What to Think About Citizen Kane on First Viewing: A Dialogue
What to Think About Art: This post was inspired not by my love of film but by a memory that came back to me like Proust’s madeleine. I was watching Lovecraft Country and there’s a scene where one of the characters goes back to 1920s Paris to sing and dance in Josephine Baker’s jazz club. And at the thought of black jazz musicians in Paris, my mind immediately flew to...Boston University, January of 2010.
I was in graduate school for music composition and I had one of those old white professors who knows what is best. So the class was about Stravinsky, but there was a lot of table-setting about Stravinsky’s world, and at one point we were talking about how jazz was popular in Paris when Stravinsky lived there, and Professor said (and I do quote):
“Now you know, a lot of great American jazz musicians went to Paris, because they were appreciated there and it was less racist. And the greatest of these jazz musicians was?”
He paused then, inviting us to respond, but of course implying that jazz musicians could be ranked, and that he knew the rankings, and could control them.
We don’t need to dwell on this guy and the racism within that statement. But let’s say that if we asked him to give us a list of the best “classical musicians” of all time, he would say (1) the term “classical” is so broad as to be an offensive stereotype of Western musical forms, (2) “musicians” aren’t worth ranking, so let’s interpret it as composers, and (3) Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Mozart, Schoenberg, then everybody else.
Now, I’m not a scholar of jazz history; I am a fan and I know a little bit. But I knew that there was almost no chance I’d get the answer to this question right, because it wasn’t designed to have an obvious answer, it was designed to exercise control over the classroom by showing that there were right answers and wrong answers to such questions, and only Professor Guy had the right answers.
“Dexter Morgan!” I shouted.
“No, but that’s a good guess.”
Total silence from the rest of the class. (This was a graduate seminar in Stravinsky at a very classically-oriented conservatory program. One of my inspirations for leaving the school was a conversation I had with one of my classmates in which I referenced Joe Biden, then Vice President, and the person had no idea who he was and assumed he was an avant-garde composer. This group - not great on jazz history either. The Professor knew this, of course, and it was supremely frustrating to him to have a student in his class whose knowledge base approached or exceeded his in breadth. We did not get along. Another time, he called me into his office to discuss a paper of mine that he hated, and my mother had just been in a car accident and I was not in the mood, and we screamed at each other. I later apologized.)
“Eric Dolphy!” I tried again.
“Uh, no,” he said, this time a little startled. I’m not sure whether he was surprised at my knowledge or perhaps he didn’t know who Eric Dolphy was.
“Wait, are we talking musicians who lived there permanently?” I asked. “Because lots of them toured. I mean, Miles Davis. Jeez. Miles Davis.”
“No, no, no” he said, waving at me to be quiet. “_______. The greatest was Josephine Baker.”
Now, I’m not a Josephine Baker scholar. But I think it’s questionable to call her a singer, let alone a “jazz musician.” Sort of like calling Freddie Mercury a pianist. Or like calling Sammy Davis Jr. a singer. But whatever.
The reason I remember this story from time to time is it embodies for me the frustration of being told what to think about art.
The title of this blog was always intended to be tongue-in-cheek. I don’t intend to say that my thoughts on art are definitive or even correct--to the contrary, I intentionally mix in so much personal anecdote to some of my critical essays that it’s impossible to even really “agree” with me (I think). That’s part of my critical ethos - I don’t believe there’s any definitive take on a piece of art (sorry JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock, you suck), there’s just whatever that art inspires in its audience, and that’s enormously contingent on the subjective personal experiences of the audience and even the context of the work within changing ideologies and the progression of time.
That said, one of the reasons I do the blog is that the greatest pleasures from art, for me at least, are in being part of a dialogue. When we all appreciate the same piece of art, and we agree that it’s well made and “important” or part of the canon for whatever reason, then we can all approach it from our unique personal and historical contexts and be part of a discourse. The discourse helps us to learn about each other and the human experience as much as, sometimes more than, the art itself.
My spouse is no stranger to this approach - she has a PhD in literature. She spent a solid decade reading hundreds of years’ worth of criticism of a relatively small number of works written eight hundred years ago.
Perhaps more importantly for today, one of the foundational experiences in our early relationship was the class we took together in college on the films of Alfred Hitchcock. (Also foundational for me in that it’s the only film class I ever took, and nearly the entire source of my knowledge on filmmaking technique; I know what an “establishing shot” is, for instance, because of that class.)
