Zodiac (dir. David Fincher, 2007)
Unsolved serial murders are grist to the meal for a certain type of horror and suspense film. The bulk of them are based on the Whitechapel killings in 1888. Who can resist a story that gives an identity to Jack the Ripper? The Lodger, Pandora’s Box, Hands of the Ripper, Time and Again, Murder by Decree, and the supremely disappointing From Hell are only a small selection of them. The so-called Phantom Killer who committed multiple murders in Texarkana in 1946 has the The Town Who Dreaded Sundown, a 1976 film directed by Charles B. Pierce of Legend of Boggy Creek fame, which is notable perhaps for showing the only jury-rigged trombone-knife ever committed to celluloid.
And then there’s the Zodiac Killer. Five confirmed murders and two attempted homicides between December 1968 and October 1969, all in Northern California. The unconfirmed murders range into the dozens, but police investigators discount the majority of them. The numbers are grisly enough, but the crimes are notable because of his active communication with the press, his use of encrypted messages, and his wearing, for one attack at least, a costume: a black hood with a long drape on which he had stenciled a symbol: a circled cross. He was a media sensation, and I think it’s likely that narcissism was a motivating factor for his crimes.
Within a few years of the murders, films based on the Zodiac began to be made. The most notable was Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, recasting the killer as Scorpio and the SFPD’s lead investigator on the case, David Toschi, as Harry Callahan. 1971 also saw the release of Tom Hanson’s The Zodiac Killer, which he claims was an attempt to lure out the murderer, but I’m a little dubious. While masked killers have long been found in popular culture, I think it’s reasonable to claim that the image of the Zodiac helped renew that trope in media and had an impact on the slasher genre that first coalesced in the late 1970s.
Zodiac, David Fincher’s film based on Robert Graysmith’s nonfiction book of the same name, was released almost forty years after the first confirmed murder. By that point, films about serial murder had become a little stale. Fincher himself had already contributed to the genre with Seven the previous decade, and now CBS had an entire series devoted to the FBI’s hunt for serial offenders in Criminal Minds. It’s hard not to see Zodiac as a response, if not a corrective to all that.
The film closely follows the various investigators in the police and press as they attempt to solve the murders. Among them are Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonish with the San Francisco Chronicle; reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.); and the aforementioned Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). They provide our perspective on a sprawling case that ranged over multiple counties and police jurisdictions, and the unraveling of their personal and professional lives as a result of the case are seen as the murders continue to go unsolved for years. Gyllenhaal has the most to do as the lead actor, playing Graysmith as an obsessive Boy Scout descending into paranoia, but Downey and Ruffalo are excellent as well. Downey brings his own history into his portrayal of the addled Avery, and Ruffalo deserves credit for giving a better and more honest performance than either Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen could of a charismatic, but flawed detective.
The film depicts the crimes committed by the Zodiac that have corroborating witnesses: a nighttime attack on Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau in Vallejo on July 4, 1969 that left Ferrin dead; a daytime assault on a married couple, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard, at Lake Berryessa on September 27 in which the husband survived and the wife did not; and the murder of a cab drive in Presidio Heights, San Francisco on October 11. In addition, there’s an account of a woman (Ione Skye [1]) who jumps out of a moving car with her infant child when a man claims he will murder her and her baby, which is uncorroborated as a crime committed by the same man. The crimes against the couples and the woman and child are absolutely harrowing to watch. The second attack in particular, filmed as it is in broad daylight in a beautiful locale, is unsettling because it plays against our own popular conceptions of how a murder happens. Notably, all of these scenes feature a different actor playing the Zodiac Killer.
Fincher’s trademark attention to detail is on full effect here. He and the screenwriter James Vanderbilt had the unenviable task of condensing Graysmith’s tome of a book into a feature length film, but they succeeded beautifully. It’s masterful on a technical level, and among the best looking of Fincher’s films. While the actors never quite age as much as they should, you still feel the length of this investigation that stretches in the film from 1969 through to 1983 with a coda in 1991.
More than that, though, is the film’s unusual dramatic structure. It willfully denies any sort of climax or catharsis for the audience. This shouldn’t be a surprise as the Zodiac murders remain unsolved, but it feels wrong for a film to commit to the truth of that. Graysmith both in his book and as a character in the film identifies a likely suspect, but the film acknowledges that the only things tying him to the crime are circumstantial [2]. There’s no confrontation between the suspect and Graysmith, who wrecks a marriage and risks his career in the pursuit of truth. There’s only an expression on the suspect’s face as he realizes who is in front of him. The closest the film ever comes to a traditionally suspenseful scene for the protagonist occurs late in the film, and while terrifying in the moment, instantly deflates once Graysmith and the audience learn a key piece of evidence in the next scene. It’s an elaborate cat scare that’s initially framed as being trapped alone with a killer.
“Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed?” Paul Avery says late in the film. “He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into a footnote.” These are the words coming from a broken man, but he’s not wrong. While the victims and their families deserve justice, a political cartoonist’s amateur investigation into a series of murders is as much about his vanity as it is anything else. We know this because Graysmith wrote a bestselling book that was turned into an acclaimed film, while no criminal convictions have ever been made. That’s what haunts the film’s protagonists and us in the audience: that the Zodiac Killer hasn’t become an obscure case from half a century ago, but remains indelible in the public consciousness: uncaught, untried, unidentified. There’s no closure in that, but closure, as the author James Ellroy once said, is bullshit anyway.
[1] Skye is the daughter of the mononymic Scottish folk musician Donovan, whose song “Hurdy Gurdy Man” opens and closes the film and is now forever ruined because of it.
[2] The actor portraying him said in an interview with the AV Club that he doesn’t think the man is guilty due to, as he sees it, conflicting criminal compulsions.
October 27, 2018
oliveresque 