It begins with a murder, and then another. A woman is killed, a man grievously injured, and a letter is sent to the news media. The killer gives himself a name – this is the Zodiac speaking – and provides a message written in code. So we start with three mysteries: the man, his motives and his message. The third is quickly cracked; the first hypothesized, but never definitively proven. But it’s the why of it all – why a man would kill at least five seemingly random people, and why we as a culture still care – that will require more significant investigation.
When it was first released more than 18 years ago, David Fincher’s Zodiac was considered a bit of an also-ran. Over two and a half hours long, it depicts the search for the Zodiac killer, who spent the late 60s terrorizing California’s Bay Area, as a series of bad leads and dead-ends, and concludes without definitively proving anything. It flopped at the box office and was not nominated for even a single Oscar.
Yet, to the great concern of my friends and loved ones, Zodiac has become my go-to rewatch. When I have nothing much to do, I might put on 20 or 30 minutes, and watch Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) attempt over years to untangle clues, allusions and near-misses knotted around the identity of the Zodiac killer.
To tell the truth, I find it all a bit comforting. Now, there is obviously quite a lot to disturb here: a mother with child trapped in a moving car, a daylight attack by a man in a leather mask. But contra Fincher’s clinical reputation, Zodiac is a film of surprisingly light pleasures. The dialogue is zippy, the performances closer to His Girl Friday than Seven. I could spend five hours visiting various police precinct evidence rooms, or listening to the long chain of variously balding character actors as they list off Bay Area place names: Napa, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa.
James Vanderbilt’s screenplay provides the viewer with a near-constant uptake of new information, a series of puzzle pieces that nearly fit together, but not quite. This enlists the viewer in the act of investigation, placing them on a level with the characters in their collective attempt to parse relevant information from chaff. Only deep in the runtime, and years into the story, do you realize that this exploration will likely never reach its destination.
For Fincher, as for his characters, the search for the Zodiac transmutes into a kind of quest, a vocation that calls out to particular niche obsessives – puzzlers, codebreakers, meaning-makers – and turns the film into something far more expansive than your typical serial killer tale. Whether dramatized or documented, the modern true crime story tends to be intensely over-determined, bending all evidence towards an established conclusion. But Zodiac is a process movie where the clues keep coming but never quite add up, and the search can never come to a definitive ending. There are always more messages, more references, more threads to be pulled, leading its collection of journalists, detectives and obsessives down tangents that might consume literal years of their lives, and yield little but a persistent fascination.
Zodiac is, at its heart, a story of the persistent attraction of mystery, where the slow unspooling of surprising facts, incidental details and seeming revelations can become an infinite churn and can even swallow up a life. It touches on the detective story, the newspaper movie and the contemporary paranoiac obsession with lining up the endless stray impressions of daily life into something neat, comprehensible and, most of all, meaningful. In particular, Graysmith’s quest begins with an attempt to safeguard his children, and ends up endangering them. Yet he never considers dropping it, not even when mysterious strangers are calling the house late into the night to breathe over the line. The confidence of the search, the surety of Graysmith’s belief that he will somehow, someday know – the stakes here are existential, though the danger is long in the past and all violence is entirely self-inflicted. To give up the search would be to give up the work of his life, a choice he (and we) never seriously consider.
Every time I watch Fincher’s film, I too become convinced that I will find, somewhere in its weave of suggestion and incident, the solution to the Zodiac killings, much as some people believe they will find mysteries of the universe in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The constant unspooling of new information, the new leads, new possibilities, draws me onward, deeper into the puzzle, until the story dissipates and no conclusion arrives. A few weeks, a couple months, a year or two passes, and I take the disc off my shelf, and keep on with the search.
Zodiac is available on Netflix and Paramount+ in the US, Amazon Prime in the UK and HBO Max in Australia
