david fincher zodiac

David Fincher: Zodiac

I had a somewhat ambivalent reaction to David Fincher's Zodiac when I

first saw it early last year. I admired its style, attention to detail

and most of all its restrain but so densely packed its (160 minutes

long) narrative was that it left me completely exhausted much before

it actually ended. Reading the reviews did help me realize what

Fincher was trying to achieve. Since then I had been waiting for it to

come on DVD. I just saw the new director's cut (nine extra minutes!

yay!!) and I now feel that this certainly is the best and the most

important American film of last year, much more satisfying than either

No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood.

Zodiac was a box office disappointment, which is not surprising at all

given how it consciously rejects (or "unexpectedly repudiates", to use

a phrase from Manohla Dargis's review) the standard Hollywood

aesthetic, as seen in the serial killer and police procedural genres.

Fincher himself directed Se7en, though not entirely conventional but

still a standard Hollywood product. By contrast, in this film there

are no heroic characters, or for that matter no villain, though we do

feel his presence even though he is absent from the surface. We never

see the killer, though Fincher does show the murders, some in his

typical grisly style. The killer is of course never revealed or

caught, though we do feel we are tantalizingly close to him at a few

occasions. There are no shootouts, no macho cops, no funny, smartass

dialogues which is the staple of cop movies. And most important of all

it rejects psychological realism, thus denying any easy opportunity

for identifying with any particular character, in order to concentrate

more on the investigative and legal process - in all its mundane,

undramatic, even tedious detail. Having said that, last section does

become a story about the Graysmith character which I thought didn't

fit well with the rest of the film. A more radical approach would have

opted for a style used by films like The Battle of Algiers or

Salvatore Giuliano. Even the New Hollywood movies of 70s, which are

obvious touchstones for Fincher, do this very successfully - they show

more interest in institutions and processes than human beings which

are anyway shown to be too weak to have any character or any authentic

motivations of their own. It is also important to keep in mind films

of Alan Pakula's (All the President's Men, The Parallax View), Francis

Ford Coppola (The Conversation) or Sidney Lumet (Network) to really

appreciate what Fincher is doing in this film.

At the heart of the film (and the thing that interested me the most)

is the idea of epistemological despair - the profound desire for

knowledge yet understanding that it might be impossible even if you

bury yourself under an avalanche of facts and information (which this

film does). It shows the limits of rationality and taking from there

the limits of our liberal justice system which takes rationality and

the possibility of knowledge as an implicit assumption. We may never

be completely sure about what we really know or can know. But it is to

film's credit and its political integrity (and it shows how far

Fincher has come from Se7en, Fight Club or Panic Room) that it never

wavers from its faith in the rule of law and liberalism. We know that

bringing the guilty to justice is important but it is equally

important to make sure that no injustice is done to any innocent. The

film makes repeated references to Dirty Harry, thus clarifying its own

position relative to that. It makes Fincher's past films, and indeed

any standard hollywood thriller, which all essentially work on the

principle of wish-fulfillment fantasies of meting out violent justice

look illiberal, if not downright fascist. It is specially important in

these times when so-called "preemptive" ways of handling crime are

becoming more and more acceptable. An excellent essay in Slate goes in

more detail about it. There is a scope for a much more involved and

detailed discussion on this topic. Somewhat reminds me of essays

collected in Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. You

can allow truth and reality to be contingent and yet build liberal

institutions on that foundation and indeed there is no other way to be

liberal in this postmodern age.

I have been thinking about these philosophical questions about

assumptions of rationality in the context of detective stories even

since I saw Twin Peaks. In fact watching it second time the Zodiac

killer reminded me quite a bit of Windom Earle from the second season.

One uses code cyphers and other uses chess positions to communicate -

both consciously making a point about limits of rational, logical

deduction when it comes to identifying and weeding out evil. I am sure

Agent Cooper would have cracked the Zodiac case with his unique

mind-body technique and the Tibetan method! But its really hard work

for ordinary detectives.

I know most people missed it when it came but the two disc special

edition more than makes up for the lost chance. I haven't been able to

explore extras or been able to listen to the two commentary tracks but

will try to find time for them soon. Anyway, Zodiac definitely

deserves a place high on your to-watch queue.

Trailer to whet the appetite: