I scratched my first number on the card early into the scene, matching the quick introduction of the Odorama in Polyester. The film begins with a scientist talking us through the method and instructions of the Odorama; luring us in, Waters gives us the practical joke of the first (and best) smell – a bouquet of roses. The smell translated fantastically, both in the olfactory fidelity of its original source (yeah, it smelled like roses) and its relationship to the screen, matching the vibrant pink of those flowers.

I was mustered, through my nose, to focus on the aesthetic sensibility of such natural beauty: as one of the most beautiful shots of Zodiac Killer Project, it might be a practical joke of a similar kind – allowing us easy access into the potentials of Lafferty and Shackleton’s lenses, before the process of stagnation and failure commence. 

The second scratch-and-sniff cements the shift towards emptiness – happening ten minutes later, over a wide angle of an old, desolate dining room. Zodiac… is full, paradoxically, of emptiness, and the shots of ‘home’ make for the most gutting examples. There is no real separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spaces, no serial killer hovel to contrast the warm family home – most interiors are empty, most exteriors sunny. This is simple mundanity, where you can smell the dust in the air. I gave a whiff of No.2 and instead got artificial fart. 

Polyester’s main plot follows Francine Fishpaw (played by Divine), whose strong sense of smell exacerbates the gruesome collapse of her family dynamic. Through the Odorama, we’re trapped in the nostrils of a despised mother, forced to relent the hurtful odors of her loved ones – namely, the farts of her husband, and the model glue her rebellious teen daughter huffs. 

The smell of cheap glue came into Zodiac Killer Project during the image of an empty diner. The camera’s depiction of America (well, maybe every depiction of the USA, intentional or not) can feel a bit similar to a model village – some constructed town in a basement, made entirely of toothpicks and fabric. It’s only in the quaintness of these images provided that Shackleton’s main narration can thrive – we’re watching something both beautiful and flat, necessarily.

Shackleton is no stranger to still, slow, flat images. I asked how the renewed emergence of his film Paint Drying in festivals last year felt, compared to the inherent ‘failure’ of ZKP.

CS: I did Paint Drying 10 years ago, almost precisely. It never screened anywhere apart from for the BBFC [British Board of Film Classification]. It’s only in the last few years that there have been these one-off screenings here and there, including one in Portugal and one in Brisbane, which as a result means on Wikipedia and IMDB – It’s now listed as a 2023 film weirdly?
There’s this whole debate in the talk page about whether it should be listed as a 2023 film, when obviously all its significance was in 2016, but they’re like “these are the rules, it’s about first public presentation” – which in a way is quite nice… it makes me sound like I’ve got a lot more going on. Really keeping myself in the cultural mix, whereas actually I’m not, I’m coasting on the fumes of a provocation from 10 years ago.

JR: I mean that really is Shacklefraud.

Fish? Petrol?

Smells 4 and 5 rendered the transition period, from my secure knowledge of what each scent related to in the Polyester-verse to the frightening unknown. It was also my last record of specific timecodes for each smell, leaving me dependent upon my own nasal sensibilities.1

Perhaps scared by my separation from Polyester’s umbilical cord – or simply bad at smelling – I found it hard to distinguish what was going on at all between each sniff. I knew one of the two was petrol, but even after smelling both, I struggled to find any words for either.

It didn’t help that both smells appeared in dry circumstances: Number 4 occurred in a near-pristine grey hallway, and Number 5 occurred during an extended montage looking more generally at the styles and tropes of true crime. Was there even any new ground to sniff out here? 

JR: If you had to come up with a scratch-n-sniff for Zodiac Killer Project, can you talk me through some of the scents that you’d pick?

CS: I’m at a disadvantage here because I have a really bad sense of smell. Terribly bad. And I don’t know, true crime is, in some ways, so slickly detached in its aesthetic that I almost find it hard to think of it having a smell. It’s like all of its images are too clinical for that. Because, you know, what would you say the smells are? Like blood and cigarettes, smoke, gunpowder. But all those, they all feel too live, too raw for something that’s so inherently cold.  

