Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart

Saw David Fincher’s new movie Zodiac and thought it was tops. Not so much a serial-killer film as a rumpled, patient period procedural with little to no payoff, which is definitely cool by me. (I wanted it to be even more go-nowhere than it was – to end in the state of ignorance & existential agony that much of the movie seems to point toward. But instead it’s a tad more comforting: it ends up arguing that the cops pretty much know who the Zodiac Killer was, but just couldn’t prove it.)

Anyway, getting back to that rumpled & patient vibe, I think some reviews have compared the movie to All the President’s Men, which seems bang-on to me. But Zodiac also has real visual style. The opening sequence, with the camera gliding through a suburban California neighbourhood at car level while 4th of July fireworks go off, made me swoon; likewise a shot of a mail cart moving through a newspaper office.

Everything in the movie is fact-based – Fincher was apparently much more scrupulous about that than the director of a typical Hollywood production would be – and Robert Downey Jr. plays Paul Avery, a flamboyant San Francisco crime reporter. I poked around afterward & discovered that Avery was also the co-author of The Voices of Guns, the definitive book about that other classic Bay Area crime story of the 1970s, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. I’ve read the book but didn’t put the names together when watching the movie; when I did later, I got all giddy. Because, um, I’ve maybe been obsessed with Patty Hearst for years. Perhaps.

So here’s “Tania” (Patty’s nom d’guerre, y’know) by Camper Van, from their 1988 album Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. I liked this record a lot when it came out and still kind of do – there are a couple stomping Led Zep rewrites, and “She Divines Water” has a lovely lilt, and I dig all the David Lindleyesque world-music instrumentation. But looking back, it seems painfully clear how ill-served the band was by the sparkling ’80s production. Everything here cries out desperately for a little dirt.

• Camper Van Beethoven, “Tania” (buy here)