Big (Bad) Data: Information as Antagonist in
Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty
Adam Stier
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)—both of which are based on
real-life events—represent two of the most critically acclaimed American films of the 21st century. In a post titled
“The 100 Best Films of the Decade (So Far)” film critic and A.V. Club contributor A.A. Dowd describes Zero Dark
Thirty (ranked #24) as “a spiritual relative to Zodiac” because, like Fincher’s film, Zero Dark Thirty “digs deep into
the most mundane details of intelligence work, before building to a powerhouse climax.” Dowd is right to perceive
a fundamental connection between these two texts, but in my view he does not push the comparison far enough.
Examined together, these two films signal a significant new direction for the hero-villain dynamic in contemporary
narrative filmmaking. My contention in this essay is that each of these films dramatizes 21st-century American
culture’s preoccupation with the influence of information technologies and processing. In its very structure, each
film marginalizes the more traditional figure of a personal or embodied villain—the serial killer in Zodiac, the
terrorist mastermind in Zero Dark Thirty—to present instead recurring scenes in which the protagonist struggles
against Data itself. Both Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty, that is, represent surplus information as a primary source of
antagonism in our “information age.” In turn, as I illustrate below, this new villainy requires a different kind of
hero, a protagonist capable of processing the data ceaselessly bombarding her—and perhaps ever willing to sacrifice
herself in the process.
Since villains often serve as embodiments of cultural anxieties, I am interested in how (and why) these two
film narratives in effect disembody their villains in order to dramatize high-stakes confrontations between individuals
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
60
and information. I begin with a brief summary of each film’s plot. Zodiac, which the esteemed crime novelist James
Ellroy has praised as “one of the half dozen greatest American crime films,” follows the story of Robert Graysmith
(Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist with the San Francisco Chronicle, who throws himself into the pursuit of a serial killer
operating in late 1960’s California (Browning 73). The identity of the killer—who refers to himself, in a series
of letters to the media and police, as the Zodiac—remains unknown to this day, despite the efforts of the actual
Robert Graysmith, who would go on to write a bestselling book about the case.1 Turning the conventional serialkiller story into an existential fable about one investigator’s obsessive relationship to—and fetishistic acquisition
of—information, Zodiac ultimately seems less interested in the murderer than it does the mountains of paperwork
accumulating in the wake of his crimes. The narrative therefore de-romanticizes the investigative process by
putting “drudgery front and center” (Jones 45). Pointing to the film’s lack of traditional closure—the Zodiac is
never apprehended—Alison Young argues that Zodiac forgoes “any sense that the killer has finally been given
definitive embodiment,” and that ultimately the killer “remains […] a collection of letters, an unsolved code, some
fingerprints, a voice on the phone” (159).
Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, for its part, tells the story of the hunt for and eventual killing of Osama bin
Laden following the September 11 attacks. The protagonist of Zero Dark Thirty—a CIA operative known only
as Maya (Jessica Chastain)—struggles for nearly a decade to ferret out the piece of intelligence that will bring
the Al-Qaeda mastermind to justice. As with Zodiac, in Zero Dark Thirty the narrative’s central antagonist is less
an embodied villain—bin Laden himself—than it is a surfeit of data. Indeed, Maya does not battle any terrorist
so much as the vast stores of intelligence—the digital “chatter”—available to her. In The New Republic, Hanna
Rosin observes that Zero Dark Thirty “unfolds like a police procedural,” dubbing the film “CSI: Pakistan.” Just
as Zodiac emphasizes investigative “drudgery,” the focus of Zero Dark Thirty, according to Rosin, is decidedly
bureaucratic: “many of the high emotional moments transpire in cubicles” (8). In this sense, both Zodiac and Zero
Dark Thirty achieve their power in part by re-imagining established genre stories (the serial-killer narrative or the
spy thriller) within what are essentially white-collar, information-management workplaces. Ultimately, the conflict
each protagonist faces has less to do with an externalized villain than it does the struggle—more internal and
intellectual—to process large-scale information effectively.
