Unsolved
Mystery.
Misunderstood
upon its 2007 release, ‘Zodiac’ now stands as one of the great films of the
century. A look back on this postmodern, hyper-realistic, obsessive mystery
film about cops, a famous killer, newspapers, and the puzzle that stumped a
city.
More than any
American movie of the past decade, Zodiac accepts and embraces irresolvability,
which may be why it’s so hypnotically rewatchable. If it’s a cosmic drama, it’s
one that works on macro and micro levels. Its depiction of the hunt for the
most notorious and mysterious serial killer of the 20th century is at once
suggestive of larger cultural shifts while also being detailed down to the
inch. Reviewing the film for the Village Voice in 2007, Nathan Lee perceptively
called it an "orgy of empiricism," noting that for the first time,
Fincher’s micro-managerial directorial style was being applied to historical
material. The same fanaticism that held up production on Alien 3 and pushed
Fight Club over budget was now angled as a guarantor of authenticity.
Fincher is a
scrupulous blue-printer with a reputation for control freakery. What Zodiac
represented was an attempt to leverage those skills in the service of
ambiguity — to make a work more open to interpretation than its predecessors.
In Se7en, Brad Pitt finds out whose head is in the box; in Fight Club, Edward
Norton finds out who’s really in his head (spoiler: it’s Brad Pitt). In those
films, Fincher orchestrated sharp, jagged storytelling twists that tore their
narrative universes apart. In Zodiac, the fabric of reality is stretched so
tight over the action that it threatens to break at any moment. Except that it
doesn’t. The twist is that there isn’t one.
