But if concrete political issues are somehow present in the film, Kane himself continues to be depicted as a mystery to be unraveled. The wide-angle, deep-focus photography in the later sections enhances the mystery by frustrating Welles’s inquisitive camera, setting up a feeling of space that can never be crossed no matter how many “No Trespassing” signs are disregarded. Throughout, Kane has been presented with a mixture of awe, satiric invective, and sympathy. He has provoked widely different responses from the people around him: in the newsreel he has been attacked for different reasons by both capital and labor; at his death, the Inquirer has shown a distinguished-looking photo with the banner headline, “CHARLES FOSTER KANE DIES AFTER A LIFETIME OF SERVICE,” while the rival Chronicle has pictured him glowering under a dark hat brim, with the headline reading “C. F. KANE DIES AT XANADU ESTATE.” To Thatcher, Kane was a spoiled do-gooder who was a menace to business; to Bernstein, he was a hero who helped build the country; to Leland, he was an egomaniac who wanted everybody to love him but who left only “a tip in return.” Ultimately the audience has been made to feel that no single response is adequate, and near the end the disparate judgments take the form of a single, complex emotion. Thompson, functioning as the audience’s surrogate, remarks to Susan Alexander, “You know, all the same I feel sorry for Mr. Kane.” Susan, the only character we’ve actually seen Kane victimize, the only person who could condemn the man outright, gives Thompson a harsh look and a terse reply: “Don’t you think I do?”
Susan’s comment crystallizes the film’s divided attitude. In the later sequences where Kane nearly destroys Susan, the images of his massive form towering over the submissive woman are more than simple evocations of tyranny: we fear along with Susan, but we also feel sympathy for Kane, who is pained by age and thwarted desire. This feeling of pity is especially strong toward the end, where the most powerful and intense moments, the enraged breaking up of Susan’s room and the discovery of the paperweight, are played off against the predatory Raymond (Paul Stewart) and the vast, chilly labyrinth of Xanadu. As the inquiry has deepened, the tone of the film has shifted subtly; the comic blackout sketches that characterize the Thatcher and Bernstein sections have been replaced by a darker, more grotesque mingling of comedy and tragedy that belongs to Leland and Susan—the scenes near the big Xanadu fireplace, for example, with Susan’s voice echoing, “A person could go crazy in this dump”; or the gaudy picnic, with a stream of black cars driving morosely down a beach toward a swampy encampment, where a jazz band plays “This Can’t Be Love” against a matted background of sinister RKO bats. Each phase of the movie becomes more painful than the one before, until we arrive at the most cynical of the witnesses, Raymond, who is ironically responsible for the most intimate part of the story: Susan leaves, her image receding down a corridor into infinity (another brilliant use of optical printing), and Kane blindly destroys her room, the crisis bringing back memories of childhood loss and rejection.
As Kane has grown increasingly isolated, the camera has stressed the space between him and other people; Thompson never emerges from the shadows, but by the end of Raymond’s story he has become less like a reporter and more like a sympathetic, slightly troubled onlooker. (It seems to me a mistake to speak of him as a fully developed character, as some commentators do. Even the acting of the role is clumsy—William Alland being in fact an amateur who suggests a man wandering into the fiction from outside.) Finally he gives up his search, knowing too much to expect a simple answer. We, of course, are in a more privileged position and are given, if not a rational explanation, a vision of “Rosebud,” an image that both transcends and unifies the various witnesses to Kane’s life.
Of course Welles was uneasy about the whole sled idea. He dismissed “Rosebud” in a famous remark, calling it “dollar-book Freud” and emphasizing that Herman Mankiewicz thought it up. Pauline Kael has said that it is “such a primitive kind of Freudianism that it . . . hardly seems Freudian at all.” It should be noted, however, that some of the psychoanalytic ideas in Citizen Kane might indeed have come straight from a textbook. According to Freudian terminology, Charles Foster Kane can be typed as a regressive, anal-sadistic personality. His lumpen-bourgeois family is composed of a weak, untrustworthy father and a loving, albeit puritanical mother; he is taken away from this family at a prepubescent stage and reared by a bank; as an adult he “returns” to what Freud describes as a pregenital form of sexuality in which “not the genital component-instincts, but the sadistic and anal are most prominent” (General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1917). Thus, throughout his adult life Kane is partly a sadist, who wants to obtain power over others, and partly an anal type, who obsessively collects zoo animals and museum pieces. His childhood, as Joseph McBride has pointed out, seems far from idyllic; nevertheless, it is a childhood toward which he has been compulsively drawn.