1. Published in 1986, Graysmith’s Zodiac: The Full Story of the Infamous Unsolved Zodiac Murders in California lays out the circumstantial evidence
against several of the prime suspects.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
61
Even bracketing the fact that both Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty can be considered “procedurals” of a sort,
and thus generic siblings, the two films share a striking number of narrative beats. Take, for instance, the very
beginning of each film, which focuses its respective audience’s attention on the determinative power of data even
before any images occupy the screen. Zodiac opens with a chyron stating that the film has been constructed from
“actual case files.” Zero Dark Thirty, in strikingly similar fashion, deploys a chyron claiming that the film is “based
on first-hand accounts.” What I find fascinating here is not merely the gesture toward a “real-life” referent, or how
a statement such as “This film is based on a true story” constitutes an interesting rhetorical move in and of itself,
affecting as it does audience expectations. Rather, I find myself more compelled by the fact that these two films
point viewers to actual records of information; Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty are not making “truth claims” so much as
they are “data claims.” Each film begins, in effect, with a challenge to the audience (“But don’t just take our word
for it; check the records”), thus directing us back to the very files in the “real world” that will come to haunt the
fictionalized heroes in the worlds of their stories.
Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty also function as “spiritual relative[s]” in terms of their central characters,
jointly imagining a new form of heroism that might combat the antagonistic force of Big Bad Data. The films
follow protagonists who are obsessive pattern seekers, and both Fincher and Bigelow include few cutaways to
embodied villains, who receive surprisingly little screen time. Indeed, Graysmith and Maya face a uniquely modern
conundrum: each understands that the problem they confront in “solving” the case before them stems not from
a lack of information, but rather from the fact that the processing of so much information is incredibily difficult.
Put differently, both Graysmith and Maya believe that “The Answer” to the mystery is already accessible in the
data, if this data can only be analyzed properly. In Zodiac, we see the actual killer in only a handful of scenes, and
these all in the first half of the film. Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Chronicle’s crime reporter, who investigates
the case alongside Graysmith, never interacts directly with the Zodiac. Graysmith and his chief suspect—a man
named Arthur Leigh Allen—make eye contact only in the film’s final moments, when Graysmith visits the hardware
store where Allen is an employee. Aside from that brief moment, Graysmith remains at a remove from the film’s
ostensible villain, never interacting with him or even finding himself in close physical proximity. In Zero Dark Thirty,
even during the film’s climactic raid on bin Laden’s compound, the film goes out of its way to marginalize bin Laden
himself—the character appears only momentarily, as a night-visioned blur—instead directing more of our attention
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
62
to the compound’s cache of intelligence. Indeed, several minutes of the film are spent following Seal Team Six as
they collect the Al-Qaeda leader’s files and computers; here Bigelow seems to suggest that the payoff of processing
intelligence is principally more intelligence, in a kind of perpetual loop. More adamantly than her colleagues,
however, Maya demands to see the person behind the chatter: she needs data to have a face. Tellingly, when the
body of bin Laden is presented in the film’s closing moments, Bigelow stages the scene such that we do not look at
his body so much as we gaze upon Maya looking at him. And, as I will further discuss below, this is in fact the same
ending as Zodiac: like Maya, Graysmith desires nothing more than to look a personal villain in the face—to find the
man who inspired so much discourse, to see words become flesh. Unlike many of their colleagues at the CIA and
the Chronicle, respectively, Maya and Graysmith demand that data ultimately be put to some kind of use—that it
dispel uncertainty, or facilitate justice, or at the very least signify something outside of itself.
