I don't mean to open an old debate, but I just got back my copy of Zodiac back from a friend who'd borrowed it, and hey, what's a Monday night without a 157-minute long serial killer movie? I've seen the movie three or four times at this point, but it really did hit me this time around (especially after finishing Katharine Graham's memoir of her life at The Washington Post, which centers around a similar period in journalism) how well it portrays the roughness and cynicism and kindness of certain kinds of old-school reporters. Both Robert Downey, Jr., whose portrayal of San Francisco Chronicle crime beat reporter Paul Avery is vastly undercredited in starting his comeback, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Chronicle cartoonist-turned-true-crime-writer Robert Graysmith, are exemplars of what happens when journalists get too wrapped up in their stories.
The mentoring relationship between them is very funny. Their first afternoon out at a bar together (it was, after all, the late sixties), Avery is expounding on something until he notices Graysmith's drink. "This can no longer be ignored. What is that you're drinking?" Avery declares. "It's an Aqua Velva," Greysmith tells him, and Avery ends up resting his head on the table while Graysmith stays sober enough to expound on codebreaking theories. Later on, even though Avery is an alcoholic and drug addict, and has ruined his career with his obsession with the Zodiac, he's the one who's able to recognize that both he and Graysmith essentially had an addiction to the case. "You're wrong, it was important," Graysmith insists when Avery tells him to drop the story and not continue to pursue it thorough a book project. "Then what did you ever do about it?" Avery demands. "If it was so fucking important, what did you ever do? You hovered around my desk, you stole from waste baskets. Am I being unkind? Oh, I forgot. You went to the library."
It's a damning condemnation of Graysmith in particular and of journalism in general, spoken by a man who once loved the craft, who stalked through a newsroom in a chartreuse vest and a cloud of smoke, who inspired his fellow journalists to read buttons saying "I Am Not Avery" because of his identification of the case. More so than David Simon's critiques of the media, which strike me as frustratingly close-to-but-consistently-off-the-mark, this seems to me to be an accurate and pungent criticism of the position journalism finds itself in today. Maybe it's just because I'm reading Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, but I think it's fair to ask what journalism can do to influence how Americans see events, much less how those events occur. Obviously, journalism runs a spectrum from purely informative purposes to outright advocacy, and I'm interested in all of them. Zodiac makes the case for and against journalistic efficacy: Graysmith's obsessive reporting leads him to a conclusion about who the killer is, and advances beyond the work done by police. But it doesn't lead the police to an arrest, and the case is still open, and subject to debate today. He advances knowledge, but he doesn't bring about justice.