The burning sled, whether it is classically Freudian or not, contributes to a coherent and, it seems to me, psychologically valid characterization. The closing scenes also provide a fascinating commentary on the limits of human power; more specifically, they are a statement about the disparity between the world as it is and the world as imagination would have it be. Throughout the film, Mankiewicz and Welles have underlined the fact that Kane is essentially childlike, a man who, for all his power, can never be completely in control of his life; just as he is not a “self-made” tycoon, so he is not the creator of his private destiny. All of his energies are spent in trying to create his own world or in rebelling against anyone who asserts authority over his will. He despises Thatcher, of course, and when he can no longer “look after” the little people, he begins to hate them. He tries to maintain a dangerous but awe-inspiring daydream, of which Xanadu is only the most obvious manifestation. Whenever the dreamworld is threatened, he responds with a child’s rage. For example, when Thatcher interrupts Kane’s play in the snow, the boy defends himself by striking out with his sled; when Jim Gettys interrupts the political game, Kane breaks into a terrifying but pathetic fury, his enraged voice cut off as Gettys exits and calmly closes a door; when Leland and Susan assert their independence, Kane retaliates with all the force of his pent-up anger. When we last see him, he throws a literal tantrum, regressing to the state of a child destroying a nursery.
Whatever his influence in other spheres, Kane cannot control his own fate. (In 1941, with the New Deal in ascendance and the United States entering a war against fascism, it must have seemed to Welles that Hearst was in a similar position.) He is forever imprisoned by his childhood egotism, living out power fantasies and converting everything into toys. The film is full of these toys: first there is the sled, then the newspaper, then the Spanish-American War. (Notice, in fact, how the war has been depicted as a child’s game, with the Inquirer reporters sporting little wooden rifles and funny hats.) Toward the end there is Susan, with her marionette-style opera makeup and her dollhouse room in a fantasy castle. The final toy, the paperweight Kane discovers after his tantrum, is probably the most satisfactory image of them all; it represents not so much a lost innocence as a striving after an imaginary, “adult” autonomy. It symbolizes an ideal—a self-enclosed realm, immune from change, where Kane can feel he has control over his life. The sled burning at the heart of the furnace therefore becomes less a purely Freudian explanation than the logical conclusion to Kane’s tortured romantic idealism. It is one of those images, known to passion and the imagination, that William Butler Yeats called “self-born mockers of Man’s enterprise.”
After our discovery of this sled, Citizen Kane concludes with still another reminder of the camera’s inquisitiveness, a near-complete reversal of the process with which it began. The camera retreats from the magic castle, staring at the awesome smoke of corruption in the sky, settling at last on the “No Trespassing” sign outside the gate. Even the title has been a contradiction in terms.
II
As an aesthetic object and as a psychological portrait, Citizen Kane becomes a highly
satisfying film, representing what is probably the limit to which a story could move toward self-conscious “art” and “significance” while still remaining within the codes of the studio system. As a portrait of an archetypal tycoon, it is so effective that it has become part of American folklore. And its central images keep returning in contemporary life—Nixon secluding himself in San Clemente, or Howard Hughes, before his death, owning a retreat in the Bahamas that he called the “Hotel Xanadu.” For all of its evasiveness about Hearst’s crimes, Kane is also a deliberately political film, growing directly out of the ethos of the Popular Front. As we have seen, it continually reminds the viewer of things outside itself—either the movies, or Hearst, or the “Welles phenomenon.” Before leaving it, therefore, one needs at least briefly to shift discussion away from formalist analysis and closer to the auteur and the audience. In this way one can see that Kane’s biographical, autobiographical, and political complexities are logical extensions of the aesthetic and psychological tensions I have been describing.