Noting Zodiac’s obsession with case files, Kent Jones has suggested that watching the film is like being
trapped “inside a filing cabinet” (44). This is an apt description, especially because—in both Zodiac and Zero Dark
Thirty—the visual motifs and spaces utilized by Fincher and Bigelow reinforce this shift in focus, from personas-antagonist to information-as-antagonist. In Zodiac, Fincher draws our attention to two separate warehouses of
files: one maintained by the San Francisco Chronicle, the other by the Vallejo Police Department. Like the hearts of
darkness of our Information Age, these warehouses function as spaces in which our protagonist, Graysmith, must
prove himself in a battle against informational oversupply. The scenes in which Graysmith descends into the depths
of these warehouses suggest the obsessiveness of his pursuit. Fincher frames and shoots this space to emphasize its
cavernous, plunging-down-the-rabbit-hole dimension, as if the warehouse of files disappears into infinite regress.
In the screenshot labeled Figure 1, notice also how the respective positions of Graysmith and Avery reinforce what
will become the two characters’ different trajectories and strategies for dealing with this information over the course
of the film: Graysmith heads into the depths of the facility, while Avery hangs back, refusing to invest himself so
completely. This use of the warehouse setting also reflects Fincher’s interest in providing a meta-representational
picture of the film’s own coming-into-being. As I note above, Zodiac claims to be based entirely on case files. Thus,
as we watch Graysmith wade into this morass of data, we realize that it is meant to be the same morass Fincher and
his team have already traversed—in fact, the same morass through which, as we watch the film Zodiac, we too are
heading.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
63
Figure One
Moreover, in terms of narrative structure, the warehouses function as the spaces where Graysmith most
overtly proves himself as a hero of sorts. He is looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack: a single name,
or pattern, or connection, in files overflowing with raw data. In a world that predates the widespread use of
computers, Graysmith attempts—both heroically and self-destructively, the film seems to suggest—to turn himself
into a computer, that is, into an efficient information processer. And Graysmith must further prove himself in the
warehouse when, due to police policy, he is not allowed to bring a writing utensil in with him; he can only take from
the room the data he remembers. Here we can feel the film reaching for something like a more traditional “hero”
moment, wherein Graysmith, deprived of his pen, must rely solely on inner reserves—his memory, attention to
detail, and information savvy—in order to get results. Since the film connects Graysmith’s hero-function with his
ability to process information, we might say this is the scene wherein we realize that Graysmith’s “hardware” is up
to the task.
Zero Dark Thirty also features this place of information-storage as infinite-regress, but, true to Bigelow’s
digital-age focus, here the space overflows with cords and wires rather than paper files. Still, as Figure 2
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
64
demonstrates, the fundamental similarity to Zodiac’s warehouse cannot be missed. Bigelow’s vision of the “data
center,” like Fincher’s before her, does not include an exit. In both Figure 1 (from Zodiac) and Figure 2 (from Zero
Dark Thirty), information networks are visually represented as continuing beyond the vanishing point, offering
horizons of even more data to be processed. In Bigelow’s film, as the camera pans over these wires, we hear overlaid
snippets of the voices passing through them—so many voices, though, as to seem chaotic and unintelligible. There
exists no efficient way, the film suggests, to sort through this stream of information. Interestingly, this moment in
Zero Dark Thirty functions as a distorted reflection of the film’s famous opening scene, which powerfully juxtaposes
an entirely black screen with actual voices of 9/11 witnesses and victims as they make frantic calls to loved ones and
emergency services. The later scene recalls this trauma, but replaces the opening scene’s black screen with the shot
of a digital network in action, and mixes the audio so that the overlaid voices are even more overlapped than before.
The film thus implies that efforts to make sense of and bring closure to 9/11 has only led to more data and more
discourse, but perhaps less clarity.
Figure Two
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
65
That both Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty emphasize such spaces suggests that, far from imagining an
investigation lacking in information, where our protagonist must find clues, collect new evidence—think the worlds
of the hardboiled detective story, or even something more contemporary like CSI—these procedurals depict
investigations inundated with too much information: excess data that the protagonist must painstakingly sift through.
