Zodiac (2007): The Human Narratives That Emerge From the Data

What starts out as a collection of data fragments in a murder case builds into a fascinating story of human and philosophical dimensions…

Warning: This article discusses many of the ending scenes

In my previous piece, focused on Mank (2020), I wrote about the idea that a story is essentially a lens on truth, as it joins together distinct pieces of information and events into a connected whole, and inevitably does so through the storyteller’s lens (their particular way of joining the pieces). That film, the latest in David Fincher’s filmography, was more specifically about the truth of people, and about how a storyteller gets to their truth without locking it and owning the keys to it.

Thirteen years back in the director’s work, Zodiac dived in not-too-dissimilar waters, but expanded them in many directions of its own. It remains Fincher’s top work to date.

Zodiac is the story of a time and a place in which Fincher spent much of his childhood — the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 60’s and early 70’s — marked by public alertness to a murderer who used to write cryptic letters to the police and to newspapers. From the opening scene, this enigma of a man is slowly drawn.

It’s natural that any story that features at its center a mysterious serial killer who goes uncaught will always have a special aura reserved for that character. But even if Zodiac doesn’t exactly play against that idea, it’s also clear enough that the film is not in the business of drawing the archetypical picture of a God-like criminal mastermind. The titular character, who may or may not be among the ones we see onscreen at different times, can by turns come across as weak, child-like, in need of help and/or largely insignificant. He may be responsible for a small handful of crimes, but the fact is that he repeatedly claims to be much deadlier than he really is, at one point taking responsibility for as many as 37 victims without there being the least bit of evidence for it. He is a case of enigmatic broken humanity that remains beyond grasp.

But the mystery draws people in. In one sense limited by statements such as “Do you know that more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed?” and in another sense taking on a life of its own, the Zodiac enigma becomes huge in public consciousness.

The film takes us through all the building blocks that went into the making of that public consciousness. It lets us in behind the scenes on all the factual pieces of detail that presented themselves on the table of the police and that of journalists. We see how variations and nuances in sets of details build into an impression, a story about the Zodiac. By the time the film ends, many such impressions and stories have taken shape — for viewers, much in the same way as for the police, for the press, and for the public (as shown in the radio bits, TV segments and newspaper cuts splintered all over the film).

Zodiac doesn’t once spell out that this is precisely what it sets out to achieve: this multiplicity of stories and the interplay between them. But it seems to me that this is not a post-modernist work that throws together a number of random fragments or slices of life, on which the viewers can then project meaning. It’s not that type of work that’s so often stripped of intention. There’s deliberate direction and craft, not only in generating a number of plausible impressions and stories out of this serial-killer-themed material, but in seeing how, when they play out against each other, some of them emerge as the central narratives, the ones that make the most coherent sense for a society grasping in the dark and trying to understand. As figures of that society, Fincher gives us a cartoonist and curious writer in Robert Graysmith, a police detective in David Toschi, and a journalist in Paul Avery.

Zodiac is as interested in pieces of data in a police case as in saying that such pieces are only a foundation for what really matters, only a backdrop for what takes shape when the pieces assemble into something else, something with a life of its own: a set of emergent¹ stories told in broader, human lines — stories about a figure that shrouds itself in mystery and about a society that comes face to face with the unknown.

Did any of the stories render a good picture of things? Of the danger really posed by the Zodiac? Of the man? Maybe to an extent. Maybe not. But the stories shaped the whole saga, they shaped lives, they shaped everything about that particular place and time that Fincher is interested in.

We know that human cognition always understands the world in the form of stories. Even something as data-driven as a to-do list is about getting from a starting place to a desired end and about the road taken to get there. Stories and grand narratives are how we link facts together all day long.

Despite this fact, there is a prevalent school of modern thought that can be highly paralyzing and yet has gained a lot of appeal for the way it purports to correspond with the experience of modern man. Like any view of the world that gains traction, it draws on what are at least partial truths, even though it seems to me to leave out a great number of others. In this view, you might hear that what happens in people’s lives is the result of a confluence of forces acting in ways that are hard to pin down and should be accepted as random, that human experience consists of largely discontinuous scenes and fragments, that reality cannot be seen as anything but a collection of fragments, that the ways in which one could connect such fragments together are innumerable, and therefore, it’s not obvious why any connecting narrative should be considered as particularly valid or useful, beyond the admission that, well, it’s one way of seeing things.

In short, everything that is the anti-thesis of a meaningful story, every ingredient necessary to render the individual truly incapable of moving, is encouraged as being part of the right attitude to have, with an air of superiority that frames it as the more learned and informed way of understanding and thinking about the world.

