Horror Scope

The first problem for Zodiac is its notorious ending.

by Cindy Fuchs

Recommended

The first problem for Zodiac is its notorious ending: The real-life killer who plagued the San Francisco Bay area during the early 1970s was never captured. The second problem is this very notion of "real-life," as Zodiac essentially imagined himself into existence, conjuring a name and persona, as well as relationships with his victims and pursuers. That he did all this as tabloid media were coming into chaotic self-definition (Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974; Son of Sam started shooting people in 1976) is no coincidence. For, as he imposed a brutal truth on communities of past and potential prey, Zodiac was also and always a horrific fiction.

David Fincher's excellent new movie is acutely aware of these problems, and winds them into an intriguing, often witty mix of causes and effects. In so doing, it rejiggers the police procedural, exposing the interdependence of fictions and facts in mythologies of authority, effectiveness and politics. It begins with a murder, the first one for which the killer took public credit. The camera slowly tracks the victims as they drive to a couples' parking area, a subtitle marking the date and place: July 4, 1969, Vallejo. (This sort of detail recurs throughout the movie, at once anchoring events on screen to events in "history" and asserting the irresolution produced by such particulars.) After the shooting, Zodiac calls the police and sends a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, creating himself as excess.

Zodiac's much-discussed "need" for publicity set a standard for serial killers, but here, the communications are left puzzling. Even when his ciphers are worked out, they provide little insight. Into the maelstrom step several dogged detectives, including Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), from whom Steve McQueen borrowed details for Bullitt; his partner (superb Anthony Edwards); and reps from the Chronicle earnest cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and brilliantly self-destructive crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), assisted and hindered by cops in other jurisdictions, handwriting experts, fingerprinters, even celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli (aptly antic Brian Cox).

With egos in the way, only rudimentary technologies (the "telefax"), and legal impediments, no one cracks the case (though the film provides a half-comic, half-thrilling near-discovery when Robert visits a witness late in the game), and all lose themselves to it. In a mess of intersecting obsessions and deceptions, Zodiac finds remarkable coherence, tracing the similar needs, means and useful fictions that structure truth.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Zodiac

Directed by David Fincher

A Paramount release