JR: The only counter to that is – and can we really call it, like, true crime – but like, those mukbangs of sort-of recounting true crime stories that are on Youtube, where it’s those absolute feasts you get while it’s happening…

I showed Charlie some search results for True Crime Mukbangs on Youtube. 

CS: “He injected his fluid into random women at the grocery store. Here’s why…” – I’m gonna watch without sound maybe.

JR: I mean, feel free to-

CS: I don’t really want to.

Vodka / Nail Polish Remover

The disillusionment I experienced with my ability to sniff perhaps suited the progression of the film; Lafferty’s exhaustive-but-collapsing plot to capture his Zodiac Killer is paired with Shackleton’s similarly-exhaustive attempt to capture the story. We’re easily swept up in the wave of potential, excited by the prospect of both investigators achieving their goal: . The seventh smell, which reminded me of vodka, was paired with a lengthy car chase along an American highway – one of many that emphasised the size of the U.S., its propensity for lengthy amounts of time alone, just getting from A to B.2 It wouldn’t shock me to see Shackleton’s depiction of Lafferty driving drunk, as one reaction to the tunnel vision effects that both face. 

My sixth smell, nail polish remover, wafted over the shot of a church.3 It’s hard not to pair the smell to the actions that would follow in this same venue, a clear narrative climax of Zodiac Killer Project: in an attempt to grab trace DNA samples, Lafferty constructs a scheme involving A.A. meetings, a reverend, and a fishbowl. The ridiculousness of the plan (which culminates in asking the suspect to carry said fishbowl, to imprint his palm onto the glass) is only outdone by the ridiculousness of its failure – the suspect, for no clear reason, performs a ritualistic rubbing and slapping of the bowl once he places it down, erasing any possible print.

I discovered only recently that poppers like Rush often label themselves as Nail Polish Remover. The undoubtable high of experiencing such irrefutable evidence, of both a killer and a thrilling narrative beat for Lafferty and Shackleton respectively, is burdened with the constant potential of being wrong, and therefore delusional. How could such a strange handling of a fish bowl be damning, exciting? We’re lured into experiencing the same hallucinatory reasoning as both investigators – I couldn’t help feeling determined that this slapping was proof, that Lafferty really was a black sheep. falling under the spells and schemes of the genre. 

Zodiac Killer Project could easily constrict itself to fit entirely into Shackleton’s viewpoint – based on his previous projects, I saw that as the only possible outcome. It’s a pleasant surprise, therefore, when we’re disrupted – we see Shackleton narrate from the recording booth, and hear the voice of a producer riffing against him. On its first arrival this second voice hit with relief, opening up a humour detached from the wit of the usual narration.

The Q&A after the screening would, of course, herald similar results, allowing Shackleton’s playful devotion to his film to hit an audience-shaped brick wall. I asked him about the art of the Q&A.

CS: One of the things I remember realising early on […] is that you really need to ride the transition from film to Q&A very carefully. Often I’d have the experience at film festivals where everyone’s very excited to be premiering their films… fairly frequently the film would end and the filmmakers would come up to do a Q&A, and it would become apparent that they’d been drinking at the bar the whole time, being really giddy and excited about their film career, and they’d be having a party up on stage, and it’d be really jarring in contrast to the experience of watching their film. I remember that being an early realisation that you have to pitch yourself at whatever tonal or dramatic register your film ends on…

I’d often struggle with this, especially because I felt for a long time that the films I was making didn’t necessarily share my personality. I’d then feel quite affected when I’d try to be the person who resembled the film afterwards, which was what partly led me to putting myself in the work to the extent that I am in this film – the film is full of me, I narrate the entire thing, on an improvisatory basis, so it really does have my demeanour and my delivery, and in theory therefore there’s a collapsed distance between the film and the Q&A – if anything it feels like the film never ended…

  I think this one, because there’s so much of me in it… by the time you get to the Q&A, it’s a bit redundant. Everything that needs to be said by me has already been said by me. But then I think on the flipside of that, it gives people more impetus to challenge me on some of what’s in the film because they feel like I’ve been doing a Q&A for the last hour and a half and now they’re gonna get to respond.

