The Movie Is the Murderer

"Zodiac" is probably David Fincher's masterpiece--made right at the artistic apex of his career before "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) marked a cliff fall that happens to coincide with increased accolades, up to and including "Mank" (2020). All the more remarkable given the script was penned by a guy whose pitiful resume went on to include "The Amazing Spider-Man" burgers, "Independence Day: Resurgence" (2016) and who hopefully won't mess up the "Scream" franchise too much with his next credit. "Zodiac" may also in a way be a defining digital film.

I don't much care, however, who the Zodiac killer was, but I do see the appeal for true crime story fans in such procedurals. It's the same with the detective-mystery genre of yore--your Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and Philip Marlowe types--which developed into film noir, including Fincher's prior "Seven" (1995). Investigative journalism works basically the same way when done in the manner of "All the President's Men" (1976), which Fincher specifically cited as inspiration here. The detective or journalist folds the reader onto the page, or, in the case of cinema, sutures the spectator upon the screen, by sharing with us the investigative work of reconstructing a hidden story, i.e. the details of the murders. Deconstruction of narrativity by the act of reconstructing the narrative. When done right, as here, we never know more or less than our counterpart detectives in the story, as we both hermeneutically interpret the traces of the clues. So, we never see the face of the Zodiac killer committing his crimes--reportedly, it's also different actors playing the role--because the detectives can't prove who he is, either, beyond circumstantial evidence. It's only in the end when a face is photographically pointed out, but even this is relatively inconclusive closure.

In "Zodiac," we get three primary detectives, Jake Gyllenhaal's "San Francisco Chronicle" cartoonist turned author pioneering the obsession with discovering the Zodiac killer's identity, Robert Downey Jr.'s newspaper columnist and fellow "Chronicle" employee, and an actual police detective as played by Mark Ruffalo. As others, including Peter Hühn ("The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction") have pointed out before, such texts are contests between readers (the detectives and us) and writers (the criminals and the authors). This process of the writers hiding the story (the crimes) and the readers deciphering it is literalized here by coded letters sent to the newspapers. In classic detective fiction fashion, this doubled interplay of reading and writing is further mediated by another reader and writer, the Watson figure, also known as the "stupid friend," who co-solves as a secondary detective and is the author within the story.

As the main protagonist, Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith serves in this role--at first, largely providing a sidelong glance at the involvement in the case by Downey's Paul Avery and Ruffalo's Dave Toschi. His being something of a stupid friend rather suggesting such a criticism as that of Ken Jones ("An Open-and-Shut Case: Why David Fincher's Zodiac is the Film of the Year," in "Film Comment") of Gyllenhaal's performance as, "a babyish actor who goes slack whenever he's outside his comfort zone," to be missing the point. Even when Graysmith fully embarks on solving the case, he turns for help from the master detectives, and it's his naiveté that underlies his obsession to satisfy the desire for narrative solution no matter how improbable or ultimately unproven--to write the book on which this very movie is based. Talk about a detective constructing the narrative, he's writing the very movie he's in as it happens.

A similar dynamic takes place with Toschi, but through the film-within-the-film, "Dirty Harry" (1971), where Clint Eastwood's character was largely based on Toschi and the movie on the Zodiac case--minus the whole "due process" thing. Here, we see both Toschi and Graysmith attending a movie theatre screening of "Dirty Harry." That Toschi is a character to be characterized may also explain the emphasis on otherwise seemingly meaningless mannerisms one might ascribe as character definition, from Steve McQueen supposedly imitating him in "Bullitt" (1968), Eastwood in "Dirty Harry," and, yeah, he looks like Columbo, to the motif of Toschi repeatedly mooching food.

The final meta construction involving the three detectives here takes art imitating life to a whole other layer, Avery, the most akin here to the hardboiled detective type, abandons the artful resolution, ultimately wallowing in the consumption of booze and narcotics instead. As played by Downey, infamous for his real-life drug addiction problems, this is perfect casting: Downey playing Avery playing Downey. At which point, like Toschi when he finally pays for food, or when Graysmith gets his supposed solution, he drops from the story as he no longer is a surrogate for us, the spectators, in unraveling the plot on screen. Of course, it helps, too, that all three are fine actors, especially when not languishing in the all-consuming, never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe. Add a supporting cast that includes the likes of Brian Cox, Anthony Edwards, Philip Baker Hall, John Carroll Lynch, Dermot Mulroney, Chloë Sevigny and even Adam Goldberg in a bit part, and I have few qualms following for some two and half hours this winding course in a city, San Francisco, that also famously lent its hilly terrain to the thematics of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958).

