Consistency


I'll be damned if I'll let a three-hour David Fincher movie keep me from my appointed daily rounds with this blog. Noel and I just got back from Zodiac, and while it's not as satisfying or as virtuoso as his most famous work, it's still a fascinating little movie. And it does feel little, despite its length -- a kind of immersion in the serial killer procedural genre that attempts to cannibalize it from the inside out. All the tropes of the genre are there -- the obsessed guy who won't let it go, the wife who leaves him, the detective who gets in trouble on the job because of the case, the killer boasting of his crime to the newspapers and calling the investigators at home freaking out their wives, the blind alleys and fruitless leads and final vindication ... except none of it pays off. Who knows if Jake Gyllenhall was vindicated in the end? Some things still don't fit, like the actual physical evidence. There's no reunion with the wife. What's with the creepy theater organist, and so forth. It's a movie about codebreaking, but there are leftover letters at the end of the code, stuff that isn't accounted for, like junk DNA. It's a movie about time passing and people changing and memories fading, but Gyllenhall drives the same orange Rabbit and wears the same blue jacket almost from beginning to end. (Well, the Rabbit doesn't appear until the seventies, but it does persist into the eighties, oddly enough.)

I think this is a movie that is trying to break the serial killer genre, revealing how messy and even petty all its standard ritual elements are. It's the film equivalent of historical-critical scholarship of the Bible -- taking the horrific, awe-inspiring mystery of the preternaturally brilliant and evil murderer that serial-killer procedurals have mined for years, including Fincher's own Se7en, and deconstructing it all into the sloppiness of a killer who kept leaving people alive, and clues that no one can figure out if they're real or planted, and busted patterns that might be intentional or might be mistakes in the boundary line drawn around the patterned incidents. Nobody knows, and despite the abundance of evidence, there's no answer except a book-length conspiracy theory by an amateur investigator. The movie doesn't hold up any of that for ridicule -- but the very fact that this outwardly genre-typical film manages to fail to execute all the steps of the dance seems to indicate that Fincher is making the anti-serial-killer serial-killer film, his own attempt at revisionism perpetrated through the medium of the real, inconvenient facts.

Posted: Sat - March 10, 2007 at 10:48 PM         |

©