David Fincher’s “Zodiac” seems like a good followup to “CWO” for a couple of reasons. First, Fincher seems to be quite influenced by Kubrick’s obsessively meticulous methods. Second, the Zodiac killer, or killers (the film strongly suggests it may have been the work of two men) seemed to view what they were doing as some kind of game (as in the book and movie “The Most Dangerous Game”). It’s as if they never grew out of the mindset of Alex in the first act of “CWO” but as adults they are not content to merely kill and maim, they concoct their violent acts as public provocations designed to whip up a grotesque media opera of lurid curiosity, fear and paranoia.
The importance of the theory that two men and not a lone serial killer did these crimes cannot be overstated, for it suggests a pathology that needs to share the created spectacle with another in the know, turning individual killings into a perceived threat to the entire community. That feeling that the whole community—a major city—is under threat is what is to be shared and savored. It’s as if the Zodiac killers were taking revenge against American society for consigning them to ordinariness. That’s not a pathology that the psycho-sexually oriented forensic psychologists of that time were were likely consider, nor were the media likely to deviate from the comfortably inscrutable story of the lone psycho, which fits much more neatly into the grooves of various American myths of rebellious individualism and outlawry. Perhaps now this kind of pathology might bubble up in comparative youth, in, say, the recent mass shootings perpetrated by frustrated and angry young men. Most of those men were or are mentally ill, however, and it is by no means clear that the Zodiac, lone wolf or duo, though undoubtably a deviant or deviants, could be called such. He was, or they were, content to remain unknown, to relish the stupendous private joke whose butt was the whole of the public realm. The Zodiac killings were utterly unique to their time.
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