The Hitchcock class was another old-white-professor-who-knows-best class. He was fond of saying things like “and of course, the greatest and most beautiful of all movie stars was Grace Kelly. Or should I say, [wink], Princess Grace of Monaco.” He and Professor Stravinsky Guy would have gotten along, if not for the fact that all such professors fucking hate each other.
Anyway, Professor Hitchcock Guy declared that Vertigo was the greatest film of all time. There was no arguing with him on that point. However, he did concede that Citizen Kane should be way up there.
And that brings us to Citizen Kane (a good 20,000 words before Proust would’ve gotten there). For the entirety of my childhood and well into my adulthood, Citizen Kane was number one on the Sight and Sound critics and directors polls and all the lists of the greatest movies of all time.
That is the reason I didn’t watch it. Nobody ever told me it was an exciting, enjoyable movie. Nobody ever told me it was thought-provoking or even controversial. At least in the circles I ran, it was none of those things - it was just the greatest movie of all time.
So I never saw Citizen Kane. I also have not read Ulysses or, until recently and only in the abridged graphic novel form, In Search of Lost Time.
(And I really resisted Stravinsky, too, because of that professor. My resistance to Stravinsky inspired what I believe to be the best joke I ever composed. I was in an elevator with a classmate after an hour of Professor Stravinsky Guy, and I said “hey, you know what’s weird about this Stravinsky class? All this talk about Stravinsky and we never talk about his greatest accomplishment.”
“What’s that,” asked my classmate, genuinely perplexed.
“Well, Stravinsky invented the vagina. Before that, it was all buttsex.”
This is the point where I’d like to say that the elevator doors opened and I walked out. In fact the elevator was very slow. The classmate looked at me blankly. “Wait, what? He invented what?”
And so I had to repeat the joke. Slowly. After I repeated it, and we stood in silence for a good five seconds, the elevator doors opened. And then I did walk out and did not turn around. I turned a corner and hid in a research carrel and laughed for ten minutes. The classmate later told me he continued to be very confused for a while, but on reflection found it amusing.)
A few years ago, Vertigo supplanted Citizen Kane on Sight and Sound. Around the same time, I left music school and did other things with my life, and now I don’t have any reason to give a fuck about what anyone wants me to think about art, and I have this blog to articulate my own thoughts about art and (usually) pretend I’m part of a dialogue.
And so when I saw that scene in Lovecraft Country where a character travels through time to 1920s Paris, I thought “I should finally watch Citizen Kane.”
And then I thought “I should watch it with my spouse and then we could do a dialogue about it for the blog.” Which brings us to today.
Spouse: For the record, I got an A in that Hitchcock class because I enjoy and am good at playing the game of film criticism in the style of the old white guy. Like, I get it and I enjoy demonstrating that I get it. Later, when I would go on to teach literature classes, I realized that I did NOT have to give up my affinity for old white guy art criticism in order to then examine it and say, “this is not the only way to interpret this art thing, but it is important to understand the extent to which its value system has dominated everything in western art for centuries.”
What I hate - HATE - about many academic debates is the framing that suggests that something is being sacrificed when we say “hey, the literary canon as we know it has been dominated by white male creators, and let’s maybe try and correct for that by asking what has been missed.” Guys, I’m not even saying Hitchcock is overrated; I’m saying I don’t buy that he’s somehow unquestionably the greatest. I still grew up on Hitchcock movies and think many of them are astonishing achievements. I could still probably write a paper that Professor Grace-Kelly-Is-The-Hottest would give me an A on, and I would not even need to write anything disingenuous in it. At the same time, I think it would be irresponsible of me to teach that same course in that same way. I see no need to perpetuate the hegemony of established classics; the patriarchy is doing a perfectly fine job of that on its own.
