Opening Shots: Zodiac
View image Second shot: A street in a neighborhood: Vallejo, CA - July 4, 1969. Music: "Easy to be Hard," from "Hair."
It's probably the second shot of David Fincher's "Zodiac" that you remember best: the linear, smooth-gliding traveling shot (out the passenger window from within the car that will be the site of the movie's first "Zodiac Killer" murder) through a suburban neighborhood on July 4, 1969.
The first shot is a simple (if breathtakingly beautiful) aerial establishing shot, of the sort that will be used repeatedly to introduce timecoded segments throughout the rest of the movie. We won't know it until the next shot, but the fireworks we see are exploding over Vallejo, CA. From above, we get a sense of the terrain -- the bridge over the river, the cityscape stretching into the distance. Nobody in the movie gets to see this Big Picture this way. Everyone is limited to looking at events from ground level, trying to map out the larger view, one piece at a time, in their heads.
This is a movie about maps, about time and place and getting from one point to another and how long it takes to get there and whose jurisdiction events fall within. It is, as I've written before, an analog movie set in an analog world. It is about, and made up of, an obsession with details -- an investigation into our need as pattern-seeking animals to understand and make sense of the evidence we observe or uncover or have delivered to us by phone or mail or courier (but only rarely by fax). The Zodiac Killer proved elusive in large part because he didn't stick to his patterns. In so doing, he sent police and newspapermen scurrying all over the map, and they kept losing him in the details. (See also: Hurdy Gurdys and Aqua Velvas: Misc. "Zodiac" fax....)
View image A typical "Zodiac" establishing shot, marking the temporal and geographical coordinates, as if putting a pushpin in a map of time and space: "September 14, 1972 - Santa Rosa, CA - Sunset Trailer Park - Space A-7." What do all these details add up to?
The film's other establishing shots may be aerial views or more conventional exteriors or wide-shot interiors, but they accomplish the same purpose: to place the next piece of action in a particular time and place in relation to the previous one. The movie's second shot -- from the street, but with glimpses of the fireworks overhead connecting it to the first -- shows a neat row of subdivision houses. The parallel motion of the camera emphasizes the geometric orderliness of the setting, but there are glimpses of life in passing property as we glide by -- but there's also something a little creepy about them: a kid entering a house, a girl with a sparkler, a cone fountain ("CAUTION: Emits shower of sparks") erupting in a front yard, a man with a Weber, a family congregating in the rear of a driveway/alley.... The shot ends when the camera stops in front of a house and a boy runs from the front steps, down the sidewalk, and into view from the driver's POV. His face, framed in the car window, the first we see clearly in the film, will also be the last shot in the movie. That will be years later, and this boy will be a different person. "Zodiac" traces the distance from this face to that one. His face is one of the movie's maps or cryptograms.
Comments
This along with "Into the Wild" and that Korean monster film from earlier in the year...ummmm...crap, are probably three of my favorite so far.
"Zodiac" deserves every bit of praise it receives.
Posted by: Phillip Kelly | September 28, 2007 3:35 AM
"...singing songs of love."
A most gripping opening to Fincher's masterpiece. By the way, Jim, I took the directions provided and made Aqua Velvas at my sister's birthday party. A killer time was had by all.
"Don't make fun if you haven't tried it."
Posted by: Michael De Luca | September 28, 2007 7:42 AM
Jim, I can't talk enough about David Fincher's brilliant "Zodiac", and it's nice to see that you can't seem to talk about it enough either. I loved the community atmosphere that Fincher sets up with this first shot. You really feel like this is happening in a real neighborhood. But he sets it up so subconsciously that you don't really realize what he's doing until everything else is so effective because it feels like a real city and not a "movie city". No matter what I think of Fincher's other movies (I liked them but didn’t love them, and hated the uber-p.o.s. that is "Fight Club") "Zodiac" is brilliant filmmaking, and exhilarating movie going.
Posted by: Kyle | September 28, 2007 8:03 AM
I loved this movie, and particularly this opening sequence. The POV shot out the car window creates a palpable sense of dread, and I'm not really sure why.
I think maybe it has to do with the fact that POV shots are often used in film to represent a killer stalking a victim. I probably assumed, subconsciously, that it was the Zodiac killer driving the car. (In fact the POV was from his first victim, a neat twist).
The suburban families that we pass seem to be incredibly vulnerable. I think this shot, even more than the first killing (which is pretty chilling in it's own right- here comes the Hurdy Gurdy Man) creates a sense of dread which lasts throughout the movie.
