Zodiac / Wild Hogs
March 2 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 9
Ever since the phenomenon that was Barbenheimer weekend happened there’s been feeble attempts to recreate the magic by pointing out interesting cross-programmed big releases. We had Garfuriosa weekend and Glicked weekend but none of them hit the same way. There have also been attempts to mine the past for interesting examples of the same phenomenon. Personally I’d love to be able to go back in time to March 13, 1987 and catch a double feature opening weekend of Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II. But between the big box office and important cultural relevance my money for the greatest cross programmed big release weekend is March 2, 2007, the release of two monumental films about what happens when men don’t have purpose in their lives and attempt to fill the void with something harmful, Zodiac and Wild Hogs.
Zodiac is broadly the story of the hunt for the Zodiac, a serial killer and media frenzy who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area for years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, primarily told through the lens of San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), SFPD homicide detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and cartoonist / Zodiac researcher Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal).
Wild Hogs is the story of a quartet of middle aged men who lead unfulfilling lives and find solace only in their shared love of riding motorcycles. Woody (John Travolta) is facing an impending divorce and bankruptcy. Dudley (William H Macy) is a socially inept computer programmer who is unlucky in love. Bobby (Martin Lawrence) hates his job and is henpecked by his wife, and Doug (Tim Allen) is overworked and sad about his medically mandated diet. They decide to take a road trip across the country on their motorcycles, encountering many problems along the way, not least of which is a violent encounter with the Del Fuegos motorcycle club, led by the dangerous Jack Blade (Ray Liotta).
First to get the inevitable ice cold takes out of the way: Zodiac is a masterpiece and Wild Hogs is dogshit.
Zodiac incredibly manages to thread the needle of both demonstrating how the Zodiac killer captured the attention of the entire state of Northern California but also how Zodiac himself is a sad and pathetic man who only evaded capture due to police incompetence and jurisdictional dysfunction. Unlike many other films where Fincher depicts a psychopath, Zodiac himself in no way reads as “cool” but is still terrifying. Fincher’s direction makes a 160 minute movie feel breezy. He captures the mood and look of the Nixon administration without making his needle drops and cultural references feel cliché.1 Every performance is fully dialed in and mesmerizing. It fucking rules. If you haven’t seen Zodiac yet it is beyond worth the $4 it’ll cost to rent it. You can do it tonight! I promise it’s better than the three episodes of Buffy you’d watch after dinner normally.2
Wild Hogs is a movie star driven comedy that uses its movie stars terribly. John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen, and William H Macy have all made me laugh in movies before, but I can count on one hand the amount of times I laughed in this movie, and three of those were moments of broad enough slapstick that they’d function just as well on America’s Funniest Home Videos.3 The characters are beyond uninteresting; they mostly earned my ire more than anything else. The plot drags so much that despite the fact that I was watching the movie in the early afternoon with friends I still nearly fell asleep during its 100 minute runtime. The boomer-coded needle drops are so corny I’m honestly shocked that “Born To Be Wild” wasn’t ever used. Despite the fact that Peter Fonda was stunt cast in a 2007 motorcycle movie two weeks ago in a way that made me pump my fist in triumph, when he appeared in Wild Hogs doing the exact same thing it made me roll my eyes and audibly groan. 90% of the jokes are “no homo” coded homophobia and they suck. Wild Hogs is so bad that if a friend told me they liked it I would stop trusting that friend’s judgement about literally anything.
While the two films do not share anything in terms of merit, they strangely share a theme. Both films are about a kind of loss of purpose among the men at their center. A lot of hay is made today about a modern crisis of masculinity, about how lonely young men are led into horrifying cults of misogyny and misanthropy broadly called the “manosphere”. Comedian and all-around genius Jamie Loftus recorded a podcast series on this phenomenon that is well worth your time. One of the things she points to is a kind of aimlessness among young men that leads them go looking for purpose on the internet, where harmful algorithms point them towards horrifying and radicalizing toxic modes of thought. Dangerous things happen when aimless men go looking for meaning to define themselves. They end up destroying their lives chasing serial killers and taking cross-country motorcycle rides.
