One That Got Away

The Town That Dreaded Sundown was produced while the Zodiac killings were still under active investigation, approximately 400 miles away. The documentary drama came of age in the decade of my childhood, although I did not know anything of Pierce’s work until very recently, when ThisTV purchased syndication and ran it in their cyclic fashion. While the trombone sequence can be considered signatory for the seventies idea of graphic exploitation, my concern with the film is less critical, and more symmetrical, to allude to Brian Greene’s reminder about the past and present, in physics. The 07 Zodiac has an uncanny familial reflection when compared to Pierce’s more primitive lampoon. Like The Onion Field, Zodiac elevates the focus of the true crime genre, and raises questions about justice and equity. If we wind up haunted by the heinous whom we never apprehend, the penal systems we have for those criminals proven guilty seems to be little more than an existential boomerang. Wambaugh brackets his film between the explosive annihilation of a good man with a strong center juxtaposed against an abscess of judicial process for his impulsive villains, and Fontana and Levinson,  in Oz, bind all together in manipulative culpability, while the EU confinement centers virtually dispense with the concept of punishment. Oz is a good series, but it gets bogged down by too much emphasis on "the rats in the maze," investigations with no repercussions, death sentences with no proportionality. Murderers, however, are the most distinctive of group subsets, marked by an irrevocable violation against the group, to the point that even our more aggressive primates are impacted. Apes may be more in the moment than some, but when they conspire to kill they know they've stressed the bonds that bind the families under the alpha leaders.