Having said that, I am happy to listen to someone who wants to tell me about the greatness of Citizen Kane on its own merits, and a couple of years ago I was a mom of a toddler with untreated postpartum depression and crushing pessimism about my future as an academic, and I stumbled upon a podcast that made me feel, briefly, like there might be a purpose out there for me. On this podcast, which I absolutely do not want to drag in any way, two middle-aged guys dissect “great films” at even greater length. Without going into my brief love affair with this podcast and subsequent disillusionment, I will say that these guys do seem to understand their guy-ness to some extent. They acknowledge that the vast majority of so-called “great” films are directed by men, feature men as protagonists, are defined by the male gaze, etc. But, you know, they like those films because they are middle aged guys, and they just wanna make their podcast! And sometimes, I just wanted to listen to it and not care that it was yet another set of footprints on an extremely well trodden path. These movies were easy to like, and they made me like them more with the way they dove into them. They did for Die Hard what I wanted to do for Dante’s Divine Comedy in my own teaching.
One time, after (excitedly!) listening to a nearly-four-hour analysis of Lawrence of Arabia, I was actually moved to Facebook-message the podcast creators saying “I really enjoyed this, but at the same time it made me deeply sad that there are no epic films like this about complex women.” The response I got (I got a response!) was like “Hey, I hear you and it sucks. I wish that weren’t the way of the world. Hope things change for the better!” They are not here to solve the patriarchy, they’re just some dudes who like talking about movies, and they were raised in the great-films-of-all-time stew.
And you know what, so was I, and for a while I loved that podcast, and during the time in which I loved that podcast, those dudes convinced me that I needed to watch Citizen Kane, and I did. And you know what, it was a great experience and I learned a lot and it’s a great film. So yeah, I am ready to get an A on this blog thing, let’s do it.
That was a major difference between us even in college. You were always quite motivated to get an A.
Correction: I enjoyed the work involved in getting an A. See above: I liked Hitchcock movies.
Sure...I was always convinced I could get an A, but there were times that I felt the professor or the material was really shitty and while I wanted the institutional affirmation of my talent I couldn’t bring myself to dignify authority figures with the effort required. I don’t like to kiss the ring.
Except when it comes to your mother.
Going to leapfrog past that...One item I wanted to discuss before we watched the movie is Deadwood. We watched Deadwood together this past year, meaning I watched it before Citizen Kane and you watched it after. The overarching antagonist of Deadwood, of course, is George Hearst. In real life, Hearst was a mining magnate who became a Senator and was the father of William Randolph Hearst and the source of the family wealth. In Deadwood, he is a murderous piece of shit, but also very clearly a symbol of civilization itself - institutions, corruption, regularity, industry. He’s the death of the Wild West and the birth of modern America.
As we approach Citizen Kane I have Deadwood in the back of my mind. I really only know two things about Citizen Kane: I know the meaning of “Rosebud” thanks to an ancient joke from Family Guy, and I know it’s a thinly veiled biography of William Randolph Hearst and either a take on or an archetype of the “great man” trope of historiography. So I’m curious what Citizen Kane might have to say about Hearst’s origins and how that will color my understanding of Deadwood, a tv series produced 60 years later.
Interesting; I do not think I thought about Kane a single time while watching Deadwood. What is on my mind this time, actually, is Newsies, which I recently - surprise - listened to a podcast about. The podcast is called You’re Wrong About, and it absolutely does not argue that Newsies is a great or even underrated film. It’s more interested in the iconic nature of the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899 and how interesting it is that Disney chose to make a movie of that story in 1992 in a way that champions organized labor (starring a super young Christian Bale, no less!). William Randolph Hearst does not exactly come off as a Man Of The People or whatever in that story; to the contrary, his legacy is decidedly not on the side of workers’ rights. To that end, it’s pertinent, I think, to be reminded that Charles Foster Kane at least starts out at the Inquirer thinking of himself as some sort of people’s hero. I think it’s worthwhile to ask whether the film itself shares Kane’s expressed idealization of his role as a newsman. Certainly the legacy of the elder Hearst as portrayed in Deadwood isn’t one of devotion to the democratization of anything.
No, although George Hearst does become a US Senator and has gone down in history as a pillar of American civic and corporate culture. Deadwood posits that that sort of greatness comes with a large number of dead bodies, although it may be worth it in the end. I am curious whether Citizen Kane will be similarly realistic and/or cynical. On that note…
[We watched Citizen Kane.]
Ok, well I agree it has little in common with Deadwood. I am surprised that it was not a sprawling, “this man is America” historical epic. I guess that, knowing it was about William Randolph Hearst, a man who was arguably the premier journalist in America from Reconstruction to World War II, I just assumed. Also I’d seen the shots of him giving the speech with his face in the background. But in the end it’s really about how despite his pretensions and his proximity to history he ends up pathetic and unknowable.
