‘I find it all a bit comforting’: Why Zodiac is my feel-good movie | David Fincher

IIt begins with one murder, then another. A woman is killed, a man is seriously injured, and a message is sent to the media. The killer gives himself a name This is zodiac talk – It presents a message written in code. So we begin with three mysteries: the man, his motives, and his message. The third cracked quickly. The first has been hypothesized, but not conclusively proven. But the reason behind it all – why a man would kill at least five random people, and why we as a culture still care – is what will require more significant investigation.

When it was first released over 18 years ago, David Fincher’s Zodiac was also considered a flop. Spanning more than two and a half hours, the film depicts the search for the Zodiac Killer, who spent the late 1960s terrorizing California’s Bay Area, as a series of bad leads and dead ends, ending with nothing conclusively proven. It failed at the box office and was not nominated for a single Oscar.

However, to the great attention of my friends and loved ones, Zodiac It has become my favorite choice for rewatching. When I don’t have much to do, I might set aside 20 or 30 minutes and watch San Francisco Chronicle Inspector Dave Tucci (Mark Ruffalo), reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) try to solve years of clues, hints, and near misses connected to the identity of the Zodiac Killer.

To tell the truth, I find it all a bit comforting. Now, obviously there’s a lot to worry about here: a mother with her child trapped in a moving car, an attack in broad daylight by a man wearing a leather mask. But contrary to Fincher’s clinical reputation, Zodiac is a film full of surprisingly lighthearted pleasures. The dialogue is graceful, and the performances are closer to His Girl Friday of Seven. I could spend five hours visiting various police department evidence rooms, or listening to a long string of variously bald actors name place names in the Bay Area: Napa, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa.

James Vanderbilt’s screenplay provides the viewer with an almost constant absorption of new information, a series of puzzle pieces that almost fit together, but not quite. This engages the viewer in the investigative process, placing them on the level of the characters in their collective attempt to parse relevant information from the chaff. Only deep into the runtime, years into the story, do you realize that this exploration will likely never reach its destination.

For Fincher, as for his characters, the quest for the zodiac turns into a kind of quest, a vocation that calls for specialized geeks—puzzlers, code-breakers, and meaning-makers—and turns the film into something far more expansive than a typical serial killer story. Whether dramatic or documented, the modern true crime story tends to be greatly over-specified, bending all evidence toward a fixed conclusion. But Zodiac is a process film where clues keep coming but never quite add up, and the search can never reach a definitive conclusion. There are always more letters, more references, more strings to pull, leading her group of journalists, investigators, and obsessives down shadows that may consume years of their lives, yielding only persistent fascination.

Zodiac is, at its core, a story of the constant attraction of mystery, where the slow revelation of surprising facts, incidental details and apparent revelations can become an endless froth and can swallow up a life. It touches on the detective story, the journalistic film, and the contemporary paranoid obsession with compiling the endless stray impressions of everyday life into something elegant, comprehensible, and, most of all, meaningful. In particular, Graysmith’s quest begins with trying to protect his children, and ends up putting them in danger. However, he never thinks about dropping it, not even when mysterious strangers call the house late at night to breathe over the line. The trust of the search, Graysmith’s guarantee that he will know somehow, one day – the stakes here are existential, even though the danger is long past and all the violence is entirely self-inflicted. Giving up the search would mean giving up his life’s work, a choice he (and we) never seriously considered.

Every time I watch a Fincher film, I also become convinced that I will find, somewhere in its weave of suggestions and events, the answer to the Zodiac murders, just as some people thought they would find the secrets of the universe in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The constant revelation of new information, new leads, and new possibilities pushes me forward, deeper into the mystery, until the story dissipates and no conclusion arrives. A few weeks go by, or a few months, or a year or two, and I pull the disc off the shelf, and keep searching.