I saw Zodiac last week. I had my reservations about it... how interesting could a movie about a fat, greasy 1960s serial killer possibly be? Now, after seeing it, I wonder what possessed David Fincher to make this movie. Beyond the people who are obsessed with the case and those (like me) who adore All the President's Men-style, paper chase movies full of wild-eyed reporters scrawling their random thoughts on napkins, I really don't know who Fincher wanted his audience to be. The story is too protracted, complex, and unresolved to make a standard thriller, and it's certainly not gorey enough to appeal to slasher fans. It follows the slow, parallel investigations of the San Francisco police and a Chronicle cartoonist named Robert Graysmith who became absorbed in the 1966-69 shootings of 3 sets of young people in and around San Franciso (his 1976 book, Zodiac, is the account of the case, though it contains some minor errors).

There's solid acting from Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith, Robert Downey Jr. as drunk Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, and Mark Ruffalo as Detective Toschi (who lost his job as an indirect result of the Zodiac case; his superiors suspected that one of the final letters from the Zodiac was forged by Toschi, based on comparison with some anonymous fan letters he wrote to Armistead Maupin.) My favorite character was celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli, played by Brian Cox. I love that guy. (Cox, not Belli)

The movie names two of the likeliest suspects, Rick Marshall and Arthur Leigh Allen. Allen was a convicted child molester who might have known two of the victims. He died in 1992, just when the evidence against him was starting to come together:

• The Zodiac wore military-issue boots at one crime scene. Allen had been in the Navy.
• Allen admitted he knew the Lake Berryessa area (where a young couple was stabbed by a large man wearing a black costume made up of a square hooded mask marked with the Zodiac's crosshair symbol). In fact, he was skin-diving in the area on September 27, 1969, the very day the couple was attacked.
• A surviving male victim, Mike Mageau, picked him out of a photo lineup.
• Allen insisted that bloody knives people had seen in his car around the time of the murders had been used to decapitate chickens (not an unlikely explanation, since Allen liked to stock his freezer with squirrels and other hillbilly delicacies).
• A former friend of Allen volunteered to police the information that Allen had bragged about killing couples in parked cars and children coming out of school buses in 1968, saying he would taunt the police with letters signed "Zodiac". Strangely, though, this guy didn't come forward until all the murders had already been committed.
• The Zodiac spoke to Melvin Belli's housekeeper over the phone of December 18, 1971, telling her he would have to kill because it was his birthday. Arthur Allen's birthday was December 18. (John Douglas, in The Cases That Haunt Us, notes that the calls to Belli might have come from a mental patient unconnected to the crimes).
• The sister of victim Darlene Ferrin told police that Darlene had been friends with a creepy guy called "Lee". He once showed up at a painting party dressed in a suit and spoke to no one; Darlene seemed fearful of him, and warned her sister to avoid him. Around this time, Darlene worked in a diner directly across the street from the home of Allen's mother. Allen was living in his mom's basement at the time. The night Darlene was murdered, four people close to her received heavy-breathing phone calls after 1:30 AM, before the crime scene was discovered. Zodiac also reported the murder to police from a pay phone...less than a block from Darlene's house.

Altogether the evidence is circumstantial. I doubt Allen could have been convicted even had he lived. The case, like the Zodiac cipher shown above, remains unsolved.

Which brings me to what I'm currently reading: The Voynich Manuscript by Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, and The Friar and the Cipher by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. I've been interested in the Voynich MS for a long time, and these are the first recent books devoted exclusively to it. The MS was found by an expatriot from Lithuania, rare book dealer Wilfred Voynich, in 1912. Book-hunting in an Italian castle occupied by the Jesuit Villa Mondragone college in Frascoti, he unearthed a cache of rare illuminated manuscripts in an old chest. One of them captured his attention because it was such as "ugly duckling", hand-written and illustrated on vellum of unequal sizes.

Every page of this manuscript was a mystery; the dense illustrations were rather primitive and seemed to linger somewhere between science and myth. (Many researchers believe it to be an alchemical manuscript or a grimoire.) There are 113 intricate drawings of the leaves, flowers, and root systems of plants that don't exist, a Zodiac chart, astronomical/astrological charts that have not been identified, Mandala-like shapes, and many plump, nude little females reclining in tubs of green liquid that are interconnected by a strangely organic plumbing system. Smaller drawings of stars and urns are sprinkled throughout the text.

But the most unusual thing about the Voynich MS is the text itself. It is written in an entirely unknown language or code. Since 1914, language scholars and code-crackers have tried their hands at translation. No one has succeeded. The book is often called The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World. Possible authors named over the decades include Roger Bacon, John Dee, aliens from space, and Voynich himself. Until we know for certain who wrote the book and why, gazing at its bizarre, primitive illustrations is enough for me. Whatever the MS was intended to be, it stands out today as a work of art.

I'll post more about the Voynich MS at "High Strangeness" when I've finished these books.

I hope everyone had an awesome weekend. I did. I found some truly tasty tofu "cream cheese".

Foamy the Squirrel: "Creamy cheesy cheesy creamy! Gettin' high on the cream cheese!"