Granted there was no way I was going to come out of this viewing agreeing I’d just seen the greatest movie of all time. But I am thinking that its supposed greatness has to do with its invention of cinematic language. Like, it’s beautifully shot, every frame has many layers of information, there are lots of interesting camera angles going on. I’m not a film historian, but if you were to tell me that Orson Welles invented all those techniques and nobody had ever done any of it before and he basically taught everyone how to make a movie, then sure, I’d believe you.
I sort of recall from the month of podcasts on Welles by the aforementioned film guys that yes, Orson Welles (though not a blast to work with!) was doing things no one had ever done with the way he shot the movie. And on this viewing, my third, I think I paid even more attention to what was going on visually than I had previously and it was, I gotta say, a great experience. It’s an extremely engaging movie to watch precisely because of the cinematic language you’re talking about. The way Kane is rarely in the frame without it being kind of jarring. Recall that his story is told through flashbacks, basically, from whatsisname Bernstein, Jed Leland, and Susan Alexander, then the butler guy who’s like “Rosebud? I’ll tell you about Rosebud if you give me a thousand bucks.” In their recollections, Kane looms large - he’s always shot from below so that he towers. When he’s foregrounded (like in that horrific scene where Leland wakes up from his drunken stupor and Kane has taken over writing his review of Alexander’s performance), he’s SO foregrounded. That scene is being told from Leland’s perspective, right? And yet he is out of focus and in the background, while Kane is maniacally typing in the foreground with his eyebrows doing all the lifting, and he occupies the entire left side of the shot. You can’t take your eyes off it.
Regarding Leland - this time, though I don’t recall thinking about it on previous viewings - do we think he is a reliable narrator of himself? That impassioned speech that he gives after Kane loses the election, when he’s basically stumbling around drunk at the Inquirer offices and telling Kane off for being a hypocrite, right before he storms off to Chicago? Do we think that’s like what really happened, or is that what Leland would like to think happened? And for that matter, do we apply that same scrutiny to the other characters who are recalling Kane to the journalist (the journalist who of course thinks his job is to figure out what Rosebud means, which is arguably jack shit)?
Well, arguably jack shit, yes. But I think there’s a more obvious, if not necessarily correct, argument that Rosebud stands for the life he lost when his family got rich and abandoned him and left him craving control and human affection and so on...but the movie also suggests that, at least in the presence of the interlocutors, he never really interrogated that. And so all we have are the impressions he left on these three people.
I think the film may also be saying that the parts of our lives that say the most about who we are happen when we’re children and appear inconsequential to those around us - and I do sympathize with that and that was a powerful statement for me, seeing as I have spent the last 20 years trying to get over being a horny neurotic asshole of a teenager (shoutout Big Mouth, again).
I just looked up Bernstein - the movie doesn’t give him a first name. It’s hard not to read that in light of Bernstein being the only Jew in the movie and the only non-WASP speaking character, and 1941 being a time when Jews weren’t really considered white people. And hard not to read it in light of him being a nebbishy little accountant.
I hadn’t thought of Leland that way, but I think you’re right. Leland’s memories are at once self-hating and self-congratulating, and surely in “real life” Leland wouldn’t have made all the right speeches at the right time. At the same time, it’s Leland’s “flashback” but he appears to remember stuff that happened while he was passed out drunk. And I was struck by other scenes where everything is larger than life - like when Kane dances around with showgirls for several minutes to celebrate - what? Hiring some really good writers? It’s not depicted as it happened or maybe even as one person remembers it happening - it’s depicted as an event that has grown in the memories of many people who were there, and talked about it for years afterward. And then as you get later in Kane’s life, and you’re seeing memories that are really just Susan’s recent memories of the two of them together, the physical actions and presentations of the characters are much more realistic (and unsympathetic), even as the scenery becomes quite ludicrous.
The showgirls scene really took my breath away this time on a visual level. I think it’s harder than it looks to act like you’re just sort of farting around and pretending you know how to dance, but because of how that whole scene and all the shots are constructed, that dancing sequence had to have been orchestrated to a T. Even so, Welles makes Kane look exactly like a doofy grinning guy who is trying to look good without looking like he’s trying, if that makes sense, and the way he’s always visible in the background while other men talk in the foreground is really mesmerizing. I don’t think I heard a word they were saying; I was just watching him. You’re right; the scene itself has no real point other than to convey the dizzying feeling of being with Kane as he moves up in the world.
