Zodiac

13/05/2024

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 In Zodiac, the murderer of the title will be credited with killing five people, but the film is more concerned, over its chiefly fourteen-year time span, with how it looks like he has helped destroy three: the film’s main characters, a San Francisco Chronicle journalist, a cartoonist at the newspaper who becomes fascinated by the cryptic preoccupations of the killer, and a top cop Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), who was so famous and respected that Steve McQueen’s character in Bullitt was based on him and Clint Eastwood’s too in Dirty Harry. Dave goes to see the latter but doesn’t stay. After all, the film isn’t only derived from Toschi, its villain is based even more on the killer Dave has been trying to capture. In the Eastwood film, Zodiac becomes Scorpio, and Harry has no problem dispatching the killer at the end with a bit of rough justice. 

    Zodiac is a film well aware of its movie connotations, but it also has to entertain a reality that most films elide. Dirty Harry wasn’t a procedural account of capturing a killer but a wish-fulfilment fantasy that proposes if you put aside some of the niceties of the law, you can get your man. Late in Zodiac, cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) thinks he has all the evidence he needs to arrest the Zodiac. While Toschi is increasingly convinced that Graysmith has pieced together a case that has convinced him, finding new links the various police departments involved have missed, it still won't hold up in court: it is circumstantially plausible but evidentially weak. Toschi may have given rise to two iconic film characters. But he has to live in the real world where the intricacies of the legal system matter, and the film explores very well how the three characters are near destroyed by the maddening sense their instincts are right but that their claims are incomplete. 

   The third main character is Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), whose life is threatened by the killer, and whose career spirals as he drinks, takes drugs and ends up working for a less significant paper, The Sacramento Bee. Though the early murders in the film are brilliantly terrifying as Fincher conveys a sense of threat that few horror filmmakers can match, the film’s greatness rests partly on its cinematic accomplishments meeting the ambiguous reality the film comes up against and that ruins Avery, damages Toschi and almost wrecks Graysmith’s family life.

    We will say more soon about those killings in Zodiac's first half hour, but it is as if it wants both to acknowledge cinema’s presence on the film as form and culture, and its limitations as genre. From the late sixties to the late 70s, San Francisco was a very cinematic city: Point Blank, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, The Conversation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Towering Inferno were all set there. Famous films were set there before (Vertigo) and after (Basic Instinct), but Zodiac is set during its cinematic heyday. The film has also absorbed aspects of 70s cinema as if to escape the facility of many modern films, including some of Fincher’s own: Seven, The Game and Fight Club were all impressive instances of ludic and reflexive cinema, works that played with the viewer's expectations and played into the demands of a late 90s audiences’ desire for clever narrative twists and turns. Seven is predicated on a killer murdering people who fall into one of the seven deadly sins, The Game a film that plays a game on the audience as a wealthy banker is tricked, like the viewer, into believing in a reality that turns into the game of the title, and in Fight Club two characters are really one as we discover that the protagonist has a split personality. All three films rely on a conceit and fall into the post-modern, if we see an aspect of filmic post-modernism relying on the unreliability of narratives, the ability of films to manipulate all the better to tell us we have been watching a movie and more fool us for assuming the filmmaker is interested in playing fair. There is perhaps nothing crueller in Fincher’s work than the head of our heroic central character’s girlfriend in a box at the end of Seven, nothing more likely to register the filmmaker’s control over an audience than telling us that the two characters we have been following for over two hours happens to be one guy with a personality disorder. 

    Fincher has always been interested in the technological possibilities of film, but we shouldn’t assume such developments inevitably lead to post-modern configurations: just because the tech can create doubts over the fabric of our reality (as Chat GPT and deep fakes have shown us), this doesn’t mean that a filmmaker has to play with us as a consequence. The Social Network is more technologically manipulative than Fight Club if we note that Fight Club takes two actors, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and proposes they are one person, while in The Social Network, Fincher takes one actor and shows them as twins: Arme Hammer playing the Winklevosses. Though there is inevitable fakery in the latter, there isn’t gimmickry. In the former, there is gimmicky without fakery. Technology and manipulation needn’t go together, even if they often do so.

