How an obsession can bring you misery

One of my all time favorite movies is a movie called Zodiac (2007) by David Fincher, who also directed the movies like Seven, Fight Club and the show Mindhunter. After watching Zodiac 9 times, and still being at the edge of my seat for the 9TH TIME, I felt obligated to write about it.

The movie introduces us to the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized Northern California from the years 1968 to 1978. The movie starts off on July 4th, 1969 where the Zodiac killer claims his 3rd and 4th victim, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau. Darlene would later die on the way to the hospital, while Mageau would become the only victim to survive an attack and to see the Zodiac without his mask (which becomes important later in the movie).

Almost 45 minutes into the movie, the killings stop, and we are now left with the real plot of the movie: Robert Graysmith’s obsession that eventually declines into madness and how he is able to grab the attention of an audience and lead them down the same path as him.

Robert Graysmith (played by the wonderful Jake Gyllenhaal) is a political cartoonist who works at the San Francisco Chronicle, around the same time the first Zodiac letter is sent. After his first interest in the case, Graysmith befriends Paul Avery (played by the amazing Robert Downey Jr. as seen in the first picture) who was the lead reporter on the Zodiac Killer.

The first thing that leads Graysmith and the audience down a rabbit hole is the passage of time in the movie. Throughout the movie time changes a significant amount, almost every other scene through simple title cards. As time goes by, characters in the movie start to move on and forget about the case as chances of solving it becomes slimmer, but since Graysmith obsession has grown with every second that is passed he becomes the one and only character determined to solve the case, and since the audience can’t feel the time change, they become more attached to Graysmith and believe he is the only one that can give them the conclusion to the story.

Which brings me to my next point, another reason why David Fincher is able to attach the audience to Graysmith’s obsession is that the audience is able to feel Graysmith frustation when he hits a dead end in the case. They are able to feel his anger due to the lack of care coming from Avery (who gave up on the case) and Inspector Dave Toschi (played by the very talented Mark Ruffalo as shown in the second and third picture), who was the lead and only remaining detective on the case. Graysmith gets desperate and starts to lose hope on what is the truth and wants it all to be over with. When he visits Darlene’s sister, Linda in prison (fourth picture), Graysmith loses his mind when he shares his theory of who was the man that killed Linda’s sister and she repeatedly denies, and tells him his theory is not true.

What brings me to my last conclusion, comes from a specific line in the movie wherein Graysmith’s wife confronts him about his obsession, he says : “ I... I need to know who he is. I... I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye and I need to know that it's him.” The third point is that Graysmith is the only one who can provide the resolution the audience needs. Although Graysmith believes that he has solved the case, he can’t know for sure. He is never able to give the audience that satisfaction that they need, his obsession is never fully satisfied and neither him nor the audience ever witnesses an arrest, he might be able to assume what actually happened, but he’ll never know for sure.

Graysmith nor the audience is ever able to get the satisfaction of witnessing an arrest because years after Graysmith comes to the conclusion that Arthur Leigh Allen is the Zodiac Killer, Michael Mageau is shown a line up of several men and is asked to point out who (if anyone) he thinks shot him, and after 23 years, Mageau picks out Leigh’s picture from the pile and claims it was Leigh who shot him and Darlene. Soon after Mageau picks his picture, the authorities scheduled a meeting to discuss charging Leigh with the murders, but unfortunately Leigh suffered a heart attack before the meeting took place, so he was never charged with it.

The movie makes the audience think that the plot of the it is about a serial killer’s obsession and how different he is from the everyday person. But in the end, the film is really about a person who just couldn’t let something go. Graysmith successfully destroyed the lives of everyone around him while dragging the audience into his obsessive world. And at the end of the movie, as shown in the fifth and sixth pictures, we see two people (Graysmith and Leigh), both able to do whatever it takes to satisfy their obsession, just to get the conclusion they’ve been wanting so badly, to then realize that they are not that different from each other.