Right, and that is a pointed contrast to the scene where he trashes Susan’s bedroom. In both cases he’s being watched and remembered by a lot of people and it’s very exaggerated and lasts a lot longer than you’d expect. I thought Orson Welles made a great contrast in the way those scenes were shot and also in his own physicality. For all the brilliant, loose goofiness you see in the early days, in that latter scene he’s a very stiff, awkward old man and the sight of him destroying all that art and furniture so stiffly and awkwardly scans as impotence.
Hell of a job they did aging him for the second half of this movie, it bears mentioning.
More generally, I thought the acting (and some of the staging) was very theatrical. There’s a lot of bigness to it, high drama, in a way that’s been discarded as film directors moved toward more closeups, less acting with the entire body. And the dialogue also moves very quickly. That’s not a judgment; I suspect our perspective on scene pacing and dramatic scale has been developed in the focus group era, where major studios are very afraid of anything that moves big and fast and isn’t repeated, because the audience might be aware they’re missing something and feel stupid. Anyway, that is to say that the acting, together with the set design and cinematography, all build this sense that there is a lot going on in every frame.
A lot of bigness, yes. And I actually think that watching it with this idea that it’s Bernstein, Leland, and Alexander who are telling it to us makes that aspect of it work for me more than it might otherwise; they’re telling their versions of this story, like we were saying before, and sometimes that injects grandiosity and consequence to what may in reality have been something that sounded much more mundane in real life, much less like a movie.
This is one of those movies during which you never forget you’re watching a movie, not unlike Pulp Fiction (another great film whose greatness is a bit complicated for me but which I have a hard time not thinking of constantly).
So I’m curious what your initial reaction was, watching this. Or I guess, watching it now. How did you respond to the pressure of its reputation? Was that something that affected your enjoyment of it or your critical opinion?
I went into it pretty wide-eyed. Watching it for the first time in 2017, I was like “here I am, ready for you to tell me why I should love this film; lay it on me.” This is why I went to graduate school in literature. I love close readings; I love texts that reveal themselves to you more the more you engage with them. I guess the other question is that of whether it deserves its reputation, and how that question bears on the 21st-century viewer’s experience. It’s a hard question for me to answer, because apart from that one Hitchcock class in college, I haven’t been trained in this field and thus don’t harbor resentments about the amount of space Kane takes up in the discourse. I imagine it’s a lot of space, and if you’re a film scholar tired of attending academic conferences at which 90% of the talks concern complicated male protagonists, it might piss you off! And I, for one, would not try to mansplain you out of that opinion.
All of which is to say, I’m pretty comfortable with my level of consciousness about art and art criticism. Like i said, I enjoy the work of getting an A, and watching Kane makes me feel like i am getting an A because there is so much going on and I see new things every time. Simultaneously, I am extremely open to a wide array of experiences in response to a work of art like Kane. The only attitude I have no time for is an incurious one.
What about you? You resisted watching this movie for a long time, because your automatic assumption when something is hailed as the best ever is that everyone is full of shit (I’m paraphrasing). Did it win you over at all?
I mean, it’s not a bad movie. In fact I’d say it’s obviously great. The obviousness is what I get stuck on, although maybe I wouldn’t if not for the film’s reputation.
I think what you said about Citizen Kane making you feel like you’re getting an A encapsulates my love-hate relationship with the literary (or film) canon. There are a lot of works in the canon that seem to be there because smart people can read them and teach them and get an A. There’s so much to unpack and write essays about. And there are so many techniques clearly and expertly deployed that you can grade those essays and know which ones should get As and which should not.
You just described my dream scenario, as a student and as a teacher.
I get that, but as an appreciator of art and a person who, except in my less enjoyable dreams, never has to go back to school and write a graded essay, I don’t give a fuck about the qualities that render a work popular among academic critics, per se.