    Zodiac uses the very latest developments, yet applies them to a film that resembles more the key works of the 70s than those of the late 90s and early 2000s. As Michelle Schreiber notes, “Zodiac was the first film ever to be shot di­rectly to a hard drive and uses CGI to explore the ultimately futile investigative efforts of its male protagonists…” (Journal of Film and Video) But the computer- generated imagery isn’t there to create the artificial but paradoxically to augment the real. Speaking of the immense work required, digital effects specialist Eric Barba says, "the neighborhood has changed from when the original murder took place. David shot in San Francisco for some of the sequence" he says, though most was shot at Downey Studios in California. There, Fincher recreated Washington and Cherry streets, built the facade for two houses, and brought in period vehicles. But much of it was pure CGI: "the rest of the neighborhood, a CG police car and motorcycle, a fire truck, and reflections on the real cars. It was an elaborate amount of work.” (Studio Daily) Fincher wanted to use CGI to capture reality; not extinguish it. This offered interesting ethical implications, and Fincher has made much of the notion that the film’s fidelity to reality be manifold. "When you’re portraying people’s real lives, you owe them the responsibility and dignity of telling them what you’re gonna do and then sticking to that. My reputation aside, I really don’t set out to offend anybody. And especially not people who’ve suffered.” (Cinephilia and Beyond) 

     Zodiac might be a fiction,but it's based on fact, and Barba says “when you're trying to recreate the murder of someone who actually did die, it gets to you.” (Studio Daily) The blood the film shows wasn’t shot in camera but added afterwards, which raises interesting questions about what constitutes authenticity in film. If directors like Christopher Nolan and actors such as Tom Cruise make much of eschewing CGI and stuntmen, respectively, this is all very well, but if the film is working off a highly artificial premise, then we might be left believing the veracity of the action sequence but not the diegesis surrounding it. Fincher seems to propose that one seeks veracity in the ethos over the fact of the image. If what matters is filming with special effects, the better to comprehend reality, then this is what he must must do. 

    We can see it in the three murder scenes, ones critics have consistently invoked as more realistic than most movie deaths. "The bleak ferocity behind "Zodiac" stems from its true crime origins. We can easily dismiss Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees as monsters we'd meet in real life, but the Zodiac Killer?” (Slash) In the first of these killings, Fincher uses a song that plays against the scene (Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man), in the second, avoids music altogether, and in the third, has a radio programme on as the murderer takes out a cabbie. These choices give to the film a sense of authenticity that more ostensibly, tehnologically realistic Nolan and Cruise films lose because the non-diegetic music dictates the emotion and signals action over event. When action stars do their own stunts, is this then undermined as realism by the music, and by the construction of shots that generate identification that makes us too involved in what is going on dramatically rather than observationally? It is all very well Cruise doing his own stunt work on Mission Impossible, but the film vocabulary is so predictable that usually the music and the camera angles make us feel we are in yet another action sequence over attending to the reality involved in the filming. Even in the fine sequence with the disc in the first film, director Brian De Palma films it suspensefully, as he maximises the tension in the scene by including variables like a passing rat invading the space of the man holding the rope that is keeping Cruise suspended in mid-air. 

      There is nothing wrong with such suspense, of course, but if an actor or filmmaker seeks to capture the real, then there are methods that draw this sense of reality out. Even when Fincher uses point-of-view shots in the second murder, by the lake, he forces upon us the observational partly because he limits the possibility of the dramatic. The viewer is left witnessing the crime rather than feeling they have any agency within it. But isn’t this often the case in horror films and why the scene may seem to resemble one? In the typical slasher movie, the victim is oblivious to their fate but the film usually creates complicity between the viewer and the killer that is vital to the sub-genre’s sadism. The non-diegetic music tells us the victim is in trouble, and the camera adopts the perspective of the murderer. It will also sometimes show us the axe or the knife as a shadow against the wall moments before the victim is killed. This might not be dramatic but neither is it observational. It is instead complicit: A contract between the viewer and the filmmaker (perhaps even the killer), and all the details we offer are present in the first killing in Friday the 13th.  