We may begin by noting that Kane’s splendidly artful ambivalence toward its central character is not shared by the major biographies of Hearst written during the thirties; in fact these books are as much in conflict as Thatcher and the labor spokesman in the Kane newsreel. The authorized portrait, Mrs. Freemont Older’s William Randolph Hearst, American (1936), makes Hearst a paragon of civic virtue, a sort of philosopher-king. Ferdinand Lundberg’s Imperial Hearst (1937), which I have already mentioned and which became the object of an absurd plagiarism case against Mankiewicz and Welles, is a muckraking journalist’s account of Hearst’s crimes. Interestingly, W. A. Swanberg’s “definitive” Citizen Hearst, which appeared in 1961, takes a middle-of-the-road view; although Swanberg does not acknowledge it, his title and the structure of his narrative clearly were influenced by the movie.
All of this data about Hearst is valuable to students of Kane, not only for its own sake but also because it shows how the film delights in making references to its primary source. Even the New York Inquirer is significant. In real life Hearst owned a paper with that title, which was published by the Griffin brothers. “From the legal standpoint,” newspaper columnist Irving Hoffman wrote, “they might as well have referred to the paper in the picture as the Journal-American.” Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Kane and Hearst are not identical. Welles was at least technically correct when he said that Kane was a fictional character partly based on several turn-of-the-century tycoons. In translating the yellow journalist into a creature of fiction, he and Mankiewicz had borrowed freely from other lives. They had departed from biographical fact in a number of crucial ways, each of them important to the dramatic and perhaps also the ideological effect of the film.
Unlike the biographers, Welles and Mankiewicz chose to concentrate on a private life rather than the public structuring of an empire. They also gave Kane a humble birth, which was not true of any of his possible models; it was certainly not true of Hearst (the whole point of John Dos Passos’s famous sketch had been that W. R., born into Phoebe Hearst’s “richly feathered nest,” could never understand his public), and it was not true of McCormack or Insull or Welles or Mankiewicz. Last, and in some ways most significant because more than anything else it aroused the ire of the Hearst press, they made Susan Alexander into a tormented, unhappy creature who walks out on her supposed benefactor—this in contrast to the Hearst-Davies relationship, which was generally happy. Indeed when death finally came to Hearst, it was very different from Kane’s death in the film. Hearst did not spend his last days alone in the caverns of his estate; several years earlier he had moved to the less resplendent Beverly Hills mansion of his mistress, and he died with her close at hand. His last words were unrecorded.
These changes imply that Welles and Mankiewicz were trying to create sympathy for Kane by playing down his menace. As a tycoon in the grip of a psychological compulsion, as a poor boy suddenly given wealth, he becomes less, not more, representative of his class. To some viewers he has looked like a great man doomed by his own good fortune, an embodiment of the same “American Dream” myth that is often applied to Welles. When the script is summarized, Welles’s and Mankiewicz’s sense of melodrama appears to have displaced their politics.
Of course Hearst’s life was in some sense melodramatic, and writers of the left in the thirties took relish in giving his career the structure of a Hollywood-style morality play. Dos Passos saw Hearst as a “spent Caesar grown old with spending,” and Charles Beard, in his introduction to the Lundberg biography, predicted that the old man would die lonely and unloved. By showing Kane as a tragicomic failure, Mankiewicz and Welles were doing no more than what these writers had done, and when they changed the facts to suit the demands of melodrama, they were, in principle at least, entirely justified; after all, they were conveying political attitudes through fiction, not through biography. Thus Citizen Kane might have been an answer to the plea made toward the end of Imperial Hearst:
Down through the years [Hearst] has played a great and ghastly part in shaping the American mind. He could, more truthfully than any other man, say, “The American mentality is my mentality.” This is not because Hearst has become “the voice of the people,” speaking their unformulated thoughts and desires. It has been because adequate, widespread and popularized criticism of his innumerable deceptions has been lacking.
