Best Films of 2007 #4: Zodiac

Like No Country for Old Men, David Fincher's latest is much more about the experience of watching the film than about anything that the movie ostensibly markets itself as. It's certainly not a serial killer film, for instance. While many critics have pointed out that this is a dramatic turn away from his first great movie, Se7en, they rarely note that Zodiac is its antithesis for any other reason than generic expectations alone (the latter film is not a horror film, they posit, and I personally am not really convinced that the former is either). In any case, Se7en concerns the actions of a killer whose murders are ciphers from God, all existential subtext circulated in the characters' philosophical conversations about what the murders mean; it's something of a fable on the order of Camus's Myth of Sisyphus, as the detectives realize the futility of saving a world that has become a kind of Hades. Zodiac, on the other hand, is entirely about the ways in which the murders are objects to be examined not for their content but for their context, a remove from the earlier film which allows the detectives and reporters on this case to realize that the killer's ciphers are not important for their meaning so much as they are important for how they fuck with the entire nation's infrastructure.

The film as a whole embodies this kind of investigative approach more reminiscent of social sciences than it is of literary criticism (note the contrasting motifs of the two films between the library and the movie theatre, between the location as a space in which knowledge is kept and the location as a space in which people live and act upon each other). The characters never contemplate the meaning of the crimes, but rather treat the entire affair as a series of actions and events with particular details to be used as evidence in relation to the larger social context from which they emerged. The killer works so well as a metaphor here because he has no referent, and, as a result, the existential dread is shifted from iconography and symbolism to the mundane chatter of the everyday that is used to maintain the illusion that our social networks cannot be breached as easily as the Zodiac killer demonstrates. In other words, the film has shifted from the idea of cinema as an object in which meaning is represented to us and toward the philosophy of cinema as a series of moments and spaces which present themselves baldly to a viewer. That it makes this clear through its own obsessive focus on period detail and its painstaking attempt to make everything relative to how people experience the sights and sounds of that period (for instance, a different actor portrays the Zodiac at different moments to match the descriptions offered by witnesses) makes this film an incredibly sophisticated statement about the cinematic experience.

Best Films of 2007 #8: 28 Weeks Later

Danny Boyle's 28 days later... was a very good film: a genre exercise that made a pastiche of conventions in zombie films, allowing that pastiche to resonate in a larger social message. But the message itself felt more like a paraphrase of something much more complex: its message about the different kinds of violence we're capable of enacting under certain circumstances buried under the weight of its own attempt to universalize the message rather than to ground it in contemporary matters. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, on the other hand, is a sweeping epic catalogue of the horrors that have plagued American society (strange, considering the London setting) in the past half a decade or so, a pastiche which uses our recent history as an analogue to those very same zombie movie cliches. The difference registers in the titles even: the former attempting a kind of narrative ellipses, a mere moment in an unending stream of atrocity; the latter title, shown on screen during a series of military reports, feeling more like a bureaucratic report of our current state of affairs; the former is all horror story punchline while the latter hearkens back to Congressional reports on terror which comment on what led us to where we are now. Boyle's film may be better in the long run, but Fresnadillo's is very much of this moment, and the experience of watching it is positively electrifying as a result.

It's more than a cliche to mention that horror films are the best barometer of our social fears (especially after breakthrough work on the genre by scholars such as Robin Wood and Carol Clover, and even a popular writer like Stephen King). But one can find an obvious successor to Romero's three great Dead films (the less said about Land of the Dead, the better) in Fresnadillo's epic, often using direct references to those films as a signal for the ways in which our social anxieties have evolved in the past forty years. Compare the casting of a black helicoptor pilot in this and in Dawn of the Dead, and you see in each film an angry statement about the way minorities are sent to die for our country in the military, but Fresnadillo's Hurricane Katrina tableaux of that pilot looking at a rooftop in the disaster zone with a plea for recognition of the life within adds a whole new contemporary resonance to that anger about race in America. The film says a lot with small moments like that one, brief images that speak volumes about our growing security state's failure to protect its citizens when protection really matters, and it always feels like it organically grows out of the genre itself rather than as an uncomfortable addition to it. As a riff on the cinematic past, the film is a revelation in its unbearable bleakness.