By contrast, I just watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the past couple weeks, while exercising and doing dishes and so on. I don’t know if those films will ever make it onto the Sight and Sound top 100 lists. I don’t feel like I’m getting an A, watching those films - you know who the good guys and bad guys are and it’s not all that complicated. But it’s an astounding feat of filmmaking, it’s visually complex and beautiful in many of the ways Citizen Kane is, and it has wonderful characters and I sometimes cry during it. It’s meaningful and it earns its moments.
Totally agree about LOTR. I have seen those movies probably dozens of times and they also make me cry. I kind of feel like Peter Jackson lost me when he decided to make The Hobbit into three movies, but I don’t begrudge the Rings movies any of their acclaim.
The Hobbit was terrible. And I don’t begrudge Citizen Kane its acclaim. But would it be on your top 10 list for the greatest films of all time? I think even if you exclude “genre” work like LOTR - and we both agree that one should not do so - there are films that are just as complicated, beautiful, well directed and written and produced and acted, and say more important things about life and about American history as we see it today. There Will Be Blood comes to mind, in our era of antidemocratic resource pillaging and hypocritical religious nutjobbery. And that’s a film I’ve only seen once and I don’t know if it’s on my top 10! Don’t you think that part of Citizen Kane’s place in the literary canon comes from it being the right movie, saying the right thing at the right time, to a group of white male critics who are finally losing their grip on the academy after fifty years?
I think we fundamentally agree on how to parse the way society judges art, even if our mileage varies on how much we enjoy the part of consuming art that feels like studying. If I’m going to watch a movie like this, I like the part where we TALK about the shots and the themes and the questions, in addition to arguing about whether they’re worthy of being talked about. So can we do both? Was there anything that impressed or surprised you, or were there things that you recognized from pop culture as having been influenced by it?
Well, my entire academic background in film is that Hitchcock class. I think I understand a lot of the artistic decisions being made in film on a scene-to-scene level, but I have less to say about that than about the social forces that cause one film to be declared the consensus “greatest.” But I agree that the one has to derive from the other to some extent.
Maybe this is from you saying beforehand that you already knew that Rosebud was the sled, and how obvious it then seemed when that sled was so obviously foregrounded during that early sequence about his childhood: this time, I really just couldn’t stop shaking my head at the absurdity of the reporter’s obsession with that word. He’s kind of yada-yada-ing the rest and it’s almost like he’s not really even hearing it. The butler towards the end OFFERS to tell him more about what went on at Xanadu and he’s like nah, I really just need to figure out this Rosebud thing.
I actually read that as the reporter knowing that whatever the butler was going to say wasn’t worth the money the butler was demanding. A thousand bucks in 1941 money - that could buy you a house! But I agree that was dumb; the butler probably had some pretty crazy stories to tell.
And then as the camera slowly pulls back during that last scene as everyone’s walking through all the mountains of Kane’s stuff, everyone’s like “huh, yeah, never did figure out the whole Rosebud thing, oh well,” and it’s like they’re totally missing the point, thinking that there’s this one key that can unlock Kane for them. Remember that we start the movie with this newsreel of Kane’s life, which gives us a very broad strokes, TV announcer version of his accomplishments. This time, all of this made me think that no one actually has any real curiosity about Kane. They want a good story that will sell papers; they want Rosebud to be some eye-popping revelation. Which is, of course, thanks to Kane himself. The story of an emotionally stunted man with questionable motives whose relationship to his own power, fame, and wealth is complicated to say the very least? Not news; no one really wants that kind of a peek behind the curtain.
Made me think about what’s different and the same about the way we eulogize the dead, especially the complicated dead (Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant). Do you think we’ve gotten better at seeking out and perpetuating more nuanced narratives about famous people?
Well, one major difference that’s actually foregrounded, watching Citizen Kane today, is the death of the monoculture. When Kobe Bryant died, there wasn’t a Hearst Corporation to print the same obituary in every newspaper in the country, right? There are several major tv news networks, then newspapers and magazines and the entirety of the internet, where yes, those who are looking for it can usually find a nuanced narrative. Certainly you’ll find someone willing to talk about the rape stuff. But most people are not intellectuals, and there’s a social tradition of staying positive about the recently deceased, and so yeah, I don’t think mainstream media has changed a ton in the last 80 years.
