Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Dean of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of
A Deluge of Delusions and Lies: Race, Sex, and Class in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
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Published:December 2023
2023. "A Deluge of Delusions and Lies: Race, Sex, and Class in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace", The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian/America, Celine Parreñas Shimizu
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American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018) presents the life of Filipinx American Andrew Cunanan, infamous for a killing spree that culminated in his murder of a famous gay icon, Italian American fashion designer Gianni Versace. Cunanan’s life was one of lying rooted in childhood sexual trauma deeply imbricated within race and class. The theorizations of the true and false self and the good and not good enough mother by psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott unpack the trauma of Cunanan’s racialized life and the carnage he left in his wake. Cunanan’s experience of distrust and the distortion of his parental relations contributed to his exceedingly fragmented self, which ultimately killed others unwilling to cooperate with his lies. Learning to recognize the structural forces that act on him rather than internalizing them as truths—racial inferiority, poverty as queer perversity—hurt him rather than healed him. He then hurt others.
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