The italics here are Lundberg’s, and they convey his feelings of urgency. Kane, however, emphasizes the failures of Hearst more than the deceptions; as Charles Eckert has remarked, the hero dies on a “mystified bed of capital.” Harry Wasserman has been more explicit: “It is safe and reassuring,” he writes, “to think of Citizen Kane and his sled . . . but unsettling and dangerous to discover the sometimes insidious results of such innocent obsessions. What is more important to remember about a character like Kane is not how the loss of a sled influenced his life, but how the newspapers published by his real-life counterpart Hearst might have influenced a war.”
One response to such comments is to say that the film clearly does satirize Kane’s public life and that its “mystifications” are at least partly ironic. It exposes Kane’s manipulative interest in the Spanish-American War, it reveals his exploitative “philosophy” of journalism, and it makes several references to his attacks on organized labor. In the election scenes it depicts the corruption of machine politics with the force of a great editorial cartoon. Moreover, it links the press to the politicians themselves, showing Kane hoist on his own petard. In regard to Kane’s so-called progressive youth, the film is explicit in its denunciation; his democratic aspirations are seen as in reality a desire for power, a means to extend paternalistic benevolence to the “people.” We even see Kane on a balcony conferring with Hitler, an image that colors the audience’s reaction to everything the character does. What is more radical and more interesting, however, is that Citizen Kane brings its own workings under scrutiny, questioning the whole process of popular entertainment, including the “image making” of the movies. From the beginning, when “Rosebud” is introduced as a cheap means of spicing up a newsreel, until the end, when Thompson confesses the futility of searching out the meaning for a single word, Kane casts doubt on its own conclusions. Moreover, Welles’s brilliant manipulation of cinematic technique keeps reminding us that we are watching a movie, an exceedingly clever and entertaining manipulation of reality, rather than reality itself. This is not to say, of course, that Welles hated Hollywood movies; on the contrary, it was precisely his delight in the conventions of the medium that gave his self-consciousness and self-criticism such poetic force.
Even so, the film is primarily about Kane’s private life. It shows that the characters are determined by their material existence, and yet it seems fatalistic about this condition, suggesting that there is no way to radically transform human consciousness. It treats the political issues allusively, aiming relentlessly at “Rosebud” and making Kane a sympathetic, if frightening, cha
racter, a dead failure rather than a living threat. Because of its all-inclusive ironies, its sentimental mythology, and the sheer gusto of its Hollywood craftsmanship, it has always been open to a certain amount of justifiable criticism from the left; indeed the most doctrinaire critics have suggested that Kane is a pernicious influence on its audience, leaving us complacently and ignorantly believing that money can’t buy happiness.
There are, of course, several possible reasons why the film takes a personal and psychological approach and loads itself with plot conventions from earlier movies—Welles’s own ambivalence about the Kane type, for example, or Mankiewicz’s methods of working, or the simple wish to stay within the realm of fantasy and entertainment. Doubtless one of the more important reasons why Citizen Kane is not a more didactic film is that from the time of the modern-dress Julius Caesar, Welles had contended that the problem with left-wing melodrama was its “cardboard, Simon-Legree villains.” But a still deeper reason is suggested by the fact that Kane often seems to be very much about Orson Welles himself. It was Welles, after all, who was known as the enfant terrible, and this may account for Kane’s emphasis on infantile rage. It was Welles, not Hearst, who was raised by a guardian, and the guardian’s name has been given to a character in the film. It was Welles who made a famous comment comparing the movies to his own personal electric train set, almost like Kane remarking that it would be “fun” to run a newspaper. According to John Houseman, who worked on an early version of the script, “the deeper we penetrated beyond the public events into the heart of Charles Foster Kane, the closer we seemed to come to the identity of Orson Welles.” Houseman, Mankiewicz, and Welles himself deliberately set about filling the script with parallels and private jokes about the film’s director; even Raymond the butler was modeled on a suspicious servant who used to lurk around Welles’s big Hollywood house. Bernard Herrmann once summed up all the evidence when he noted that the film is “in a way . . . a dream-like autobiography of Welles”; hence, it is no surprise that the film should have been more about psychology than about the structure of an empire, more sympathetic than purely destructive to the central character.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 13