“We got a million tips—things got lost in the shuffle” Maya is informed by a CIA colleague, after she realizes that
Abu Ahmed, bin Laden’s courier and the key to his whereabouts, has “been in the files this whole time.” In the
CIA’s data-rich environment, Maya’s major obstacle is not a shortage of intelligence, but rather a surplus of it. While
the protagonist’s need to process information could be said to play an important role in any procedural narrative,
my argument is that in Zero Dark Thirty and Zodiac excess information becomes the focus to such a degree that all
other obstacles in the protagonist’s path—most conspicuously these stories’ ostensible personal villains, the Zodiac
killer and bin Laden—become relegated to the background. Thus, by filling the structural role of the antagonist,
Data paradoxically supersedes the personal villain to which that information is supposed to point.
Of course, much of the commentary surrounding Zero Dark Thirty to date has centered on the film’s
portrayal of torture. Critical disagreement on this subject has been so pointed, in fact, that one scholar estimates
“Zero Dark Thirty will no doubt go down in history as one of the most controversial films ever made” (Stone
76-7). For many viewers, the focal point of this debate seems to be determining whether or not the film vindicates
torture as an effective (not to say ethical or humane) means of extracting information from persons thought to be
withholding it. Those who take issue with Bigelow’s depiction of torture typically call out the film’s implied message
that significant information about the identity of bin Laden’s courier was obtained during the CIA-conducted
process of “enhanced interrogation.” The historical accuracy of this claim has been disputed by many sources close
to the actual events. Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, for instance, has been a
vocal critic of the film’s portrayal of CIA practices. Following the film’s release, McCain joined with Democratic
Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin in writing a letter to the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures. In the letter
the Senators called Zero Dark Thirty “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in
information” that led to bin Laden. “We have reviewed CIA records,” the Senators wrote, “and know that this is
incorrect” (Davidson).
Even critics who cannot or will not speak to Zero Dark Thirty’s purported historical fallacies find the movie’s
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
66
depiction of torture troubling because, on its surface at least, the movie invites the audience to empathize with
American torturers, not those being tortured. Likely for this reason, Susan Carruthers accuses Zero Dark Thirty
of functioning “primarily as wish-fulfillment fantasy” (50). Alan Stone offers a more nuanced view of the film’s
thematic intentions: “Does this film, then, vindicate torture? No. Think of it instead as an allegory in which Maya
stands for America. The opening 9/11 calls and the torture establish the theme: revenge. Pursuing it, Maya, the
innocent and vulnerable, degrades herself. Zero Dark Thirty thus describes a chapter in the degradation of our
nation” (79). To paraphrase what I take to be the thrust of Stone’s argument, while it is almost certain that Zero
Dark Thirty inaccurately represents the efficacy of the CIA’s interrogation methods, the film does attempt to
illustrate some of the moral and psychological consequences attendant upon those who tortured. Bin Laden is dead
at the end of Zero Dark Thirty; Maya is alive, but dead inside. Although I do not have the space to give full attention
to this important discussion, the debate over torture in Zero Dark Thirty is closely connected to my argument.
Presumably, torture is first and foremost a method of gaining information; it constitutes the attempt to extract data
from persons through the systematic dehumanizing of them. To induce data, that is, torture inevitably reduces
persons, and in this sense scenes of torture provide yet another stage on which we find dramatized the fraught
relationship between people and information in 21st-century life—a zero-sum game that both Zodiac and Zero Dark
Thirty, in their distinct ways, seek to represent. In neither film does the protagonist who goes to battle with Data
emerge unscathed.
As brilliant and single-minded processors of information, Maya and Graysmith are protagonists who
resonate in our information age, yet neither film depicts its central figure as an unqualified hero. Graysmith’s and
Maya’s quests are shown to be obsessive and costly—both self-destructive and damaging to those around them.
