Zodiac

The cop and the cartoonist. Zodiac is an origin story of sorts — not just for our titillation with serial killers or true crime, but for the codependent relationship between law enforcement and media. Whether that relationship is symbiotic or parasitic — and how it impacts society’s search for justice and its relationship to the truth — is as much a throughline to this film as is its pulpy whodunit premise. For that reason, with each passing watch, I’m increasingly of the belief it belongs at the very top of the list in 21st century movie making. Its two sides — what’s going on above the surface and beneath it — are simply in perfect concert, in a way I find to be without peer. To wit: it’s impressive enough that two-and-a-half decades of byzantine detail click together with the precision, clarity and watch-like precision of a one-hour procedural. But somehow, between the lines of this gripping investigative thriller — equal parts journalism flick and crime caper — a secret, second movie also unfolds. That movie is one about how criminality and heroism and justice are all, in equal parts, disseminated, defined, and performed as much in a reality mediated by film, TV and the press as in one grounded in truth…That is, in a reality mediated by story. Consider the structure of this thing, the degree to which the dance between law and media is stitched into its bones. There is of course, the early chronicles at the Chronicle; the interregnum with Star Trek-star Melvin Belli, as he tries to springs a trap for the Zodiac on live television; and the asides featuring *The Most Dangerous Game. * But of course, the real key to decoding Zodiac is in its central relationship — between the cartoonist and the cop. At the beginning of the movie, Graysmith and Toschi are both known to play by the rules. The former is a square edged ex-Boy Scout, oozing do goodie energy. The latter is a stickler for proper investigative protocol, regularly correcting colleagues and upholding policing standards. It’s no surprise Toschi chafes at the Dirty Harry character he supposedly inspired; he is unable to stomach a sanitized version of his work — a vision of policing the public gobbles up precisely because it is freed of the shackles — and complexities — of due process. By the end, though, Graysmith, possessed with an investigator’s pursuit, is no longer so bright and uncorrupted. Sunken-eyed, he bangs down Toschi’s door, desperate for the access and intelligence unavailable to him in the private sector. Toschi, meanwhile, ultimately arrives at a realization shortly after letting him in: Graysmith can do what he cannot. He can string the facts together in a way that may not be able to hold up in court, but is no less satisfying as a result. Not to mention no less “true,” whatever that means. Toschi resists this at first. “Just because you can’t prove it doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Graysmith says. Toschi, discomfited by this extralegal idea, retorts: “Easy, Dirty Harry,” comparing Graysmith to that earlier subject of his scorn. But soon, he relents, his sense of judiciousness crumbling under not just the avalanche of circumstantial evidence Graysmith offers, but also mounting frustrations with his own futility and his profession’s constraints. As such, the final words Toschi offers, both in the movie and to Graysmith, are an exhortation: “Finish the book,” he says, as much offering his blessing as he is an investigative baton. And also shrugging something off, with terrific relief: the burden of proof. What makes this climax so perfect is the coda that follows, which subverts the closure we seem to be gathering towards. In the movie’s final scene, Jimmi Simpson’s Mike Mageau tries to identify the Zodiac 25 years after he was shot. Initially, on a scale of one-to-ten, he is only an 8 in terms of his certainty. But mere moments later, as both he and the movie grasp for a sense of finality — and justice — he says. “I am very sure this is the man who shot me,” he says. And we fade to black. What in any other crime movie would provide a nail in the coffin of the case instead feels weirdly ambiguous, up to interpretation. The truth, spun convincingly and compellingly across two-and-a-half hours — by way of a masterclass in directing, writing, editing and performance — is at our fingertips. And yet also somehow just out of grasp. Left to float in the ether. In the realm of myth.