ZODIAC: What's your sign?
I read with interest Matty's take on ZODIAC, and, personally, I sort
of disagree with his take on it. To wit:
"Thematically, it's also two films -- reflected not just in the
script, but in inconsistent theme-setting music and direction. One
is a dark tale of obsession in which a not-objectively-important
mystery that wrecks the lives of everyone who touches it. The other
is a tale of triumph, where a scrappy investigator solves the
puzzle that stumped the experts."
Ehhhh. Except the obsession isn't that dark, lives don't really get
ruined, nobody really triumphs per se, and the guy who finally
"solves" the case isn't a "scrappy investigator"--it's some dude who
comes into the film in the final scene who we've never met before, and
the only thing he's got that Graysmith and Co. don't is the witness
who everyone from the rest of the movie wished they could have run to
ground in the first place. I really enjoyed the movie--clearly moreso
than Matt, but I am at a loss because I think that David Fincher's
clear intent was to entirely avoid the sort of story that Matt
describes above.
I perhaps have the benefit of comparing this David Fincher Serial
Killer Movie with his Other Serial Killer Movie--Se7en. In Se7en, all
of the outsized elements Matt alludes to are in play. Cinematic
"darkness", the promise of "triumph", acts of dogged
determination--even heroism--from the investigators. But that universe
is vastly different from the one presented in Zodiac. In Se7en, for
example, the killer is a crazy genius with a grand plan--so much so
that his actions breach the border of the plausible (the investigators
unearth hundreds of diaries which, in and of themselves speak to much
vaster insanity that the killer's deeds suggest). The killings are
elaborately staged events, his pursuers fit melodramatic tropes to a
tee, and the environment in which everything takes place is an
unbelievable urban hellscape that suffers from permanent torrential
downpours. Everything is insanely larger-than-life and everything
takes on some crazy symbolic resonance.
I mean...Gwen Paltrow's head in a box, people...
The comparison is instructive, because I found Zodiac to be one of the
most thematically unified films I've ever seen, and, almost straight
down-the-line, it ends up being the anti-Se7en. In the first place,
Zodiac isn't nearly as horrific a spectacle. Its characters aren't
nearly as gransiose. And finally, while Pitt and Freeman definitely
get their man in Se7en, in Zodiac, the movie cannot really make any
conclusions in fact as to whether the guy Graysmith ultimately fingers
was the killer or not.
So, with that in mind, how on earth do you build something dramatic
out of that? Well, when you think about it, the average serial killer
movie begins with a hero and a villain, and sets the two on a
collision course. In Zodiac, Fincher finds a way to build the dramatic
arc doing precisely the opposite--finding newer and more inventive
ways to keep his heroes and villains apart. That's one formula neatly
turned on its ear.
Nevertheless, if you ask me what really distinguished Zodiac in my
mind from other films is how well it illuminates the mundanity of evil
by establishing a world in which absolutely NOTHING is outsized: the
viewer is awash in the nuts-and-bolts details of the case as they
unfold, the chronology is rigidly linear, the camera focuses on
characters' small idiosyncracies rather than large psychologies and
the environment is oppressively naturalistic.
As sure as those otherworldly rains loomed over the proceedings of
Se7en, the entire enterprise that is Zodiac is haunted by that
cipher--the weird code that finds its way into the Chronicle's office
and, eventually, up on Graysmith's tackboard. The stage is set for the
audience to attempt to penetrate something, yet the film reveals that
what was truly impenetrable in the Zodiac investigation was the
interlocking sworls of the banal and the everyday--the investigation
foundered on the obstacles of a missing witness, bureaucratic
ineffciency, misinterpreted clues, interoffice disagreements,
political wranglings, bad timing and bad luck. And just as the Zodiac
was revealed to be not particularly intelligent, particularly
competent or particularly consistent, his pursuers were portrayed as
generally good men, more often than not persistent, who weren't
particularly prone to moments of shocking insight.
Even that cipher turns out to be nothing special. The work of someone
with the right library books and a little bit of education.
Here's a term that very neatly defines everything and everyone you
happen upon in Zodiac--"garden variety." Everyone and everything in
this movie tends to follow a reductive path back to the normative.
Graysmith may be an obsessive--but his obsession seems no more
interesting that the shit that leads one to blog, frankly. His
estranged wife can only describe it and their time together as a first
date that never ended. There's nothing "fever dream" about Graysmith,
no long dark periods of soul-searching, no amazing character turns.
The end of his relationship with his wife transpires with hardly a
whimper, and his tensest moment comes in a situation where the
audience understands that logically he is in no actual danger (credit
Fincher--we know it full and well and nevertheless get creeped out in
spite of ourselves).
The only ruined life in Zodiac--besides those killed by him, of
course, is Robert Downey Jr's journalist, Paul Avery. But it's not the
Zodiac that ruins his life...it's just as easily blamed on his life of
vice and excess! And Mark Ruffalo's David Toschi is doing just fine,
by the way--the only residual impact the Zodiac has had on his life is
his being asked to serve as an advisor on this very film.
One terrific scene exemplifies the movie's obsession with layering the
plot in a fog of normalcy--the scene in which the Zodiac encounters a
pair of young lovers near a lake. The Zodiac is shown to be a maked
man in a cartoonishly silly T-Shirt. Their conversation is downright
cordial. One of the victims last words is to gripe about the weather!
And the killing itself is anything but vaunted--it's shot in a way
that places it almost entirely offscreen.
You also come to admire the film's obsession with tiny idiosyncrasies:
Graysmith's almost whinging attempts to ingratiate himself with his
higher-ups, Toschi's love of animal crackers, the unspoken bonds
between Toschi and his partner (played with a brilliant
straightlacedness by Anthony Edwards, well cast and terribly unsung),
Chloe Sevigny's quiet recriminations, the way Avery's story arc played
itself out most clearly through his wardrobe...in a movie about the
the little stuff, you sure get a wealth of it as a viewer to sift
through.
It's a movie of garden variety people navigating garden variety
obstacles where the only thing more banal than evil itself is the task
of confronting that evil, and yet the thing that makes it dramatic,
creepy, exciting, and ultimately alluring is that we recognize that
the characters--locked in a dance with the mundane, picking up and
leaving off threads of an investigations like cast aside dance
partners--are very much like us...except somewhere within that tangled
thicket of strange, off-putting normalcy is the chance to come
face-to-face with something extraordinary--real danger, real history,
real accomplishment. All we're recognizing is that simple promise of
possibility that sends us out in the world everyday--what's unsettling
is just how close the seemingly normal path of a life comes to
intersecting with something truly dark.
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