       Fincher says creating a complicit relationship with the killer would have turned the story into a first-person-shooter video game." We didn’t want to make the sort of movie that serial killers would want to own.” (American Cinematographer) While apparently this second murder scene is similar to many a horror movie scene, we can see how it is also very different. It wants observational empathy over generic complicity, and makes clear it has no interest in creating even momentary identification with a killer who, after all, remains an enigma. Though the film offers a thesis that leaves us in little doubt who is responsible, the case remains moot, and others have proposed that it could have been someone else other than Arthur Leigh Allen, brilliantly carnated by John Carroll Lynch here chiefly through one scene. 

     What the film wants to do is use the serial killer topic as a societal biopsy, to try and understand the times, to suggest the passing of time and to show how this unsolved mystery blighted the lives of three characters whose confidence was damaged by, or who couldn’t get out of their minds, the taunting, cryptic killer. Zodiac risks destroying dramatic unity as it drags on for years. Fincher has spoken a great deal about how he wanted everything to look as historically accurate as possible; that he wanted to avoid the sort of homage to the seventies which would have played up lambchop sideburns, Volkswagon Beetles and checked jackets. These aren’t absent, but neither are they prominent, as though Fincher was wary of creating anything that would make viewers feel in the know about the period - when the purpose behind the film was for us to remain in a constant state of anxiety over the unknown. Fincher thus gives us a film that absorbs a period of time and insists on a manifold resistance to viewer complacency. The film is truer to the reality of the 70s than most, resists the generic pull of the serial killer film, doesn't arrive at any greater certainty than the facts allow, and is permeated with a dread it won’t attempt to expel. Not surprisingly, the film was a box-office failure, yet it remains alongside Gerry, Elephant and There Will Be Blood, one of the few American films of the early 2000s that created a tone and pace resisting the reflexive and the generic. If it felt like a film out of its time, it was centrally because it was so determined to capture the one in which it happened to be set. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Zodiac

 In Zodiac, the murderer of the title will be credited with killing five people, but the film is more concerned, over its chiefly fourteen-year time span, with how it looks like he has helped destroy three: the film’s main characters, a San Francisco Chronicle journalist, a cartoonist at the newspaper who becomes fascinated by the cryptic preoccupations of the killer, and a top cop Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), who was so famous and respected that Steve McQueen’s character in Bullitt was based on him and Clint Eastwood’s too in Dirty Harry. Dave goes to see the latter but doesn’t stay. After all, the film isn’t only derived from Toschi, its villain is based even more on the killer Dave has been trying to capture. In the Eastwood film, Zodiac becomes Scorpio, and Harry has no problem dispatching the killer at the end with a bit of rough justice. 

    Zodiac is a film well aware of its movie connotations, but it also has to entertain a reality that most films elide. Dirty Harry wasn’t a procedural account of capturing a killer but a wish-fulfilment fantasy that proposes if you put aside some of the niceties of the law, you can get your man. Late in Zodiac, cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) thinks he has all the evidence he needs to arrest the Zodiac. While Toschi is increasingly convinced that Graysmith has pieced together a case that has convinced him, finding new links the various police departments involved have missed, it still won't hold up in court: it is circumstantially plausible but evidentially weak. Toschi may have given rise to two iconic film characters. But he has to live in the real world where the intricacies of the legal system matter, and the film explores very well how the three characters are near destroyed by the maddening sense their instincts are right but that their claims are incomplete. 

   The third main character is Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), whose life is threatened by the killer, and whose career spirals as he drinks, takes drugs and ends up working for a less significant paper, The Sacramento Bee. Though the early murders in the film are brilliantly terrifying as Fincher conveys a sense of threat that few horror filmmakers can match, the film’s greatness rests partly on its cinematic accomplishments meeting the ambiguous reality the film comes up against and that ruins Avery, damages Toschi and almost wrecks Graysmith’s family life.

