Zodiac

There is an essential and perhaps constitutive gap between what we normally feel to be a conviction of truth and the evidence in support of it. To some extent, all evidence is somewhat circumstantial. How do we close that gap? How much certainty is enough to be "certain"?

One of the more provocative and interesting interpretations of Zodiac see the movie as dramatizing the arrival of the digital age as it encroaches upon and overwhelms the solid certainty, the contact, of analog. The solid certainties of hierarchies of truth and meaning give way to a digital flatness of equivalent 1's and 0's. The search for the killer, an ethical imperative and need for truth, marks this film as a tragedy, if only an epistemological one.

I did not write a "Best Movies of 2007" post, but this was the best movie of 2007.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling