Seven Red

When I was very young, maybe 10 or 11, I took Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter out of the local branch of the New York City Public Library. My mother, who accompanied us to the library on Union Street once a week or so, raised an eyebrow, but I think she was glad that my interests had turned to grown up books, and so she let it go. That book scared the crap out of me. I read it deep into the night – mostly because I couldn’t sleep, given that the Manson family was probably creepy crawling our Queens apartment, ready to strike with the knives and strange rantings. Since then, I’ve had one of the typical white male American fascination with serial killers and law-breakers; it competes with the white male fascination with military history, a bizarre duo that fills up so much floor space in your average bookstore that you cannot avoid it. The TV murder show and military history industry is only an intensification of the phenomenon. There is certainly a study to be done of these twin obsessions: the economics and psychology of these gendered reading practices. (Maybe a mix between Klaus Theweleit’s excellent Male Fantasies and Penley’s work on Trek fandom.)

In any case, this fascination, born in Mansonia, led me some time during my teenage years to the Zodiac killer, who stalked the Bay Area in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s (that’s how these people talk: “stalked the Bay Area”). The Zodiac case, of course, is particularly famous because nobody was ever caught for those killings. Like all unsolved crimes (think Jack the Ripper), it has spawned a massive community of theorizers, who obsess about the case and know details down to the fine grain. These people are amateur researchers, experts without credentials, and they are legion on the Internet. So, from time to time I would revisit their theories, usually as a guilty pleasure. I’ve also read Robert Graysmith’s books on the case, Graysmith being the most successful of the Zodiac chroniclers, and therefore generally despised as a patsy and sell-out by the theorizers. That’s the way these things go. But my experience with the case made the release of David Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac very exciting to me, above and beyond the inclusion of my man-crush Mark Ruffalo in the film.

Fincher’s film has – appropriately, I think – garnered much critical praise, and it has appeared on many of the “2007′s Best Films” lists as your “Hollywood Sleeper.” You go in expecting a film about the Zodiac case, and for the most part you get that, but Zodiac is also, weirdly and movingly, about writing itself. The film is less about the Zodiac murders than it is about the texts that accumulated around the murders, including the various writings of the Zodiac killer himself, but mostly the writing of Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s often listed as a film about obsession (Graysmith’s obsession with the case, which ends up wrecking his marriage and generally taking over his life). But the obsession is a writing obsession: the big research project, the single-minded focus on the minutiae of research. The murders, and even the murderer, become less important than the form of attraction to the event (perhaps even fidelity, in Badiou’s sense). What’s ultimately disturbing about it, for me, is that the image of Graysmith – his life consumed by the obsession – is in some sense our model of the ideal researcher, what many of us would like our students to be when they write, or what we would like to be when we write, at least as an ideal case. And it’s a terrifying spectacle – more dreadful, the film seems to argue, than the murders themselves.

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