When I first heard that David Fincher was making an expensive Hollywood movie about the Zodiac killer, I had my brilliant column all planned out. "Hollywood glorifies serial killers yet again! Casting call! Murder in a stylish, clever, and morbidly fascinating way and you too can have your very own feature film in thirty years or so!"
But then last week I saw the damn thing, and it wasn't half bad. From what I know about the case, they didn't glorify it, beyond the first, obvious glorification ("the medium is the message," you know). I calmed down-somewhat.
The Zodiac was a serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area between 1969 and 1974, attacking at least seven victims for sure, and claiming over 37.
He would approach individuals or couples in isolated areas and shoot or stab them. After the attacks, he would write letters taunting investigators and reveling in media attention.
He created a logo for himself, and included ciphers in his letters, demanding they be given front-page coverage and daring the public to crack his codes.
He also gave himself his name in the opening line of a letter from Aug. 4, 1969: "This is the Zodiac speaking..."
The letters petered out in 1974, then resurfaced in 1978 with a communique widely believed to be a hoax, but which the film treats as authentic. He fell completely silent after 1978.
If he committed further murders, the public never knew about them.
Then in 1987, Robert Graysmith revived public interest in the case with the publication of his sensational bestseller, "Zodiac". Graysmith had been an editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle during the Zodiac scare and had become obsessed with the case, pursuing it privately long after the public lost interest.
The film is based upon his book, and follows the same conclusion he does: the murderer was a pedophile and former schoolteacher named Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992. You'll meet him about eighty minutes in.
By all accounts, director Fincher is a careful guy who wanted to soberly portray the simple brutality of murder - to "remove all the violins," as he put it. And from stem to stern, the film is a meticulous period piece, capturing a moody, dark San Francisco reeling with the notion of serial killing before the very idea even existed.
I have no doubt that Fincher has respect for the victims, a goal of verisimilitude, and a desire for factual accuracy, but something about the cinematic format is a just a bad idea here.
Arthur Leigh Allen has been long accused of being the Zodiac on circumstantial evidence, albeit a huge honking fat stack of it, but they never once got him on anything concrete, and cinema naturally lays out a very multifaceted thing (the historical truth) as one simplified visual fact.
Probable and definite hoaxes, questionable witness testimony, the differing opinions of a range of investigators-many interesting little points of contention underlying the narrative are glossed over, or completely hidden from view. (My advice? Go read about it.)
The problem is, it's sure fun to play along; the whole mystery is fascinating, particularly the Graysmith-Fincher version, and it's amazing to think that the Zodiac, who attacked maybe seven people for sure, could achieve such a cult status through his shrewd media manipulation while hundreds of other murders in San Francisco went unsolved without getting anything close to this kind of attention.
The worst part is that the Zodiac killer would thoroughly enjoy watching himself be canonized. Luckily, the filmmakers are aware of the irony.
When the police receive the (allegedly genuine) 1978 letter, they read it out loud: "I am waiting for a good movie about me. Who will play me?"
And unless you buy the Arthur Leigh Allen theory, then who knows maybe on Friday the man formerly known as the Zodiac will be in a movie theater somewhere, laughing up his sleeve and feeling a wonderful sense of completion.
Reach the reporter at: matthew.neff@asu.edu.