Graysmith and Maya attempt to use information to protect themselves from their fear of the unknown, yet the
information they turn to is shown to wound them as often as it heals. In an emblematic scene in Zero Dark Thirty,
Maya curls into a fetal position, and Bigelow takes care to frame the shot with hefty binders. Here the film raises a
pivotal question: is Maya taking cover within data, or is she attempting to protect herself from it? The answer, I want
to argue, may in fact be “both.” On the one hand, certainly, Maya and Graysmith are quick studies who use data to
their advantage. They immerse themselves in information to such a degree that they come to know their cases inside
and out, thereby gaining respect from their colleagues. When Maya’s supervisor tantalizes her with supposed new
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
67
information—“Don’t you want to see what’s in the folder?”—she recites the whole of its contents without looking.
Later, in a meeting with CIA Director Panetta, she flaunts her knowledge of the exact measurements of bin Laden’s
compound.
Yet, on the other hand, both films also show how the personal lives of the protagonists are compromised
or threatened by information overload. This is effectively literalized in Zodiac when Graysmith, his home overrun
with files, finds a message from his wife saying she is leaving him—and on the back of the message, he finds
notes he had scribbled to himself about the Zodiac case. This script’s logic is clear: these are flip sides of the same
problem, cause and effect. Graysmith’s immersion in Zodiac data results in alienation from his family, and both of
these processes are concretized in writing. Indeed, for both Maya and Graysmith, the search for truth is nothing
if not exhausting. Their associates take note: in Zodiac, one of Graysmith’s interview subjects tells the tired, beatendown investigator, “You have the look.” In Zero Dark Thirty, a colleague comments to Maya, “You’re looking a little
strung-out” and “look how run down you are.” Maya does not have much of a personal life; the implication is that
her existence is wholly consumed by the hunt for bin Laden. Graysmith, for his part, cannot manage to shield his
family from the Zodiac case even when he wants to. In the car with his son, he tries switching radio stations, but the
story is everywhere. In another scene, a news report on the television interrupts a Graysmith family dinner. Later,
we see how deeply Graysmith’s obsession with the case has intruded upon the family, when Graysmith puts his
children to use in cross-referencing case files, searching for patterns. While the tone in this last scene tends toward
the comic, Graysmith’s effort to transform his kids into an ad hoc computing system underscores the destructiveness
of his obsession with the Zodiac case, and sets the stage for the moment later in the narrative when his wife
Melanie will leave him, taking their children with her.
Beyond demonstrating the personal tolls involved, each film contrasts its protagonist with their colleagues
in order to complicate, even undermine, the very rationale of the protagonist’s quest. Indeed, both Maya and
Graysmith are urged repeatedly by their colleagues to give up. One CIA analyst tells Maya that bin Laden’s “out of
the game—you’re chasing a ghost.” Yet while others tell Maya that her obsession with bin Laden obstructs a more
pragmatic focus on stopping new attacks, she insists throughout that finding bin Laden is worth any cost. Similarly,
in Zodiac, Paul Avery and others question the effectiveness of Graysmith’s obsessive pursuit, pointing out late in the
film that the killer has been inactive for years—and that if Graysmith is truly intent on stopping crime, he should
turn his attention elsewhere. “[Zodiac’s] a footnote,” Avery tells him. Graysmith’s rebuttal—“I need to know”—
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
68
suggests that his goal is not pragmatic or public-minded so much as it is personal and existential: he simply cannot
tolerate mystery, especially when, to his mind, The Answer must be somewhere in the files.2 Here again the contrast
between Graysmith and Avery is striking. When, four years after the trail has gone dead, Graysmith returns to Avery
with a scrapbook in which he has put together all his information on the case, he finds that Avery has lost or tossed
his own files. The newspaper business is a “daily business,” Avery reminds him. While Avery, an alcoholic, turns to
drink to help him forget, Graysmith obsessively remembers. In this sense, the two men represent opposite reactions
to the same trauma, differentiated only by the objects of their addiction. “I just need to see one file!” Graysmith
shouts desperately to a police officer midway through the film. Zodiac ultimately suggests that Graysmith’s
information addiction is in certain respects as debilitating as Avery’s alcoholism.