The three men at the center of Zodiac find themselves being driven to solve the mystery of who the Zodiac Killer was and why he did the things that he did in part due to their lack of other purpose. Each of them doubtless had fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles who banded together to fight an ontological evil in the form of the Second World War; their grandparents fought to save democracy in the First World War, and now in their own adulthoods their once in a generation struggle is, what, a nebulous struggle against national self-determination in Vietnam? Lacking this same generational sense of purpose, these men are thrilled to find themselves in the center of a real struggle against real evil. In the same way that young men of today can find themselves enticed by simple narratives about how there is an evil conspiracy to put straight white men like them under the thumb of a nebulous other, so too do Avery, Toschi, and Graysmith find themselves driven by this simple narrative of a single evil man terrorizing their community, a man who can in theory be caught, held to account, and brought to justice, rendering them heroes. The terrible thing of course is that they can’t. The struggle to find Zodiac consumes their lives, crowding out everything else and drives wedges into their careers and personal relationships, broadly wrecking their lives beyond repair. Just as an incel might find purpose in waging war against the chads and stacys of the world only to find himself more alone and isolated than ever, so too do the men of Zodiac find purpose in chasing someone who killed a quarter as many people as slipping on banana peels has, isolating themselves from their loved ones and material success in doing so.
While Wild Hogs isn’t Andrew Tate, it’s not not Andrew Tate either. On its surface it features four men who are unhappy with their quiet suburban midwestern lives in entirely relatable ways. Divorce and financial insecurity and job unhappiness and overwork and loneliness are all very real phenomena that all really stink! The toxicity of the film comes from each of these men’s proposed solutions to their problems.
Travolta’s Woody is going through a divorce, always a painful process that often has no real clear and obvious answers, and I have no glib answer for this. He’s also broke, but he’s the kind of broke that you find out about while talking to your financial manager on your conspicuously expensive proto-smartphone in your five bedroom home on an acre-sized lot before climbing aboard your $16k recreational motorcycle for a ride with the boys. Lawrence’s Bobby feels hemmed in by his wife, but his wife also has very real concerns for their household finances after he’s taken a year off to fail to write a self-help book.4 Allen’s Doug feels overworked in his dental practice, but it’s also his dental practice, and he’s a dentist, a profession so notorious for its levels of disposable income that “dentist” is a shorthand in many niche hobby circles for “something that very marginally improves performance but is also incredibly expensive.” He is also dissatisfied with changes to his diet to get his cholesterol down, eschewing bacon for breakfast and meatloaf for dinner in favor of a half-grapefruit for breakfast and an undressed pile of lettuce for dinner. To all of these I say: skill issue. Better budgeting, better spousal communication, and a remote understanding of how to make food taste good could solve all of these problems.
The problem isn’t that Woody is broke or that Bobby is henpecked or that Doug is forced to eat salad. The problem is that none of them are willing to confront these problems on any level beyond “it’s unfair that they exist”. Each of these men seem to think that they’re entitled to a life devoid of even the slightest bit of friction, and their only proposed solution for it is to run away and perform a certain kind of motorcycle guy masculinity just as hard as humanly possible while ignoring their families and their careers. If you find enough purpose in your motorcycle you can successfully ignore your problems. They won’t go away of course, but you’ll have a motorcycle.
The best possible interpretation of these two films and their legacies is as a kind of cautionary tale. Wild Hogs ends with a pair of dei ex machinae where first Peter Fonda appears to appease the bad guys and then Extreme Makeover: Home Edition appears to undo the damage the Wild Hogs have done. It’s patently impossible and ridiculous. It offers no plausible solution to the protagonists’ problems, only magical ones, so clearly the main characters are meant to be viewed as villainous, right? Zodiac ends with its three protagonists in various states of disrepute and family dysfunction and with the only plausible suspect for the Zodiac killings dying before being arrested. It clearly demonstrates that chasing the mystery of a press-obsessed serial killer weirdo is a dead end for personal fulfillment, right? Then I remember how much money Wild Hogs made, and how much money the touring motorcycle5 industry makes, and I remember how every time the subject of Zodiac comes up in my movie group chat my friend with a goddamn PhD announces “that movie makes me want to try and solve the Zodiac mystery.” No one is safe. Men will literally try and solve the Zodiac mystery instead of going to therapy.
Ratings:
Wild Hogs ★☆☆☆☆
Zodiac ★★★★★
Economics: Both Wild Hogs and Zodiac made money (one only technically), which itself is interesting in that these films are indicative of a model of profit making film that no longer exists: the star driven high budget original concept, but at the same time imploring anyone to try and mimic Wild Hogs on any level feels like folly.
