There are many candidates opting for “most disturbing element.” For one, the true-life tale of the Zodiac killer is about as creepy as source material gets. Briefly, the story—which the film follows closely to the facts—is about the cryptic serial killer who stalked northern California in the ‘60s and ‘70s, toying with investigators and making himself a media spectacle by sending mysterious notes and code ciphers to San Francisco newspapers. The legend of the Zodiac—who claimed five “canonical” victims, but is suspected in a few others—is made all the more haunting by the fact that the case remains unsolved.
Though the Zodiac killer is never unmasked in the film, we do see him at work—and these scenes are another really disturbing element of Zodiac. Fincher is known for violence, and he spares us little in showing each of the victims’ terrifying encounters with the Zodiac. There are scenes of teenage kids in a car on lover’s lane, a cabbie chauffeuring an ominously silent figure in the back seat, a woman on a dark, deserted highway who makes the misguided choice of hitching a ride with an unknown man after her car breaks down … This is pure horror movie fodder, and yet it is all true to the Zodiac events. One murder scene in particular I found quite unsettling, for many reasons (it takes place in broad daylight, for one thing). Fincher certainly knows how to stretch already tense situations, and in about five or six scenes in this film, he stretches them almost to the breaking point.
All of that creepy stuff aside, the thing that most disturbed me in this film was not the Zodiac himself, but what his persona represented as a cultural artifact—for the media, for the investigators, for the everyday citizen.
More than just a killer, Zodiac was a superstar. There are killers—even serial killers—in action every day, across the world. But there are not killers like Zodiac, who shape their own mystique and celebrity to the point that books and major Hollywood films are being made about the havoc they wrought. One could even argue that an entire genre of horror and thriller films was created because of the Zodiac: methodical psychopaths who prey on teenagers, not because of revenge or sexual deviancy, but just for the sake of being a killer. Terrifying stuff, but it makes for a good movie.
And this blurriness between real life and entertainment is, for me, what is most frightening about the Zodiac.
It is very unnerving to watch Zodiac—which is largely a psychological detective story about cops and journalists trying to put together the pieces of the case—and feel so engaged, so involved, so entertained. Why is real life crime-solving such an entertaining diversion?
In the film, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Robert Graysmith, is a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where the Zodiac’s coded messages are sent to run as front page stories. Graysmith, though not directly affected by the Zodiac case (at least not at first), takes an immediate interest, adopting Zodiac-sleuthing as a hobby of sorts (he loves “solving puzzles”) that gradually becomes an obsession. For Graysmith, solving the Zodiac is the ultimate puzzle—an amazingly intriguing pastime. At times, Graysmith’s thrill with the case feels more creepy than the case itself.
Essentially, Graysmith is a fanboy. He is nerdy, lonely and desperate to insert himself into a larger drama. He reminds me of a much-less-creepy version of John Mark Karr, that weird guy who was so obsessed with the JonBenet Ramsey case that he found a way to insert himself into the legend of it—by confessing to the crime last summer. Graysmith is not that malevolent, but his intentions feel eerily similar. He wants to get involved in the Zodiac case to the extent that he becomes a part of it, not just an expert on it.
Oddly, this film, though its subject matter is pretty dated (Fincher makes a point to emphasize retrograde technology like fax machines being brand new and phone-call tracing taking at least 15 minutes) represents a concept in media and culture that is very, very now. It is the concept that Time and numerous other magazines highlighted as the defining idea of 2006: the user as producer. This idea—that users are becoming the producers of culture and content, while at the same time consuming it and being entertained by the act of producing—is more or less what Zodiac is about.
In some ways, this DIY, bottom-up practice has massive potential. In Zodiac, most of the major breakthroughs in the case come about from citizens who, like Graysmith, have seen the media coverage of the Zodiac killings, become engaged and put on their “citizen journalist” caps. One particularly funny example of this occurs when the initial coded message comes in to authorities, is passed on to the FBI, and then to the CIA, and still no “expert” code-breaker can decipher it. Only when the code is printed in the papers—and Donald and Bettye Harde of Salinas, Cal., go to work at the kitchen table as they would with the daily crossword puzzle—is the cryptogram solved. Similarly, Graysmith, cartoonist-turned amateur detective, provides more valuable links to the case than any of the professionals who get paid to investigate.
In this sense, “user-generated content” is a valuable resource. If there are people out there who glean entertainment value from doing work that cops, experts, and other bureaucrats are being paid to do, why not give them a shot? There is a lot of value in “collective intelligence,” after all.
The problem, at least for me, is that all of this begins to work to the psychopathic, Zodiac-turned-media-star-wannabe’s advantage. Think about it: when complex, “Hollywood-esque” crimes begin to become a valuable cultural commodity that “users/viewers” crave for personal intrigue or to fulfill some layman’s detective fantasy, then the media will treat such crimes as valuable stories that deserve unlimited coverage. That’s why cable news loves a good kidnapping story, or anything that involves a ransom note or puzzle that invites user interaction. That’s why the Anthrax notes, the Unabomber, the BTK killer, were all ratings gangbusters.
Getting media attention is no longer a bonus or side effect of being a serial killer. Now it is the motivation for some to kill in the first place. The “Beltway snipers” from a couple years ago created a Zodiac-style web of death and mystique, arguably not because they held ill will toward their victims, but because they wanted to dominate headlines. It is the notion terrorists subsist on—killing for media attention that will make them even more powerful and culturally significant.
More than being a stylish and well-made thriller about an intriguing historical episode, Zodiac is a commentary on what happens when media serves more of an entertaining—rather than informative—function; when users are so isolated from larger purpose and drama that they’ll do anything to insert themselves into some grand, bloody, mythical affair.