Taking place in the late 60s and 70s, Zodiac’s pre-digital setting contributes to the film’s thematic aims.
That the killer committed his crimes in multiple jurisdictions adds to the complexity of the case. Different police
departments are engaged in separate but sometimes overlapping investigations, without any centralized data
system to coordinate their efforts. The investigation thus becomes a model of inefficiency. A detective from one
jurisdiction informs a detective from another that he cannot send over evidence because “we don’t have telefax.” In
stark relief to such media-adverse detectives, Zodiac represents the eponymous killer himself as a savvy manipulator
of the media, and of information more generally. “He’s in it for the press,” Paul Avery tells Graysmith, explaining
his theory that the Zodiac may have falsely claimed to commit crimes the he had only read about in the newspaper.
As if to extend Paul Avery’s point, Zodiac demonstrates that the real killer is not the only one “in it for the press.”
People looking for fame, or for a public outlet for their madness, start claiming to be the Zodiac killer. These
false confessions complicate Graysmith’s investigation by further diluting the Zodiac case files—that is, by further
detaching the discourse surrounding the Zodiac killer from its originating person. In fact, it is this very discursive
plentitude—the contents of the case files, not the killer himself—that mostly directly threatens Graysmith
personally and existentially over the course of the film.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Zodiac repeatedly draws viewers’ attention to writing. After the Zodiac murders
a young couple at Lake Berryessa in one of the film’s most visceral and disturbing scenes, the killer writes some
2. In fact, Graysmith’s very first words in the film—telling his son to “learn a lot,” as he drops him off at school—immediately establish his
character as one valuing knowledge, information, and certainty.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
69
information on the victims’ car, leaving it for the police to find. This information includes the dates of his crimes,
the killer’s modus operandi (“by knife”), and the location: Vallejo. Many fictional killers—Hannibal Lecter is perhaps
the best-known example in this regard—strive to turn their murders into intricately staged artworks. By contrast, the
Zodiac killer, as represented in Fincher’s film, strives not to create art but rather to create data. His transformation
of people into individual points among a broader data set serves to remind investigators of his dominance and
further dehumanizes his victims.
Figure Three
Along with written communication in general, paper specifically functions as a visual touchstone in Zodiac.
Paper even assumes a kind of kinetic agency in the film, moving about the storyworld as if a character in its own
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
70
Zodiac’s first letter—arriving through the back door. The film’s editing drives home the point that these two entities
are on a collision course: protagonist and antagonist, one a part of an institution (the Chronicle), and the other an
invasive attack on it. Fincher even uses a POV shot from the letter’s perspective, as if we are riding into the Chronicle
offices with the mail. Harris Savides, the film’s cinematographer, notes that he and Fincher “never wanted to ‘become’ Zodiac. We never wanted that through-the-eyes-of-the-killer perspective.”3 Fincher twists this convention by
allowing us to see the world through the “eyes” of the killer’s written productions rather than through those of the
killer himself. In one of Fincher’s grander directorial flourishes, the film provides a montage in which newspaper
headlines, ciphers, maps, and letters of all kinds tower over detectives David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) as they pursue their investigative work (Figure 3). Here writing seems to surround them;
they cannot escape it. Throughout the film, Fincher has provided close-ups of letters, Zodiac codes, case files, and
warrants; now, via montage, these documents begin to dissolve into each other, and the result is thoroughly disorienting. Capturing a single moment in this montage, Figure 4 illustrates how, as the layers of superimposed files
accumulate, the writing itself becomes nearly impenetrable. The image provides a striking visual metaphor for one
of the film’s most counterintuitive implications: the more information, the less clarity.
