October 28, 2024

This Is The Zodiac Speaking is worth hearing out

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
A series of unsolved murders in California in the 1960s; child endangerment.

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The story
This Is The Zodiac Speaking dropped on Netflix almost a week ago at this writing, but I kept elbowing it aside on my to-review list, because this is one of those cases I just don't think I can learn anything new about…and that's because I've already interacted with what I think is the most sensible explanation, and I can't go back to how I felt about the case before.

For me, for the assassination of JFK, it's Mortal Error; for the Zodiac killings, whatever tragic list of names you believe qualifies, it's Jarett Kobek's work. We probably need a name for that kind of case, the kind that's no longer an obsession after you meet up with a proposed solution – "fallen-scales cases"? suggestions welcome – but whatever we want to call it, the point is that I've already decided Arthur Leigh Allen isn't a valid suspect*, so the "shocking new series that points to Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac killer" part of the doc's IMDb logline made me reluctant to engage.

*neither, still, is my dad

But This Is The Zodiac Speaking doesn't only, or even primarily, do that; it's as much about the rest of that logline – "an unlikely family['s] increasingly chilling relationship with Allen" – as it is about Allen himself, or the promised connection to the notorious case. The three-parter is unique in the Zodiac-doc space, focusing on the now-elderly Seawater siblings and their childhood experiences being groomed, then allegedly assaulted, by Allen, not to mention their mother's intransigent refusal to believe Allen was a monster.

Directed by Phil Lott (executive producer on The Beauty Queen Killer and Murders at the Burger Joint, among other projects) and Ari Mark (Murder in the Heartland), Speaking is a difficult but worthwhile watch for that reason. The almost casual recounting of a lost weekend at the track with Allen, involving roofies and entire days blanked out of memory, is an affecting look at the "this was the price of having a father figure" attitude of previous generations towards this kind of predator. When the Seawaters watch 2007's Zodiac and either realize what had befallen them as children, or retreat further into denial, you really feel both the resignation of the victimized child and the impossibly high cost of secrecy and shame.

As an audiovisual prospect, Speaking is solid, including contemporary press-conference footage and a handful of photos I'd not seen before. It has good secondary access as well, to KTVU reporters, Darlene Ferrin's sister, and the case dean himself, Robert Graysmith. (Someone should do a documentary about only Graysmith; I am not a crackpot. …Unless someone already has, in which case, hit me with a link!) As is true of many of these three-parters, it probably wanted to be a 95-minute feature instead, but I did like that it seemed to assume a certain level of case knowledge in the viewer, and only spent time on the by-now-catechism details of the file that it could tie to the Seawaters' testimony. 

I don't agree with its conclusions, necessarily; Allen's stated desire, on several occasions, to confess to "put an end to" police interest in him may have more to do with law-enforcement pressure (or with Allen's wanting to cover up other crimes) than with per se guilt. I definitely don't agree with the decision to send cameras into one of the Seawaters' hospice rooms so that the others could talk about coming together on their dark shared history, even if the family okayed it. But the choice to set up at the shoulder of a single family, and to look at Allen from that vantage point, in the context of the impunity with which sexual predators could operate on struggling families, is a smart one, and one more major-case projects should make.

This Is The Zodiac Speaking has something to say – maybe not about the disposition of the case, but about where else justice for victims might be found.