"Zodiac": Harry Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

By Lucia Bozzola, Mar 5, 2007
Ah, serial killers. Such a cinematic subject. All that murdering, all that investigating. You have clear heroes, villains, conflicts, and, when the plot starts to lag, you can always throw in another bloody homicide tableau. As an added bonus, real life provides some mighty tasty source material if you can’t think of another creative way to link killings to the Bible or body part fetishes or family woes on your own. Real life also often provides a story complete with a Hollywood ending. Charles Manson, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos: all caught and convicted. The End. But what if you have a camera-ready killer who never gets caught?

David Fincher has one answer: you make a character study about the men who try for two decades to nail the killer. Don Siegel and writers Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, and Dean Riesner had another: you make a wish-fulfilling fiction about a rogue cop who won’t stop until he kills the killer in 1971. Then again, considering that Dirty Harry first came into being during the Zodiac murder spree, and Zodiac makes its debut more than three decades after the fact, it’s easier to forgive the former’s flight of ideologically questionable fantasy. If you want to sell tickets, don’t send the audience home certain that they’re next on the murderer’s list and there’s no hope he’ll ever be stopped. Now? With the prime suspect dead and the case long dormant, why not go back to just the facts, ma’am. It’s the past. It’s over. Fincher and his gang, however, still have a bone to pick with Dirty Harry’s anti-Establishment fascist hero Harry Callahan.

Some critics have noted that the dialogue-heavy, stylistically dialed-down Zodiac is a “repudiation” of Fincher’s career-making murder porn Se7en. Don’t get me wrong. I liked Se7en, and not just because Gwyneth Paltrow’s head ended up in a box. Nevertheless, the main attraction was the imaginatively grotesque murders devised by Kevin Spacey’s even more grotesque Bible-thumper in a fabulously dank and shadowy Any City. In Zodiac, all of the murders happen early and horribly, but not quite as stylishly. Yes, we get up close and personal with Zodiac’s knife work on the couple by Lake Berryessa, but that’s not the reason that scene haunts my dreams. It’s more the way Zodiac simply appears in broadest sunny daylight, and easily could be just another nature lover until he puts on his deceptively silly ninja disguise. And yes, Fincher does make one of his signature virtuoso gestures with the overhead shots following the doomed cab through the streets of San Francisco, but again, he doesn’t linger as much over the gore. After these deaths, though, the film is two hours of conversation and neurotic obsession by a quartet of handsome distressed men. No wonder I loved it.

Less noticed, however, is how those two hours of dialogue and obsession become a repudiation of Zodiac’s first cinematic incarnation via the thinly disguised killer Scorpio in Dirty Harry. It isn’t just the fictional “happy” ending that comes under fire, either. It’s also the image of violent male potency embodied by Clint Eastwood’s iconic Callahan. Now, Callahan does fall prey to the same soul-draining obsessiveness that seeps into Zodiac’s investigators. There’s a world of attitudinal difference between the jaunty delivery of his “Do you feel lucky” speech to a downed bank robber early on, and the way he angrily spits out the final “Well, do you, punk?” through clenched teeth at the denouement. But then he gets to blow away Scorpio because he had indeed fired only five shots prior with his .44 Magnum revolver. Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edward’s police detectives Toschi and Armstrong, though, never get that satisfaction in Zodiac. Heck, they don’t even get to pull their guns. We learn that Toschi’s gun holster style inspired another icon of late 60s manhood Steve McQueen to wear his the same way in Bullitt, but we never see him actually use it. The only non-Zodiac man we do see fire a gun? Robert Downey Jr.’s fey, alcoholic crime reporter Paul Avery. At a firing range. Badly. Thus endeth the crime-solving efficacy of the most powerful handgun in the world.

This isn’t to say that Zodiac is about how Toschi and Armstrong are hapless cops. They are effective in that they do (as far as anyone knows) identify and track down Zodiac. They even get to sit in a room with him and manfully fix him with that “we’re on to you” stare that’s repeated every week on the Law & Orders and CSIs. Yet they never bring him down because of, yep, Callahan’s biggest pet peeve: bureaucracy. Evidence gets lost in the low-tech shuffle. Other jurisdictions want to protect their turfs. Still, Fincher and company make a point to show that even with those impediments, Toschi still won’t be wild about Harry. For when Dirty Harry opens in San Francisco shortly after Toschi and Armstrong learn they can’t arrest their man, Toschi happens to see it the same night as Avery’s fellow Zodiac-fixated colleague, Jake Gyllenhaal’s doe-eyed Robert Graysmith. When Graysmith tells Toschi how it ends, Toschi scoffs in disgust, “So much for due process.” Toschi may not be all that broken up about Zodiac’s rights, but he knows better than to become a vigilante.

Still, the movie doesn’t end there. It could have, and some bladder-challenged people with the attention spans of gnats probably think it should have. But that would miss the point that starts percolating beneath the surface with the casual revelation that it’s a married couple of professors who initially crack the Zodiac’s cipher. It comes up again when Avery can’t quite believe that shy cartoonist Graysmith’s accurate insights into the case arise from his taste for library books and puzzles. It hovers around Avery’s ability to root out salient facts that the police miss. And it comes to full fruition in the last third of the film when Graysmith takes Avery’s dismissive comments to heart and decides to research the case himself. Yes. When cops can’t do the job, then it’s best to let the bookish, non-macho types take over—especially when the target believes he’s smarter than any cop. Nerds of the world, unite! Toschi is rogue enough to do a Deep Throat and point Graysmith in the right direction (the vague resemblance of the San Francisco Chronicle’s cinematic newsroom to the Washington Post’s in All the President’s Men: discuss) because he knows that Graysmith can do things he can’t.

His investigation doesn’t turn Graysmith into a Callahan, either. Granted, no one will ever mistake Gyllenhaal for a young Eastwood (whom we never see in Zodiac), but as Graysmith, he remains resolutely stooped, reserved, and prone to fits of fear and anguish. Reading is his weapon of choice. Paperwork and neurotic dedication get him farther than any guns or knives could. And in case we didn’t notice that he’s still a dweeb, Fincher throws in a scary red herring visit to an ominous…repertory film projectionist (oh, the chills) that ends with Graysmith fleeing out of a shadowy basement rather than trying to kick some ass with a movie canister. His gut impulse is flight, not fight. It’s easy to see why. He has a powerful brain. Body? Not so much.

Some have complained that Zodiac ends with a diffused whimper instead of a bang. It seems like it could end with a bang when yet another police detective finally gets the only Zodiac survivor who saw the killer’s face to pick that face out of a line-up in 1991. But then it’s cut to end titles. Oh, boo. Yet, when said suspect drops dead of a heart attack before he can be arrested, how else is the movie supposed to end? Toschi bursts into the funeral home with guns blazing to arrest the corpse? Come on. Besides, it’s already become crystal clear that such action is not what this movie is about, nor what this movie favors. In this vein, the real end is the second-to-last scene. Having done his homework to completion, being the good Eagle Scout puzzle-solver he is, Graysmith gets to do what Toschi and Armstrong had done a decade earlier. He gets to fix the prime suspect with that “I’m on to you” stare when he tracks him to his job at a hardware store. That stare may not be a .44 Magnum. But—unlike the stares from Toschi and Armstrong—it is enough to make the intellectually arrogant killer quake on the inside. He knows that the unassuming brainiac looking him in the eye has beaten him at his game. And he no longer feels that lucky.