Figure Four
3. Savides refers of course to the perspective made famous by horror movies such as John Carpenter’s Halloween, and other slasher flicks, in
which the audience often sees the victim through the perpetrator’s eyes.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
71
In Zero Dark Thirty, true to its digital-era setting, the focus shifts from paper to electronic media. Screens
and wires are among the film’s most important visual motifs. Maya watches on a screen as the helicopters descend
on bin Laden’s compound; she watches piles upon piles of DVDs containing scenes of detainee torture; and when
a CIA colleague is killed by a suicide bomber, Maya follows the unfolding tragedy moment-by-moment on her office computer. Hence, as we watch her watching screens on our screen, Maya becomes a kind of audience stand-in
within the fictional world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a similar meta element occurs in Zodiac, when Graysmith attends
a screening of Dirty Harry, a 1971 movie in which the villain, “Scorpio,” was loosely based on the Zodiac killer.
Fincher’s film provides a shot of Dirty Harry, projected onto a theater screen, during which one of the Scorpio’s
letters is given in close-up. Here Fincher provides a not-so-subtle nod to the forms of discursive mediation, regress, and circularity that the film has shown interest in all along. That circularity goes something like this: the reallife Zodiac’s letters became case files, which became the actual Graysmith book, which became the basis for Fincher’s movie, which contains a reference to the film Dirty Harry, which features a re-creation of a Zodiac letter… and
so on. However, despite being part of this same meta-narrative loop, Zodiac is no Dirty Harry. “The killer gets shot
in the chest—that’s how it ends,” Graysmith says, describing Dirty Harry. As we have already observed, Fincher’s
Zodiac self-consciously distances itself from that kind of tidy storytelling. The villain does not get shot; he does
not even get caught. Rather, Fincher’s film ends with the publication of Graysmith’s book on the Zodiac case—as
much of a resolution as the film is willing to provide. The case goes unsolved, but information, in the form of
Graysmith’s book, flows on. Our protagonist has managed a small victory by wrestling raw data into something like
narrative.
By shifting the focal point of narrative conflict away from the protagonist’s confrontation with the con-
ventional “Big Bad” and toward his or her struggle with Information qua Information, both Zodiac and Zero Dark
Thirty imagine data-rich worlds in which personal villains figure less forcefully than the very surplus of “chatter”
surrounding them. In tandem with this shift in focus, these films also imagine protagonists who must transform
themselves into efficient information processors—eschewing significant aspects of their humanity in the process—if they are to have any chance at achieving their goals. Thus, while the story of Zodiac takes place primarily in
the 1970s and that of Zero Dark Thirty in the 2000s, both of these narratives reflect contemporary anxieties about
the vexed relationship between people and data in our own information-saturated culture.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
72
Works Cited
Browning, Mark. David Fincher: Films that Scar. Santa Barbara, CA: Prager, 2010.
Carruthers, Susan L. “Zero Dark Thirty.” Cineaste (Spring 2013): 51.
Davidson, Amy. “Three Senators and Zero Dark Thirty.” The New Yorker (December 20,
2012). http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/three-senators-and-zero-dark-thirty.
Dowd, A.A. “The 100 Best Films of the Decade (So Far): #24, Zero Dark Thirty.” A.V.
Club (April 8, 2015). www.avclub.com/article/100-best-films-decade-so-far-21-50-217472.
Jones, Kent. “An Open-And-Shut Case: Why David Fincher’s Zodiac is The Film of the
Year.” Film Comment (1 January 2008): 44-7.
Rosin, Hanna. “The Auteur of Unease: What Kathryn Bigelow understands about the
war on terror that no other director does.” The New Republic. 6 February 2013.
Stone, Alan A. “The Price of Vengeance.” Boston Review (March-April 2013): 76-9.
Williams, David E. “Cold Case File: Harris Savides, ASC and director David Fincher
plumb the depths of human obsession with Zodiac.” American Cinematographer (April 2007): 32-51.
Young, Alison. The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Zero Dark Thirty. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 2012.
Zodiac. Dir. David Fincher. 2007.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.2
73