Bark Chips / Human Shit

In the MAC’s Q&A, alongside praises of the film’s approach, one audience member critiqued Shackleton. Her issue was focused largely on the film’s absence of any meaningful discussion of the Zodiac Killer as a larger cultural identity. The film refuses to explore any other potential suspects, strands of investigation, relating to the Zodiac killings – informationally, it is devoid of any context unrelated to Shackleton’s own journey. Her experience, of coming to the cinema to see a film titled The Zodiac Killer Project, missed that title’s promise, in some regard.

Her questions and confrontations about the film’s glaring omissions, enabled Shackleton to reveal a truth about this non-adaptation: even in the distribution phase, with the film existing as a complete identity, he still couldn’t legally discuss the contents of the book in a significant manner. If examined as a piece of true crime, the project would necessarily fail. It felt fantastically tense being in the theatre during the moment; no side disagreed with the other, even if

There are similar exciting tensions within Zodiac Killer Project, especially in my odoramic viewing conditions. In one scene, Shackleton returns us to a stalwart, beige house, where we find Lafferty and his wife preparing for a double-date with the suspect and his wife. Hiding under the double-date, of course, is Lafferty’s true intentions – shown through a montage of guns being cocked and prepared. Shackleton, again here, throws contrast between situation and action, a stagnant house and the close-up silver sheen of potential violence. I got the familiar stink of bark chips from scent no.8 during this montage of cocking guns, edging the metallic aesthetic of firepower closer to some form of nature.4 The smell reminded me of the audial sensations of Uncle Boonmee and His Past Lives, in which every interior is unable to ignore the exterior, the white noise of the home coated with the soundscape of active fauna. In both cases, there is no interiority – Lafferty’s personal life, and marriage, is a mere tool of his professional circle for this plot. The bark-chip scent pervading the house could even suggest that growth is even stimulating from his insecure foundations. Shackleton’s work as an infection, subsuming Lafferty’s original voice to fit a true crime narrative and leaving the shell of U.S. structures to film, only begins thanks to the juicy seed left in ‘The Silent Badge’. 

Another late-game contrast landed less effectively – over a flapping flag of the USA, I scratched no.9, receiving the unmistakable whiff of faeces.5 It felt quite disappointing to discover, in my own senses, such an obvious political statement so near to the film’s conclusion. I assume both Waters and Shackleton would grimace at the thought of ending with such a clear partnership of a U.S. flag and a pile of shit – but each individual image’s placement near the end perhaps makes for a more interesting structural analysis of both directors. In both the odorama and film, we might view both sensations as a chance to engage in the bigger picture – to face the worst, whether human waste or the imposing systemic injustices that build the U.S.A. Neither film could justify ending on that image – I don’t think it satisfies either director to focus so much on their work setting an example – but its appearance can still hint at the leviathan structures that, in some way, contain filmmaking.

The true crime mukbang Charlie watched in my interview with him was far different to what I’d personally imagined. Rather than just watching someone eat as they describe fentanyl overdoses, we had a P.O.V. perspective, a hand also reaching out to feast. I asked if he felt sated. 

CS: It’s odd, isn’t it? I mean, the true crime aspect is kind of arbitrary in that. Feels like the main component is like a kind of companionship thing, right? Like you have the sense of having a friend who’s excitedly telling you something. In some ways, that’s the thesis of my film – I’m the friend excitedly telling you something. In this case it happens to be about a true crime project, but it could just be anything else.

In ZDP, As Charlie attempts to find closure for Lafferty’s failed search, he disrupts us for a final time to discuss the beauty of Xenia Patricia’s cinematography. The shot he disrupts, both narratively and visually, is a beautifully low sunset, spread across the sky above a highway – the best of the film’s long phantom drives. We can no longer imagine Lafferty in the driver’s seat, nor attach to the petering narrative we’ve been following. The film’s beauty is the final witness interrogated.

