zodiac

ZODIAC

David Fincher has crafted a masterpiece in Zodiac, and while much can

be said about the film's visual construction, it is the narrative

storytelling that interests me most. Fincher and screenwriter James

Vanderbilt have tossed the conventions of the Hollywood narrative

aside to weave a tale that bounces back and forth between multiple

protagonists, conflicting points of view, and pieces of a puzzle that

can never be answered. The film concentrates on one character thread

while ignoring others for extended stretches of time, only to reverse

the concentration later. It offers setups without payoffs, payoffs

without setups, and plenty of loose ends and leads that can never be

followed. It's a long movie, full of protracted temporal gaps. In some

ways it plays more like a collection of short stories wedged between

newspaper clippings than it does a big-budget studio picture.

Fincher is like the cinematic equivalent of a postmodern pop singer.

He's Britney Spears if she had a Ph.D. in Continental Philosophy.

Fincher plays within the populist forms and subverts them at the same

time. With Zodiac, he subverts the "serious" film. There's no "W" Arch

Plot in Zodiac. There's no Three Act structure, no beginning and no

end, just an infinite middle in search of an impossible opening and

closing act. To imply a start and a finish is to imply knowing, and

Zodiac never claims to know. Its narrative brilliance is its

transparent confession of not-knowing. Its purpose is not catharsis

but to ask what is to be done about the absence of catharsis.

I have a hunch that mainstream audiences will react poorly to this

movie. They'll lose track of the threads, get bored, get lost, grow

tired and irritable, and most of all, they will resist the open

ending. As Robert McKee writes in Story, "Most human beings believe

that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change;

that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves;

that they are the single and active protagonists of their own

existence; that their existence operates through continuous time

within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside

this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons."

McKee is right that most human beings believe this. Zodiac exists to

remind us that, in this particular regard, most human beings of

woefully stupid. My hope is that cinema exists not only to entertain

audiences but to educate them, particularly to educate them on how to

be an audience, that is, how to see the messiness of life reflected in

the mirror of the cinematic image.

On a visual note, I love that Fincher shot Zodiac in HD. It underlines

the point: this is not a film about film but a film about what film

can tell us about real life. Zodiac is a film that asks you to

challenge your expectations of a story. If you're not up for that,