With releases like There Will be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, Charlie Wilson’s War, Atonement, Eastern Promises and Juno, 2007 is one of the most memorable years for movies in the last few decades, and the previous list is just the main Academy Award nominees. It also doesn’t hurt that 2007 gave us 28 Weeks Later, Rescue Dawn, Superbad, Knocked Up, In the Valley of Elah, and Gone Baby Gone.
One film that is often lost in the award-shuffle of 2007 is David Fincher’s Zodiac, a film released on March 2nd of 2007, rivaling a film like Wild Hogs, one with more problems than it takes one-hundred minutes to remedy. While such a lost weekend could have propelled Zodiac to the top, instead, it was quickly forgotten about and overshadowed by other great releases. Does the acting rival Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal of Daniel Plainview? No, but not many performances have or can. Likewise, the screenplay isn’t as riveting as the quiescent pace of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men or Sorkin’s Gatling-gun dialogue in Charlie Wilson’s War. But, after watching Zodiac again for the first time, I was just as shaken as I was in a dark theater in March of 2007, particularly because the film, like the case, has no closure. In a testament to the idyllic fairness – and inherent flaws – within the justice system, there is a pile of circumstantial evidence fingering Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac Killer, but there is no proof, only assumption and logic, two things that are hardly admissible in court.
And this lack of closure is what makes Zodiac a great film, not because it leaves the viewer hanging like the top in Inception, but because the lack of closure is the plight of every character in the film, a common affliction that persists from December 1968 through 1991, which fashions Zodiac as less of a crime-thriller and more of an investigation into the constants within an ever-changing world. In other words, amidst the political, social, personal, and emotional chaos exhibited in and alluded to within Zodiac, the one element that remains unchanged is the Zodiac Killer, and this further helps to build, define, and ultimately prophesy the destruction of the main characters.
The opening scene of Zodiac is set in 1969, a year rife with conflict that signifies the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the height of the Vietnam War, the resurgence of Richard Nixon, and the eventual Manson murders before entering a tumultuous decade of social and civil unrest culminating in Nixon’s resignation, gas crises, and the Iranian conflict.
From the outset, the connotations of the time period are ripe from which the viewer can pick and choose, but amidst all of this chaos, the Zodiac Killer methodically makes his mark, toying with the police and the public by using three newspaper publications, the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner, to promote and recap his late-night – and at times daylight – escapades through San Francisco, Napa, and Vallejo. The Zodiac’s direct contact with the three newspapers is established through three separate cryptographs that he sends and challenges people to decipher. While the puzzles are solved by a schoolteacher and his wife, the rudimentary nature of them creates a false persona of the Zodiac, which is what ultimately throws each character into chaos.
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As a society, we praise the predictable, that which we can see coming, and that which we can negotiate, so the quickly solved cryptographs imagines the Zodiac as a nutjob destined to falter under his own sloppiness, creating the illusion that inspectors David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) are in step with the serial killer; however, as more “NIXON” buttons appear, headlines chart the troop-withdrawal from Vietnam, and sky scrapers are erected through time-elapsed footage, the years drip on, and the Zodiac letters keep pouring in, but the inspectors and the press are still stymied by the killings, unable to cross-reference enough of the gathered evidence with any suspect to fortify a solid lead. And this is one of the more interesting elements within Zodiac: the outside world is placed in the shadow of the killings, suggesting that perhaps in a decade of tumultuousness, society needs a constant focus, and if that focus is a serial killer, so be it; it still allays the impending collapse of society and the self, which is illustrated most prominently in Troschi’s downfall, Graymith’s divorce, and Avery’s submergence into bottles of booze and mounds of cocaine.
However, this manhunt also fosters senses of self-implosion, particularly when the prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen, who also happens to be the lone, real-life suspect in the open cases in Vallejo, Napa County, and Salano County but who died of a fatal heart attack in 1992 before he was questioned, is interrogated by inspectors Armstrong and Troschi as well as Sargeant Mulanax. Throughout the questioning, everything seems to fall in place, from the killer’s ambidextrousness, Allen’s possession of a Zodiac-brand watch, and the very size and make of shoes worn by the killer, but this potential arrest dissipates when the time needed to procure a warrant is prolonged because the standing judge cites a lack of physical evidence, deeming everything circumstantial, allowing Allen to move to a trailer park in Santa Rosa and ditch anything that might implicate him in the crimes. This turn of events ultimately drives Armstrong to transfer and Mulanax and Troschi to focus on other cases.
The Zodiac Killer had previously been the impetus for Dirty Harry, and while the film is not a direct telling of the case, the plot points of a serial killer named Scorpio ripping his way through San Francisco and ultimately threatening to blow up a bus full of children allegorically moors to the two together. While the tones of the two films are rather different, one plot point that stands out is the man who ultimately fingers the villain. The ending of Dirty Harry is classic, and has prompted us all to spur another to “make [our] day,” but the characters of Harry Callahan and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) are similar in that they both symbolize the vigilante justice-seeker who goes outside of their dictated realm in order to uncover justice. Granted, Callahan is a San Francisco inspector, but as his sobriquet suggests, he plays with less regard for the rules than most, but in the end, this issue is negated because he gets results. Similarly, Graysmith, who was originally a cartoonist for The Chronicle and ultimately went on to pen the bestselling books Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer, works outside of the law – and without any sort of legal permission — on his quest to uncover the killer’s identity. Often, his lack of access to files disrupts his investigation, but those bound to serve and protect aid him by decrying “I certainly can’t tell you to talk to Captain Ken Narlow. N-a-r-l-o-w.” While Callahan is much more of a badass, he and Graysmith are both working outside of established parameters to get results.
In that sense, Zodiac and Dirty Harry are also thematically linked in that they both look at the impediments created by jurisdictional territory. Clearly, this is not to suggest that neither David Fincher nor Don Siegel are suggesting a dismantling of the legal system, but rather that a fluidly mobile serial killer capable of spilling blood over two hundred miles of the California coast can often out-maneuver three departments mired in bureaucratic and territorial red tape that often keeps evidence out of the other’s hands – not so much intentionally, but by default of the system itself. This is made quite clear as David Toschi, Captain Ken Narlow (Donal Logue), and Sgt. Jack Mulanax (Elias Koteas) communicate through phone conversations that invariably include a variation of the line “Why didn’t you give us this information?” In Zodiac, the lack of communication between law enforcement in amplified, particularly when it is the rogue newpaper reporters, particularly Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) who seems to uncover much of the evidence that is being withheld from other precincts and departments. The unfortunately snag here is that the public announcement of evidence, particularly anything identity-related promotes the likelihood of a mistrial for any suspect accused of being the Zodiac.
In the end, the mobility of the Zodiac and the jurisdictional tether on each of the inspectors allows the killer to perpetuate chaos in the face of a system established to prevent the spread of chaos, dichotomously exposing the social benefits for the wrongly-accused, but the numerous loopholes and left open for rational criminal in an irrational environment.
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