    We will say more soon about those killings in Zodiac's first half hour, but it is as if it wants both to acknowledge cinema’s presence on the film as form and culture, and its limitations as genre. From the late sixties to the late 70s, San Francisco was a very cinematic city: Point Blank, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, The Conversation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Towering Inferno were all set there. Famous films were set there before (Vertigo) and after (Basic Instinct), but Zodiac is set during its cinematic heyday. The film has also absorbed aspects of 70s cinema as if to escape the facility of many modern films, including some of Fincher’s own: Seven, The Game and Fight Club were all impressive instances of ludic and reflexive cinema, works that played with the viewer's expectations and played into the demands of a late 90s audiences’ desire for clever narrative twists and turns. Seven is predicated on a killer murdering people who fall into one of the seven deadly sins, The Game a film that plays a game on the audience as a wealthy banker is tricked, like the viewer, into believing in a reality that turns into the game of the title, and in Fight Club two characters are really one as we discover that the protagonist has a split personality. All three films rely on a conceit and fall into the post-modern, if we see an aspect of filmic post-modernism relying on the unreliability of narratives, the ability of films to manipulate all the better to tell us we have been watching a movie and more fool us for assuming the filmmaker is interested in playing fair. There is perhaps nothing crueller in Fincher’s work than the head of our heroic central character’s girlfriend in a box at the end of Seven, nothing more likely to register the filmmaker’s control over an audience than telling us that the two characters we have been following for over two hours happens to be one guy with a personality disorder. 

    Fincher has always been interested in the technological possibilities of film, but we shouldn’t assume such developments inevitably lead to post-modern configurations: just because the tech can create doubts over the fabric of our reality (as Chat GPT and deep fakes have shown us), this doesn’t mean that a filmmaker has to play with us as a consequence. The Social Network is more technologically manipulative than Fight Club if we note that Fight Club takes two actors, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and proposes they are one person, while in The Social Network, Fincher takes one actor and shows them as twins: Arme Hammer playing the Winklevosses. Though there is inevitable fakery in the latter, there isn’t gimmickry. In the former, there is gimmicky without fakery. Technology and manipulation needn’t go together, even if they often do so.

    Zodiac uses the very latest developments, yet applies them to a film that resembles more the key works of the 70s than those of the late 90s and early 2000s. As Michelle Schreiber notes, “Zodiac was the first film ever to be shot di­rectly to a hard drive and uses CGI to explore the ultimately futile investigative efforts of its male protagonists…” (Journal of Film and Video) But the computer- generated imagery isn’t there to create the artificial but paradoxically to augment the real. Speaking of the immense work required, digital effects specialist Eric Barba says, "the neighborhood has changed from when the original murder took place. David shot in San Francisco for some of the sequence" he says, though most was shot at Downey Studios in California. There, Fincher recreated Washington and Cherry streets, built the facade for two houses, and brought in period vehicles. But much of it was pure CGI: "the rest of the neighborhood, a CG police car and motorcycle, a fire truck, and reflections on the real cars. It was an elaborate amount of work.” (Studio Daily) Fincher wanted to use CGI to capture reality; not extinguish it. This offered interesting ethical implications, and Fincher has made much of the notion that the film’s fidelity to reality be manifold. "When you’re portraying people’s real lives, you owe them the responsibility and dignity of telling them what you’re gonna do and then sticking to that. My reputation aside, I really don’t set out to offend anybody. And especially not people who’ve suffered.” (Cinephilia and Beyond) 

     Zodiac might be a fiction,but it's based on fact, and Barba says “when you're trying to recreate the murder of someone who actually did die, it gets to you.” (Studio Daily) The blood the film shows wasn’t shot in camera but added afterwards, which raises interesting questions about what constitutes authenticity in film. If directors like Christopher Nolan and actors such as Tom Cruise make much of eschewing CGI and stuntmen, respectively, this is all very well, but if the film is working off a highly artificial premise, then we might be left believing the veracity of the action sequence but not the diegesis surrounding it. Fincher seems to propose that one seeks veracity in the ethos over the fact of the image. If what matters is filming with special effects, the better to comprehend reality, then this is what he must must do. 