Robert Graysmith’s story functions as a corrective to that type of thought. Sure, it’s not a story about the assembly of puzzle pieces that flawlessly fit together, about knowing beyond doubt, or about the rigor of deductive reasoning to reach an unshakeable conclusion. No, reality is rarely such a snug fit, and Fincher’s films always go to great lengths to give the devil his due. But importantly, it’s not a story about the senselessness and futility of any such undertaking either. It’s a story about the validity of stories, even imperfect ones, to connect the dots, to understand, to navigate and to move.

Graysmith’s story is valid and so is his story about the Zodiac. It seems obvious to me that any story that emerges after years of murk and painful investigation and holds itself together better than competing alternative ones is a valid and useful one until a better-developed version presents itself.

Graysmith explains at one point: “I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye, and I need to know that it’s him.” In one of the final scenes, he is an anonymous customer in a hardware store and he makes eye contact with the person at the counter: Arthur Leigh Allen. He has a long look at him, no words are spoken, and finally, very calmly, he nods and walks out. He publishes his book. Similarly, the final scene is of Mike Mageau, one of the victims, being shown police mugshots. He identifies Leigh Allen’s photograph, says he’s “pretty sure” it’s him, seems to change his mind to another photo as soon as he says that, but then goes back to Leigh Allen’s. He’s asked how sure he is, from one to ten. “At least an eight,” he says. He looks back at the detective in the eye, but this time, it’s fully an assertion: “I’m very sure that’s the man who shot me.” Every part of his face now shows that he’s reached his firm ground.

Both are entirely valid closures to long stories of pain. And there’s certainly enough to suggest that they could be right. There’s more than enough truth to at the very least support these two characters so they don’t need to look back and so they can move. If new developments were to come along at a later date, that would be another story for another time. As the film ends, neither Graysmith nor Mageau are about to, or should, concern themselves with any of that.

David Toshi of course will not accept the same conclusion they reached, and neither should he: he is a cop. He couldn’t care less about the overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence pointing to Arthur Leigh Allen. There are no fingerprints, no handwriting match. “I’m not asking you as a cop,” Graysmith implores him in a fascinating encounter after all the details have been discussed, all arguments have been given, and there is little more to say. “But I am a cop,” says Toschi. It’s their last scene together.

While Graysmith’s work represents the most solid attempt to give the Zodiac a human face and in doing so fills an important gap that the police would never have filled, Toschi of course cannot pursue a conviction as he protects one the law’s most meaningful tenets, which is the presumption of innocence in the absence of hard evidence. Both men’s narratives are meaningful, useful and valid.

That’s the real highlight of Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s masterwork: the way these two apparently clashing narratives, of police work and of popular culture, are integrated into the same ending and can exist side by side (“Finish your book,” Toschi tells Graysmith as he leaves). They’re not undermined for the mere fact that they’re flawed narratives. The problem with the critique of connecting narratives is that you don’t end up with something closer to truth when you take them down, you don’t end up with no narrative at all either, you end up with the much more numerous, more fragmented, and more feeble narratives that people will inevitably come up with to fill the void in their collective understanding. We get a good glimpse in the film of this craziness that could take over — in a humorous montage of individuals coming to the police with their stories. Here’s one: “Travis and I work here side by side for 10 years. His foot gets crushed in an accident and the killings begin. Coincidence? You’re a cop, man. Do the math.”

In the end, what started out as a factual dissection of the Zodiac case and a real encyclopedia of data bits finishes as anything but. Already, when it becomes apparent that we can link these bits up in not just one but a number of compelling ways, the interest starts to shift to what can emerge from that canvas. Were they two? Was it Arthur Leigh Allen? Was it someone who fed the Leigh-Allen-as-prime-suspect model which was such a perfect fit with all the circumstantial evidence? Could he have played along? Or did he somehow have absolutely nothing to do with it?

Characters reach their own conclusions, viewers might do the same. But by the time the end credits roll, even the Zodiac’s identity has become about more than just a man or a fingerprint or an ID card. As different individuals on one side of the law impersonate the killer over the years, as different people on the other side of the law contribute to the ongoing investigation, all adding their part under the same story heading, the Zodiac saga becomes less about concluding something precise from files of data and more about an emergent¹ grand narrative taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area and co-authored by the people in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Anchored in detail, Fincher’s film makes the leap to be a broader story of humanity.

— Andrew Sidhom

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¹ In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and many psychological phenomena are known to emerge from underlying neurobiological processes (Wikipedia).