As I looked into the reflection of this beautiful shot, in both the booth’s window and Shackleton’s glasses, I finished Polyester‘s odorama with No.10: icing sugar: some form of light, potentially meaningless, decoration.6

Shackleton’s focus on a beautiful sunset lightly reeked of scripted improv – an attempt to be spontaneous in a circumstance so contained. There’s something to be said for the sweetness of that kind of spontaneity, which – in excess – can overpower any original flavour. 
I don’t mind it, though. I relate quite strongly to the fear of insularity when I’m writing, or filming, something that is mine, to some degree – it’s what I like about films like Witches (dir. Elizabeth Sankey) and Rembrandt’s J’accuse (dir. Peter Greenaway). Shackleton’s gestures to an outside voice, an alternative intention, hardly disrupt the flow of Zodiac Killer Project, but it still adds texture to a journey that can feel, at times, just a little bit too intimate. 

The icing sugar smell, leaning close to the aroma of parma violets, pushed me towards an empathetic lens in its closing moments. What could have felt trivial, a meaningless cruise of desolate America, instead unfolds into a deeply personal journey through the anxieties of influence – a love-hate relationship, where Shackleton’s understanding of True Crime

In my interview, I’d offered some of my own forms of decoration – a curly wurly, a pint of Intuition, in an effort coat our conversation with a texture of local within. In our last moments, we spoke about ‘event’ screenings at large, and their role in contemporary screenings:

CS: I feel pretty sympathetic to the eventisation of cinema, because it feels to me like one coherent path forward from the clearly unsustainable one we’re in currently, where we have a cinema culture built on a model 100 years ago, before there were options about how to view movies.  It’s just fairly obviously not viable to remain wedded to a system that relies on you being able to get five auditoriums worth of Pillion viewers in every day throughout the first three weeks of December.  It makes sense to me the idea that you make cinema more of an event, and that’s better for everyone. I think in all honesty, the extent of the ‘event’ that I’m looking for is that I can hopefully see some people I know there – and we can have a beer in the bar afterwards. And I think that kind of comes with the rest, right? If you build enough of an audience, if you build a kind of community in your venue, then people come to expect that.

As much as I enjoyed bouncing around Zodiac Killer Project nose first, hoping to find new takes from within my least appreciated sense, my discoveries were no more important than those that came from other people; Max Harding of Boxer Short Film fame; Dani Mercier behind Whatever Pays the Rent; fellow Concrete writer Eleanor Hill; the woman who challenged Shackleton’s Zodiac-focuses. In a parallel universe where I saw Zodiac Killer Project with my nose plugged, I might come to the same conclusions I did today – but there’s no world I could imagine where I share the same thoughts as another cinema-goer entirely.

While simple, there’s an understated beauty to how something as simple as a Q&A can unfold into so many potentials. The questions – the gift of someone else’s interpretation, condensed into the form of one brief sentence – are much more important than any answer. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a director on tour, witnessing a whole census of reactions across the country, each city brimming with difference on a microscopic level.

My experience as a truffle hog, rooting out any chances to disrupt the screen snout-first, turned up much more than nuggets. It re-engaged my self awareness – not only was I this paper-sniffing freak, but I was simply one of an indeterminate mass (of at least ten people). Each other viewer of Zodiac Killer Project may have been smelling just as attentively – experiencing the dust dancing in the air of the Midlands Arts Centre cinema; the light perspirations of other viewers sat nearby; the allure of pints and fruit pastilles, like a fruit pie on the windowsill; the surprise appearance of a cartoonish fart from that weird bloke with a bit of card. In a way, we’re helpless to the whims of disruption, of paratext, and methods of conceiving everything but the film. There is always enough to cause a stink in every screening – what are we to do but open our nose?

Footnotes

1. Every smell I mention in the future of this article is factually incorrect in relation to Polyester, according to Wikipedia’s list of smells. For each future example, I will provide a footnote of the ‘correct’ smell. Smell number No.4 was pizza. Smell No.5 petrol. ↩︎
2. Smell No.7 – Natural Gas, perhaps more fitting than what I experienced. ↩︎
3. No.6 – Skunk. ↩︎
4. ‘New Car Smell’. ↩︎
5. Mistaken – Dirty Shoes. ↩︎
6. Air Freshener ↩︎