"Zodiac"-- True Story, Scary Story and a Pointer to Evil

The new movie Zodiac had me loosing sleep the other night. There are scenes in the movie that are very real and haunting-- for days and nights after you see them. I was awake staring at my bedroom door for at least a half an hour at about 3 am, and looking behind me as I walked around for days after. It is not a normal thriller movie--I do not like horrors-- it is based on the true story of a serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco area for decades, beginning in the mid-Seventies.

There are a couple problems about the film and I will mention them to start. The first problem with the film is its notorious ending: the real-life killer was never captured. Thus one leaves wanting resolution--but of course this points to the reality. The critics are right as well: it is too long. It is almost three hours and really doesn't need to be.

Those things being said the film is amazing. Brilliantly acting, written and directed-- it is a good old fashion thriller/detective drama. It is the best film I have seen this year. It is so real and haunting-- and accomplishes what it sets out to: to tell the story of Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle who kept pursuing the Zodiac killer even though the police gave up on it. He commits himself to the task at the cost of everything he holds dear.

The movie subtly highlights what one feels while watching it: that real criminal cases move slowly, are tedious, and do not often end "happily", contrasted with such stories as told on film, and within the media. In Zodiac, a screening of 1971’s Dirty Harry provides rueful commentary on the action. While this “real-life” movie about Zodiac submits that only a furious, out-of-bounds cop can catch a psychokiller, Zodiac shows that the cops are repeatedly hampered by rules, demands for warrants or for multi-jurisdictional sanctions.

One leaves the movie wondering: what is wrong with people? Really, that sounds like a kind of cliche question but what is wrong? The depth of human depravity and evil is profound. One of the basic questions of being human is to feel this sense and ask what is wrong with the world? Something feels wrong. We live in a broken world, with people who have been effected by sin and evil in many different ways and on different scales. I wonder if many people have thought of comitting such attrocities at some point and asked: Could I get away with it? Maybe not all of us, but maybe on a smaller scale-- something else that we would never dream about sharing, something in the darkness of our soul that we have thought up that speaks to our own evil-- a darkness that we are so uncomfortable with that we shutter at the thought of thinking it again. Why have we thought those things before? Because there is a disconnect between us and the Holy One who made us-- and we know what it means to feel right but that has been disconnected. This disconnect causes us to think and act wrongly against ourselves, God and our neighbor. We are, if left to ourselves, truly "fallen."

But the gospel is the great answer to that despair-- that through the death and resurrection of Jesus that "discarded image", as CS Lewis called it, can be restored, by a response of trust and faith in that redemptive work, and moves us forward to a restoration that will fully be seen and experienced in God's new creation (Revelation 21-22), where every wrong will be righted, even the wrongs done to the poor victims of the Zodiac. May God grant them mercy-- for we must not forget they are not characters in a movie, but people, victims, who died horrific deaths, who experienced first hand the evil that Christ came to defeat.