By the way, I recall the last shot being the one where Jake G. finally confronts the man he believes to be Zodiac, and they just stare at each other. I guess I don't remember the very end of this movie that well, but I'll never forget that beginning.
Posted by: Todd Restler | September 28, 2007 8:31 AM
The opening sequence really stuck out in my mind as well. I don't think any movie I've ever scene has captured the quality of night as well as Zodiac.
Posted by: Eric | September 28, 2007 11:59 AM
"This along with "Into the Wild" and that Korean monster film from earlier in the year...ummmm...crap, are probably three of my favorite so far."
That movie was called The Host
Posted by: unknown | September 28, 2007 12:41 PM
The song makes the scene, and I've speculated that Fincher may be thinking of the song as the Zodiac's love ballad, a damaged man who strikes out at a society that ignores him: "How can people be so heartless, how can people be so cruel...Eaaaasy..."
Posted by: the shamus | September 28, 2007 2:07 PM
When the film introduced me to those two teenagers, they were so gratingly two-dimensional I couldn't wait for them to be killed. They were just monster bait.
Not a film I would give as much attention to as you have. Partly for Robert Downey Jr. playing himself.
(Monster bait. That reminds me. Those women in The Descent ended up turning into monster bait, too. One reason I didn't like that film either.)
Posted by: Raymond Ogilvie | September 28, 2007 2:44 PM
The "kid" is one of a few bookends in Zodiac, each happening within another like a Babushka doll. A couple others that come to mind are the two scenes involving discussion of sushi, and (my favorite) the two scenes in which Dirty Harry is invoked.
Yeah, I loved Zodiac, which is probably still my favorite movie of the year (of the ones I've been able to see so far). 3:10 to Yuma is up there, too.
Posted by: Kris Pigna | September 28, 2007 2:58 PM
"Zodiac," in a weird way, kinda reminds me of "Jaws." The manner of the opening killing: Two indiscreet kids "fooling around" in the dark, the faceless killer. The uneasy alliance of the troika of "hunters." Graysmith/Brody's obsession with the killer. Even the way the trio of male stars' names appear in the opening credits. Maybe it's a stretch, but I wonder if maybe "Jaws" was, ahem, lurking below the surface of Fincher's thoughts while making it.
Best movie of the year, so far.
Posted by: Mike | September 29, 2007 9:10 AM
As soon as I saw those people congregating at the end of the driveway, the sudden flare from a woman lighting up her cigarette standing in front of the garage, I knew I was watching something special...
Posted by: Nathaniel J Soltesz | September 29, 2007 3:56 PM
I loved Zodiac and I think this is one of the best opening shots I've seen in a while. And I enjoyed your perception of this film as an obsession with getting all the facts together to make sense. Every review I've read on this movie has related it to "All the Presidents Men" but I believe it's more alike with Oliver Stone's "JFK". Not only do both films share with us a huge amount of evidence and suspicious characters (but at the same time never confuses us), but both films never are able to bring all the evidence together to put the blame on someone even if it looks like we know who's responsible.
Posted by: Mike Leto | October 1, 2007 2:35 PM
Todd nailed my thoughts about that first scene and the whole movie that followed. It constantly undermines our attempts to draw conclusions based on our knowledge of how "these kinds of films" go. There aren't these kinds of films. It did actually frustrate me for awhile (even after it ended when I gave it an 8 in my personal review). It's nagged at me, though, more than any movie in some time and it has nothing to do with the true "unsolved" story but is all about the way it's told. I'm not sure I agree with The Shamus. Maybe Fincher is thinking of the killer with that song but it seems unlikely to me because I think he was actually quite disinterested in the killer(s) aspect of the story. That's another of the great twists about this movie. Even though it takes a very clinical view about the crimes, it's not obsessed with or admiring of serial killers, which frankly, I'm pretty tired of ever since Silence of the Lambs. It's about more important things. And no, I don't remember the ending well either, but then again there really wasn't an ending. Appropriate.
Posted by: Dane Walker | October 3, 2007 9:40 PM
Dane: There are at least two endings (it could have ended just about anywhere -- being linear and inconclusive, but Fincher knows where he wants to stop laying out the "facts"). Both are stare-downs: One in the True Value hardware store and the other in what seems to be an employees' cafeteria at an airport. See Ivan Passer's "Cutter's Way" (quite possibly the best movie of the 1980s) for the precedent....
Posted by: jim emerson | October 3, 2007 11:29 PM
Did you notice that right before the stare-down in the True Value, Arthur Leigh Allen is apparently making a copy of a key? In fact, I think he's literarlly "holding the key" in that scene.
But does he also do so figuratively?
Posted by: Will | October 4, 2007 7:15 PM