Why Zodiac remains a relevant film even in today’s times
David Fincher, the only director who makes me want to pick up the book after watching his movie adaptations when generally it's the other way around.
The film I'm going to talk about is Fincher's Zodiac, which I think no one talks much about. Not like his other films. I happened to catch Zodiac midway while it was playing on HBO, the same way I found out about Fight Club. But that's a whole another story. This was maybe in 2011, 2012 when OTTs didn't exist and televisions didn't have size zero figures. I was flipping channels on my old CRT and spotted Robert Downey Jr. playing a character in a film with a weird title. The movie chronicles the serial killer, only known as the 'Zodiac' who was active in the 60s and 70s in USA, mainly in San Francisco and the nearby counties.
"Zodiac" created a kind of obsession in me back then, I had to rely on the TV to be on the lookout for its next telecast. It was a movie like none other I had previously watched. The idea that a person with no background in police or detective work gets into investigating an already complicated case got me hooked. It wasn't the crimes that drew me to the story but the whole investigation process. The efforts taken by the detectives, the toll it took on their personal lives, the taunting letters and ciphers sent by the killer to the newspapers over the years, the evolving nature of the investigative process as decades went by. From relying on fingerprints & handwriting experts then graduating to DNA research.
The movie starts and ends with the same track "Hurdy Gurdy Man", similar to Fincher's other film Gone Girl, where the opening and closing track is the same, thus engulfing you into the world of the characters. In this case, in the world of Zodiac.
The conversations that take place between the characters is what grips you to the story till the end. Nothing political or philosophical, just plain police procedural talk or casual mundane conversations. The tiniest details like the way David Toschi, the lead detective played by Mark Ruffalo eats his sandwiches or the way Arthur Leigh Allen gives random confusing details or the scene of Bob Vaughn's basement that filled me with dread.
Robert Graysmith, the author of the book took great efforts to meticulously detail the story, repeating the whole process of investigation years after police had filed the case as unsolvable. Jake Gyllenhaal portrayed as the author Graysmith, a person who followed the chronology of the crimes committed from county to county, the sheer drive he showcased, to just solve the damn thing and get the answer might be the starting point for me getting into crime books. I could feel his quest, like an unquenching thirst.
The most memorable scene from the film is the penultimate one when Graysmith visits the store where Arthur, the prime suspect works. Arthur casually asks him if he can help him with anything and all Graysmith can say is "No". The silence that stretches on between the two and the change of features on Arthur's face from casual to realisation to threatening in few seconds. Finally Graysmith's burning question that "I need to stand there. I need to look him in the eye & I need to know that it's him" is somewhat answered, atleast for his own sake. As the credits rolled with info about the actual case with Hurdy Gurdy Man playing along I was in. I was so in. I bought the book despite it being required to be shipped from overseas and being overpriced for a paperback. The book reads much more like the entire case files from all the counties, filling upto 800 pages, but it was James Vanderbilt, the screenplay writer who condensed it to nearly a 3 hour screenplay, Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal were instructed to speed up their dialogue delivery coz of the amount of material and the length of the script. Fincher delivered this humongous story in an impactful way. "Zodiac" remains the finest, yet an underrated work of Fincher's.
Needless to say, I've seen that movie countless of times since then. Hurdy Gurdy Man still sits in my playlist and the book Zodiac sits on my bookshelf.
The case is still open and Zodiac might as well be alive and free unlike the Golden State Killer.
