ZODIAC

*SOME SPOILERS*

There's a shot deep into David Fincher's latest -- his best film to date and an easy candidate for best film of the year -- that begins with the camera positioned at the peak of one of the stanchions of the Golden Gate Bridge looking out over the city. The camera pans down to reveal the bay and bridge shrouded in a soupy fog.

It's a strikingly oneiric moment in a film that draws heavily on the tropes of the police procedural but it also marks the transition from when, a decade or so after the first Zodiac killings, the active pursuit of a killer has devolved, for the men consumed by the investigation, into a slow burning obsession with chasing ghosts. That Fincher should turn to the dreamy expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge to signal this shift in energy and mood is not surprising as it recalls that other great San Francisco-set masterpiece of personal obsession, Vertigo. Similar to James Stewart's Scotty, there's comes a point when the cops and journalists of Zodiac are no longer seeking practical answers to questions in the present but rather struggle to reconstruct the past in an effort to understand who they were and who they've become. "It was important," insists Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist-cum-amateur-Zodiac-sleuth Robert Graysmith years after the crimes and letters to the editors have ceased as his own life falls to pieces in the present.

One assumes that Fincher thinks it was important too, important enough to bring it to the screen with a running time of almost three hours, and there's much to be mined from the film as a critique of the media, spectacle and the movies. No sooner does it become clear that the Zodiac case may never be solved than SFPD Inspector David Toschi (a stellar performance by Mark Ruffalo) finds himself in a theatre watching Clint Eastwood take down the Zodiac-inspired "Scorpio" in Dirty Harry (1971). When we can't find closure in real life, leave it to the movies to settle all scores. Nevermind, grumbles Toschi in the lobby, due process.

The movies are ever present in Zodiac as cultural and personal artifacts. Graysmith connects a line from the killer's first letter to the SF Chron to The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and later we see the movie posters, mostly noirs and thrillers, that cover the walls of his own apartment. Interestingly, the movies end up being one of the film's many tantalizing dead ends (the killer was inspired by the novel!). Still, movie love or obsession, runs just beneath the obsession with
the real life thriller that envelopes all of the characters' lives. Indeed, one obsession feeds the other as the search for resolution in life seems, in part, motivated by a desire for the satisfying closure that fictions feed us on a regular basis. None of this, mind you, is explicitly or even implicitly stated by Fincher but it's there in the art direction, the composition and the shifts in tone. In the linkage to Vertigo through a hallucinatory vision of the Golden Gate Bridge Fincher ties his film to a fiction that runs counter to the norm in which the search for resolution or closure itself becomes a form of madness.