Iron Circle of Zidan

High-throned in secret bliss, for us frail dust
Emptied his glory, even to nakedness -- a young Milton, sighted

Yaphet Kotto's execution sequence in the 78 film Blue Collar is an orchestrated marvel of plausible incredulity, textured with a granular, menacing quality. If the little people like Keitel and Pryor want to vie with the leadership of the union for power, they don't know what hard ball is, not until the bosses demonstrate they can even take on a pit bull like Kotto's character and deal him a lethal hand, and these are auto workers, with families and small row homes. Management needs to divide the Keitel-Pryor united front, and to do that, they eliminate the brawn, locking him in a spray paint trailer with a non-operational mask, turning on the paint nozzles to asphyxiate the little guy loyalist, one who roars like a lion. It is an unforgettable moment in the films of the me decade, and it is a texture the later Zodiac Killer reminiscences with poise and authenticity, the earth tones, the muted palette of ecological anxiety, particularly with the dead and the stressed grey squirrels in cages.

Blue Collar is not a great film, but it is true to the anxieties of my childhood, and if Kotto and Pryor were to be noted for nothing else, how their paranoia feeds off each other under Schrader's poignant look at hardened men who are desperate to make it, is one of the originals in a now nostalgia driven medium. The kill is also as much a metaphor on the consequences of defiance and expulsion as is Leah Remini's splinter from Hubbard's jazz and glitter. We are not so far removed from our primate origins, the ruptures within varying group dynamics, as we like to believe. Qaddfi may have been an Islamic socialist loon, but under his authority Libya at least had a known identity. What is it now? Collateral damage to the best intentions of the freedom loving US, where beneath the surface, how that freedom is defined isn't quite on par with constitutional articles.

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.