    We can see it in the three murder scenes, ones critics have consistently invoked as more realistic than most movie deaths. "The bleak ferocity behind "Zodiac" stems from its true crime origins. We can easily dismiss Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees as monsters we'd meet in real life, but the Zodiac Killer?” (Slash) In the first of these killings, Fincher uses a song that plays against the scene (Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man), in the second, avoids music altogether, and in the third, has a radio programme on as the murderer takes out a cabbie. These choices give to the film a sense of authenticity that more ostensibly, tehnologically realistic Nolan and Cruise films lose because the non-diegetic music dictates the emotion and signals action over event. When action stars do their own stunts, is this then undermined as realism by the music, and by the construction of shots that generate identification that makes us too involved in what is going on dramatically rather than observationally? It is all very well Cruise doing his own stunt work on Mission Impossible, but the film vocabulary is so predictable that usually the music and the camera angles make us feel we are in yet another action sequence over attending to the reality involved in the filming. Even in the fine sequence with the disc in the first film, director Brian De Palma films it suspensefully, as he maximises the tension in the scene by including variables like a passing rat invading the space of the man holding the rope that is keeping Cruise suspended in mid-air. 

      There is nothing wrong with such suspense, of course, but if an actor or filmmaker seeks to capture the real, then there are methods that draw this sense of reality out. Even when Fincher uses point-of-view shots in the second murder, by the lake, he forces upon us the observational partly because he limits the possibility of the dramatic. The viewer is left witnessing the crime rather than feeling they have any agency within it. But isn’t this often the case in horror films and why the scene may seem to resemble one? In the typical slasher movie, the victim is oblivious to their fate but the film usually creates complicity between the viewer and the killer that is vital to the sub-genre’s sadism. The non-diegetic music tells us the victim is in trouble, and the camera adopts the perspective of the murderer. It will also sometimes show us the axe or the knife as a shadow against the wall moments before the victim is killed. This might not be dramatic but neither is it observational. It is instead complicit: A contract between the viewer and the filmmaker (perhaps even the killer), and all the details we offer are present in the first killing in Friday the 13th.  

       Fincher says creating a complicit relationship with the killer would have turned the story into a first-person-shooter video game." We didn’t want to make the sort of movie that serial killers would want to own.” (American Cinematographer) While apparently this second murder scene is similar to many a horror movie scene, we can see how it is also very different. It wants observational empathy over generic complicity, and makes clear it has no interest in creating even momentary identification with a killer who, after all, remains an enigma. Though the film offers a thesis that leaves us in little doubt who is responsible, the case remains moot, and others have proposed that it could have been someone else other than Arthur Leigh Allen, brilliantly carnated by John Carroll Lynch here chiefly through one scene. 

     What the film wants to do is use the serial killer topic as a societal biopsy, to try and understand the times, to suggest the passing of time and to show how this unsolved mystery blighted the lives of three characters whose confidence was damaged by, or who couldn’t get out of their minds, the taunting, cryptic killer. Zodiac risks destroying dramatic unity as it drags on for years. Fincher has spoken a great deal about how he wanted everything to look as historically accurate as possible; that he wanted to avoid the sort of homage to the seventies which would have played up lambchop sideburns, Volkswagon Beetles and checked jackets. These aren’t absent, but neither are they prominent, as though Fincher was wary of creating anything that would make viewers feel in the know about the period - when the purpose behind the film was for us to remain in a constant state of anxiety over the unknown. Fincher thus gives us a film that absorbs a period of time and insists on a manifold resistance to viewer complacency. The film is truer to the reality of the 70s than most, resists the generic pull of the serial killer film, doesn't arrive at any greater certainty than the facts allow, and is permeated with a dread it won’t attempt to expel. Not surprisingly, the film was a box-office failure, yet it remains alongside Gerry, Elephant and There Will Be Blood, one of the few American films of the early 2000s that created a tone and pace resisting the reflexive and the generic. If it felt like a film out of its time, it was centrally because it was so determined to capture the one in which it happened to be set. 


© Tony McKibbin