"70s revisited: 'Hoax' and 'Zodiac'

The return of Don Corleone and Dirty Harry

ROBERT ZALLER

Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the ‘70s revival, two new films have arrived to immerse us anew in the bad hair, bad faith and low-grade paranoia of the period. There’s a reason, too, for the ’70s are in many ways upon us anew. Then as now, a losing war has left behind moral shame, political recrimination and (not least of course) rising oil prices; then as now, the republic seems caught in a web of conspiracy and lies, beset by sinister corporate and political forces, and almost nostalgic for a Godfather figure to bring a little street justice to town: Vito Corleone then, Tony Soprano now.

But filmmakers too have a standing reason to revisit the ’70s, for, with all the stagflation and malaise, it was a memorable decade in one positive respect at least. It was a golden age for American movies.

Enter Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax and David Fincher’s Zodiac. The Hoax tells the story of Clifford Irving’s attempt to pass off the purported memoirs of Howard Hughes, a figure whose mythic proportions only seem to grow with time. Hughes himself, the millionaire boy aviator, latched onto the Lindbergh legend in the 1930s; branched out into Hollywood, Hollywood starlets and war work; and finally, as the famously reclusive head of a vast, tentacular empire, came to seem a cosmic Godfather, with his palsied finger in every corner of the national life: our modern Merlin, master of illusion. In the end, he created a feedback loop in which art endlessly recycles life presented as art, for as in later life he seemed to be consciously mimicking Charles Foster Kane (the Orson Welles figure based on William Randolph Hearst), so now each of his film avatars— in The Carpetbaggers, Melvin and Me, The Aviator and so forth— seems to engender another. What Hughes worked tirelessly to create was his own immortality, understanding that, in the modern world, celluloid was the only true medium.

If Clifford Irving hadn’t existed….

Such a personality would inevitably attract a con artist with a literary flair, and it may well be said that if Clifford Irving hadn’t existed, Howard Hughes would have had to invent him. Who can say that he actually didn’t? The Hoax entertains this premise, since its Irving (Richard Gere— an actor who, in another feedback loop, came to stardom in the 1970s playing another con man in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven) comes to believe he is channeling Hughes, and takes to playing him in front of a mirror. In fact, Hughes appears to have manipulated Irving for purposes of his own, which the film suggests were related to his vendetta against another erstwhile client, Richard Nixon, then occupant of the White House.

In the end, as in the famous sequence of Orson Welles’s Lady from Shanghai, it’s all mirrors, in which the various protagonists see only themselves— the wannabe author Irving; his sad-sack accomplice Richard Suskind (Alfred Molina); a bevy of avaricious publishers and publicity hounds— but in which the master fabricator, Hughes himself, never appears at all. (Oh, and let’s not forget Welles’s own later film, F for Fake. What goes around keeps coming around.)

Sucked into a black hole

Zodiac too is a film with a pedigree. San Francisco’s Zodiac killer, who terrorized the Bay Area in the late 1960s, inspired Dirty Harry, and with it the long sequence of films in which Clint Eastwood shaped his film persona— the most enduring one of the last third of the 20th Century— as the cop who’s a moral heartbeat away from the creepy killers he pursues. Dirty Harry, of course, got his man, but the SFPD never did get theirs. Zodiac— who, to coin a phrase, played the media the way Heifetz played the violin— peppered the local press intermittently for a decade with messages in code. A police sketch artist created a hooded, Klan-like figure with a cultish, crosshair insignia on his chest that remains an iconic figure of dread: the first of the really, really bad guys of whom the contemporary suicide bomber is a lineal descendant.

In place of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, Fincher offers three of the real-life figures whose lives were sucked into the black hole of Zodiac’s identity: Paul Avery, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter first assigned to the case (Robert Downey, Jr., in an edgy performance that comes uncomfortably close to his own well-publicized battles with drugs and alcohol); Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the Chronicle cartoonist who quit his job to devote himself to tracking Zodiac; and Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the lead detective on the case, and, in another Hollywood feedback, the technical consultant to Steve McQueen’s Bullitt. If The Hoax is, among other things, a merciless satire of the publishing business, Zodiac presents newspaper editors wrestling with the moral as well as circulation problems of giving publicity to a serial killer, and cops who work hard within the rules to catch their man but are stymied by inconclusive evidence.

A film about a killer who won’t be caught is a film about the frustrations of the chase itself, and its effects on those who pursue an increasingly cold trail. Avery gets fired after turning in a fake Zodiac letter as a “joke”; Toschi gets busted back to the beat; and Graysmith, on whose books the film is based, sacrifices his marriage and career to his sleuthing obsession. What is it that draws good men to the abyss? We’ve needed to give a face to evil ever since we invented the Devil, and the face it inevitably wears is our own; it has no other. Howard Hughes withdrew his own face; the Zodiac killer never revealed his. In their different ways, The Hoax and Zodiac use the early 1970s— the moment of Kent State and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi— as a template to reflect an image of the present. There is no need to say “Iraq,” any more than there was for The Godfather and Nashville to say “Vietnam.” Nowadays, there is no other subject.