Back to the "Dirty Harry" connection, though, this is part of a wider reflexive throughline of "Zodiac" that reveals the real serial killer--more than anyone else depicted here--to be movies. At various points, we're misdirected to consider whether a film projectionist or a cinema owner may be the culprit--and even that the case may be resolved by another film-within-the-film and that the Zodiac symbol, if not a watch, may be based on the countdown circle at the beginning of a film strip. The Zodiac letters include the killer musing over who would play him in a movie, and he references the 1932 "The Most Dangerous Game" in his likewise hunting of human prey. Interesting this, that "The Most Dangerous Game" was made concurrently with and by the same filmmakers as "King Kong" (1933, also the same year as Arthur Leigh Allen was born, if you want to make up your own codes to decipher).

This is interesting, or at least I think so, because "King Kong" is something of the original (although not exactly the first) film where the monster was a metaphor for the movie itself--involving as it does a film crew (largely a parody of the real filmmakers of "King Kong") out to capture the beast, like a film, and unleash him onto the stage and upon the audience. After eliminating everyone on the periphery of movies--the filmmakers (say, of "Dirty Harry"), the projectionist, the theatre manager and even the writers and spectators, including the suspicion that one of our surrogate detectives, Toschi, wrote one of the Zodiac letters--the suspect we're left with is the movie itself. Just as Graysmith discovered early on with "The Most Dangerous Game" quotation, of a serial killer musing over being portrayed by an actor, of the photographic trace finally pointed out of a lineup. Note, too, what the ultimate confrontation amounts to between the surrogate spectator and the movie-as-monster: the gaze and the horror, by our being sutured into the diegesis, of that gaze being returned. Mutilate as many heads as you may, I'll take this ending to a Fincher movie over the rest.

Now, apart from concern over the potentially dangerous influence of cinema, or that time that a man died from laughing at "A Fish Called Wanda" (1988), a movie itself doesn't really murder people. And, I'm not going to get into the topic I've discussed elsewhere that film is a kind of death: capturing life and motion as dead and still images to be reanimated on a screen. Even though the time-lapse photography for the building of the Transamerica Pyramid is kind of asking for it. Nevertheless, this movie is a killer. Not unlike how "King Kong," its narrative, too, about colonialist filmmakers, was part of the age of early talkies that colonized the space occupied by the silent film, "Zodiac" was an early "digital film," oxymoron though that term is, as the microchips and hard drives of digital film are nothing like the actual celluloid, the dispositif, we see in one scene in the movie. There is no, or little in this case, "film" involved in the making of the film. This was an era when many writers understandably wrote about the death of film--and have largely been proven correct aside from a few holdouts reenacting Charlie Chaplin of yesteryear continuing to make silents a decade after their demise.

"Film preservation" today even largely consists of digitizing films. It would seem by this point that we've crossed the heavenly Golden Gate Bridge pictured in "Zodiac" rising above the clouds. Even Fincher, who previously displayed a fondness for celluloid with scenes involving another projectionist in "Fight Club" (1999) now won't surrender digital for a "Citizen Kane" (1941) homage such as "Mank." Moreover, the digital revolution has changed the history of cinema--all the way back to its origins. After all, how important is it that Edison, Lumière, or whomever, recorded images on celluloid if film isn't even used in film anymore and considering the fact that motion pictures were recorded on other material before the invention of celluloid and are now stored in computer parts, read from discs by lasers and streamed through cords and cellphone towers onto screens. Digital cinema, like a murder mystery, reconstructing the narrative through the death of film. That movie theatre where "Dirty Harry" plays, "Zodiac" was also screened there. Now, it's gone. Turns out this murder mystery is hardly ambiguous or unresolved at all. The Zodiac killer of film.