While both films made money, only one was an absolute smash, and because we live in a fallen world, that smash was Wild Hogs. Wild Hogs opened to number 1 at the box office just ahead of Zodiac. Ghost Rider in its 3rd week of release was number 3. Zodiac would go on to make $83 million at the global box office plus an estimated $21 million in DVD sales. While it did make a profit this amount of money is considered an underperformer against its $65 million budget. Wild Hogs made $254 million at the global box office plus $95 million in DVD sales against its $60 million budget. It is the 13th biggest grosser of 2007 and the second biggest hit that year among films that are neither sequels nor based on existing IP.
Most fun novelty cocktail: At one point in Zodiac Robert Graysmith decides the best way to cozy up to SF Chronicle crime writer Paul Avery is to lean into his charming alcoholic tendencies and meet him at the bar. Graysmith, clearly coded as a dweeb and not much of a drinker orders his drink of choice, an “Aqua Velva” a classic midcentury overly-garnished drink with a striking blue color. Realizing I had all the ingredients on my home bar (albeit my curaçao is the standard amber color, not blue) I made one for my Zodiac watch. The drink is cloyingly sweet and if made to standard specs unbearably boozy, but can be tweaked into a more balanced beverage.
Jackson O’Brien’s “not trying to get blasted” Aqua Velva:
1 oz gin
¾ oz curaçao or other orange liqueur
¼ oz lemon juice
¼ oz lime juice
¼ oz simple syrup
Sparkling water
Fill a highball glass with ice. Add gin, curaçao, citrus juice, and simple. Fill to the top with sparkling water. Stir well. Garnish with a cocktail cherry and an orange slice. Try not to get too obsessed with serial killers.
Ranking of films where Tim Allen plays someone who’s best friend is named “Woody”:
1. Toy Story 3
2. Toy Story
3. Toy Story 2
4. Toy Story 4
5-99. [this space intentionally left blank]
100. Wild Hogs
Next Week: 300
The greatest example of this is a moment where Toschi and his partner Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) are in a car and making small talk. Armstrong asks Toschi if he’s ever tried Japanese food, struggling and coming up with “you know, like, the urchin” as an example. Fincher & screenwriter James Vanderbilt beautifully establish this moment in time not by having his characters talk about the Chicago 7 trial or Woodstock or the Moon Landing or any other number of late 60s signifiers, but by establishing that this is the moment when sushi was something just at the edge of American culture, so very on the edge that a police detective in one of the most worldly cities in North America can’t remember its name.
If you don’t have time for 2.5 hours of entertainment in one night, the movie also has a beautiful natural break to it. Watch it until the montage where the Salesforce / Transbay Tower is being constructed while “Inner City Blues” by Marvin Gaye starts playing as part 1 and then resume at that montage on day 2.
for the record those laughs are:
1. William H Macy eating shit as he runs into a sign on his motorcycle.
2. John Travolta getting attacked by a crow on the road.
3. Martin Lawrence eating shit when he’s attacked by a bull.
4. William H Macy dramatically removing his glasses and attempting his best “sexy” look as he approaches a dance floor
everyone knows that if you have an unfulfilled need to write you write a film blog, not a self-help book
A word on the phenomenon of Touring Motorcycles.
While none of the Wild Hogs themselves ride touring motorcycles it’s fairly obvious to anyone familiar with broader motorcycle culture that these guys are coded as touring motorcycle riders, also commonly known as “baggers”. Baggers are large bikes that allow for a more comfortable long ride. Their wide wheel base allows for more ease in balancing, and often have added luxury features like built in stereos and heated seats. They often also come with large cargo compartments, the “bags” after which baggers get their names. They also sacrifice both power and fuel efficiency for user comfort and are super expensive.
There are many kinds of two wheeled vehicle riders, and most of us have an uneasy alliance with each other. I personally have been a vespa guy and a bicycle commuter, and I have many friends who are into recreational and sports bicycling, moped enthusiasts, custom chopper builders, anarchist freak bike punks, and sports motorcycle enthusiasts. While we all have our differences we all agree on a few key points: cagers are not to be trusted while on the road, and baggers suck. Just as every kind of labor union makes room for solidarity with other unions except for police unions, so too do all two-wheeled-vehicle operators have a policy of solidarity with each other except for baggers. Baggers are the cops of two wheeled vehicles
Zodiac remains a high water mark! It's talked about on a lot of the film sets I work on - folks love that movie. I don't even remember Wild Hogs existed.