity is the perfect foil for Cunanan’s unmoored, fissured, chimerical, unresolved sense of self.

Andrew’s story, his dissociated personality, to me denounces the hidden and silent tragedy of post-Rizal Filipinos.  Our moral bankruptcy, our crisis of identity after two colonizations, and the impact of decadent capitalism, or even better, crass, desouled materialism, the “American Dream”, on our psyche. 

It has literally put me in the middle of a maelstrom.  I needed to examine it and find a way out.

I have lived the same conflicts, the same non-definition, the same seeking after false identity, borrowed self, and absence of moral foundation except for rote Christianity for the innocent and ignorant.

In my own intimate search for who I am, I have had to break several molds I had created myself, but that could not withstand the test of time, of spiritual crises that impelled me toward rediscovery, redefinition, re-cognition of what, who I am, what I need, how to feed it to myself with what the world feeds me.

So people like us, like Filipinos, are a kind of laboratory for a future human. We have not received a well-configured, secure, unquestionable, unchallengeable identity like the Italians, Norwegians, the Chinese, the Indians.  We have no option other than self-creation, and the path bifurcates into two great roads:  Truth or Appearances.

If I choose truth, no one wants a smart Filipino escort, not even a smart Filipina wife.  I am not American, but I think like one and sound like one.  I am not a Latina but I have lived longer in Latin America than in my birth country, which is geographically in Asia.  I am not white, I am brown.  And my identity, which was waiting for me in this Hispanic land, is more of the 19^th century than of the 20^th, and the truth is, I would rather jettison all of these things, and live in the 50^th century, when the human race on Earth will be one race, among uncounted other races in the uncounted galaxies.

Above all, to be spirit, not determined by this external suit of physical matter.  Not be straitjacketed inside it. 

For what is it to be Filipino?  And why did I choose to be Filipino in this reincarnation?  Right now, the answer I can give is what I feel Cunanan’s story offers us as a riddle, a Biblical parable, a hermetic secret:  to be whole and strong enough, so that, like Rizal, we may embody and be witness to ourselves and before the world, like those humble, solid and squat roadside markers of old that told the traveler exactly where she was and how much farther she had to go. 



And as for the map, Rizal also showed us with his life, with his sacrifice, that the map is one, no matter where we are born, no matter what we look like, or what script we are handed at birth.  The map is Truth.  

All the rest, are Appearances.