Zodiac Sounds
As I plan to screen The Conversation for the umpteenth time in my film sound class this semester, I’m thinking about Zodiac—that film that seemed to slip under the radar in 2007 but wound up on a bunch of “best of” lists. I’m not quite sure I agree with the hyperbolic reviews but while, for example, a recent Film Comment article points to Vertigo as the San Francisco thriller that Zodiac pays homage to, I really think that the biggest intertextual pay-off comes from its relation to that other techno-frisco data-durational film. The Conversation and Zodiac share a film score by David Shire, whose music from The Conversation, echoed in Zodiac, has become the theme for poring over inconclusive record, to painstakingly piece together an elusive truth. Interestingly, when you hear Shire’s music in Zodiac that most resembles his work in The Conversation, it is only well after the half-way point of the film, at the point when you think everything has happened. Thus starts the real story and drama of the piece—the part of the film before which everything was prelude. The Shire music keeps you engaged, as if the director is telling you, yes he knows what he is doing, and there’s still a long way to the end. This is not a coda. The thriller music referencing the earlier Coppola film accompanies the extra laps Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) runs through, year after year, following old leads and revisiting far flung police archives, until he finally lands on a sort-of-certainty, only after much time has passed and the original crime much forgotten.