Filmic Friday 311: Zodiac

In Which I Discuss True Crime

Once upon a time, there was a serial killer who called himself "Zodiac". He has never, to our knowledge, been caught. Evidence is shaky. Eyewitness testimony, while extremely valuable, has not been sufficient to nail this beast. Of course there had to be a movie made about this horror. Several, in fact. But the one I'm going to talk about today is the David Fincher movie from 2007.

The poster is absolutely not kidding.
There are, indeed, many ways to lose your life to a killer.

Zodiac is a film based on the Robert Graysmith book of the same name name. Graysmith was working as a cartoonist at the time of the first Zodiac killings in the late 1960s. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the role of an obsessive artist and puzzle-lover in the film, which he plays really well against Robert Downey Jr's Paul Avery (a reporter), Inspectors Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

The Newspaper Men

The Detective

The Zodiac

The entirety of this film is about what happens to everyone caught up in the Zodiac's horror. Paul Avery does his best to nail the killer to the wall with his writing but only succeeds in destroying his reputation and descending into narcotic and alcoholic hell. Inspectors Toschi and Armstrong are slowly consumed and then crushed by the public scrutiny and the impossibility of the crime. And then there's Robert Graysmith, the artist who likes solving puzzles. And he's consumed so fully that he convinces himself of a man's guilt.

Which, let's be fair, Arthur Leigh Allen was a horribly creepy dude, and he did commit some heinous crimes.

Even Arthur Leigh Allen gets consumed in the search for the elusive killer. He is dead, yet his name keeps coming up.

Seriously, though, the Zodiac is one of the creepiest stories out there about an uncaptured serial killer because of how much has gone wrong with the investigation, and Fincher's film does an excellent job of keeping the focus away from the violence of the slayings and firmly upon the people and lives that were impacted.

One of the most powerful details about this film is that one of the killing scenes (along the shore of a lake) was directed by the survivor of the attack, who appears in the background of a scene in a movie theater with his wife, moving quietly across the background. It's powerful to see someone who this monster meant to murder, whose life was irrevocably altered in those awful moments, take control of  that moment, revealing it to the world as truthfully as possibly, and then to show himself, defiant and alive in the face of a true beast. So thank you, Mr. Mageau, for showing us your truth and for not being forced to hide.

Go watch this movie.

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FC