'Citizen Kane' and Cynical Look at American Dream Still Pertinent Today
As part of my illustrious Sight & Sound challenge, I watched Orson Welles's seminal classic, Citizen Kane (1941). The film, which depicts the rise and fall of wealthy newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, was recently bumped out of Sight & Sound's top spot by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).
Re-enactment
Whether one movie is better than the other is your own damn opinion; the more important thing to consider is how both these films, decades after their original release dates, continue to say something about our world.
With Citizen Kane, it is the film's attack on the American Dream that remains so relevant today, with making money many people's sole objective. Trust me, as a Cinema Studies student with a Bachelor of Arts, I've spent my fair share of mixers answering the question, "But what will you do with something like that?"
My face is frozen like this now
Orson Welles's film was, funny enough, one of the first things we watched in my film program. I had never seen it before, and when it finished, I was astounded that amidst the glitz and glamour of Studio Era Hollywood productions was this gem which basically took down wealth and fame as nothing more than alienating and debilitating.
And for some reason, Hollywood loved that.
The film begins with Charles Foster Kane's final moments. He falls to the ground in his gigantic mansion, Xanadu, and utters a final word: Rosebud.
A lengthy "News on the March" segment then begins, before revealing that a group of newspapermen are watching the segment and preparing it for release. The newspaper editor tells his men that they're missing one piece of the puzzle: the meaning of Kane's final word, Rosebud.
"Rosebud...it'll probably turn out to be something quite simple," the editor says, before sending one of his men into the field to investigate Kane. Little does he know that these words foreshadow the film's arresting conclusion.
This is where the film really begins to say something. Rather than approach Kane's life from the position of an impartial observer, as most biopics would do, Welles uses conduits into Kane's life to tell their own stories. So, we eventually have his old guardian, Thatcher's narrative, his business partner Bernstein's, his ex-friend Leland's, and his ex-wife Susan Alexander's. These narratives are all incredibly fragile and unreliable, told as they are from the point of view of someone who knew Kane only from the outside. As he did not care for Kane, Leland's tales paint him in a more negative light; Bernstein, who always liked Kane, relates only the events of Kane's successes, rather than failures. Subjectivity cannot be fully trusted.
Citizen Kane is infuriating and entrancing in its declaration that we can never truly know someone. No matter how many stories we hear, or news segments we watch, Kane remains just as enigmatic as ever--just as do many celebrities caught in the media-saturated world of popular culture.
Who knows what's going on behind that facade?
Citizen Kane's critique of popular culture extends to a take-down of the American Dream. Kane embodies a classic rags-to-riches tale. With his humble beginnings, he vows to be a voice of the Working Man. As we might expect, however, this proclamation becomes null when Kane's money starts to overshadow his values. The drawback of the American Dream, then, is that you never stop wanting more--enough is never enough.
By the film's end, Kane is just an old man alone in a gigantic house. Rich, but alienated from everyone around him.
~*~*~*All by myseeeeelf~*~*~*
Welles deftly crafts this critique of the American Dream which, as I mentioned earlier, is still entirely relevant. Look at contestants on game shows, lottery ticket scratchers, reality show wannabe-celebrities, and it's not difficult to see that the endgame in mind for all of them is remaining rich, famous, and, of course, beloved.
I recently watched the documentary, The Queen of Versailles (2012) , which follows the founder and owner of Westgate Resorts, the biggest timeshare company in North America, as he builds the largest single-family home in the United States of America: Versailles. The reason? "Because I can," he says, proudly. Lauren Greenfield's documentary shows the ills of mega-richness as she contrasts interviews with the family's matriarch, Jackie Siegel, in which she gleefully comments on her $17,000 pair of alligator-skin boots, with interviews with the Philippino nannies living in the house. One such tearful interview reveals that the nanny hasn't seen her own son since he was seven... and he is now 26. She comments that the Siegel children are like her own, and they are all she has.
Pictured: Humble, Everyday Americans
Clearly, the American Dream is not one of equality, but one of climbing up to new heights without a care for who might get stomped beneath your feet. Such is the message of Citizen Kane and, of course, the reason why Welles's film continues to be important today.
There are many other things to say about Citizen Kane, other than its social/political critique and interesting use of narration. Its use of deep focus cinematography, for one, is impeccable and makes for a crisp, noir-ish aesthetic. Really, the entire film comes together so effortlessly and cleanly that its two-hour runtime whips by. Maybe Citizen Kane needed to be knocked out of the top spot to give someone else a chance, but did it deserve to reign over 'em all for 50 years?
Abso-tootin'-lootely.
Welles takes his viewers on a journey so wonderfully emotional and intriguing that it becomes almost as exciting as sledding in Colorado on a wintry day.
I give this film 4/4 Rosebuds