Similarly, I do think that Orson Welles thought he was making mass media for the monoculture; I suspect (having done no research) that he and RKO wanted to have a big hit that was generally accessible (even with all the shit about operatic soprano music! Reminded me of Mildred Pierce, another work set in the 1940s, hinging on how everyone loves operatic sopranos. I don’t buy it!). A comparable film made in our era - a film that I think has a lot to say about individual legacy, and American history, would be There Will Be Blood. I’d say that film is comparable to Citizen Kane in “greatness,” for all the things that means, and I’m sure it was influenced by Citizen Kane, but I doubt anyone involved in making or distributing it thought it was going to be a big, mainstream hit. They just thought there was room in the market for that kind of nuance.
An interesting thing that those two films had in common, now that you mention it, is the amount of creative control Welles and Anderson, respectively, were given. They could essentially write their own ticket, even though Kane was the first movie Welles made (!). Paul Thomas Anderson, by contrast, had made Boogie Nights and others like Punch Drunk Love and Magnolia, and though none of them were what I would call mainstream hits, Boogie Nights was enough for a studio to be like “please make a movie with us and we’ll give you whatever you want.” In the case of There Will Be Blood, he was being backed by Miramax, of Weinstein kingmaker fame, and if there ever were a studio to make a name for itself in cerebral, auteur movies that also have a shot at mainstream appeal, well.
I do think you’re right, though, that Welles openly saw himself as making THE great American movie; having heard interviews with Paul Thomas Anderson, I think he has a bit more self awareness and perhaps a bit less hubris as a director (though much more experience by the mid-naughties, which is my favorite way of referring to the aughts).
I think we are ultimately meant to sympathize with Kane because his emotional development kind of stops at the point where his parents send him away with Thatcher and his soon-to-be incredibly lucrative trust. I think you can make the case that Kane’s mother knows that there is nothing that their newfound wealth can really do for her or for her husband, who in his brief time onscreen is depicted as kind of an ineffectual loser. Having presumably grown up with very little money herself, she wants to give Kane a chance to actually make something of the opportunities that money presents. However, as soon as he’s separated from his mother, he is deprived of emotional attachment and therefore spends the rest of his life pursuing love. The deepest, darkest insult that Susan hurls at him shortly before leaving for good is that one: he demands love from everyone. Isn’t that why he refuses to let her quit singing until she attempts suicide? His relentless pursuit of her fame even in the face of the insulting and upsetting reviews she is receiving seems to be an outgrowth of his own refusal to accept defeat in the pursuit of love. Love is meant to be hounded and chased down and demanded, in Kane’s world; it is not freely given, but bought with opera houses and pointless palaces. Not a great way to live your life, but an understandable takeaway from the way his childhood ended.
Yes, I thought Kane’s characterization was very logically established in that way. After Trump, it’s not hard to imagine that sort of desperate need for affirmation at all times, although it is hard to imagine Trump writing an opera review. I guess I’m coming around to the prescience of Citizen Kane, even as I’m tired of observing how many works of art anticipated America’s turn toward cult-of-personality fascism.
It is interesting that that was Welles’s first film. There were times in the film that I thought I could tell where he was coming from - like the scenes from childhood, they were obviously fake sets, they looked very stage-y and nostalgically romanticized, in keeping with a description of someone’s distant memory but also in keeping with Welles’s background. But then there’s the dancing scene and some very strangely shot opera scenes, and towards the end of the movie there are all these extremely angular shots from Kane’s massive house, and they’re not theatrical at all, they’re almost absurdist. There’s a shot where Kane walks in between two mirrors and sees infinite reflections of himself. There’s aggressive chiaroscuro and deep focus and long takes and, like, everything film classes love to talk about. It gives you this feeling that the director is just throwing everything possible at the wall, trying to do as much wacky camera stuff as possible.
I suppose you could read this as intentional. Like you said, it’s also very much part of presenting the story from the three interlocutor perspectives, showing how Kane is always a disturbing presence in their memory. And he’s clearly always collecting art and people and trying to arrange them so he can feel love, and that’s very offputting and unsatisfying for the people around him. Still, if I had to criticize Citizen Kane I’d say that the overtly complicated and unorthodox visual presentation can feel a bit gimmicky.
Sure. Not unlike La Grande Bellezza (and to a lesser extent its spiritual predecessor La Dolce Vita), it feels like every shot is Very Important, and there’s never a reprieve from Look At This Now.
Yes.
As I said earlier, you never forget that you’re watching A Movie and that there is not a single thing in it that isn’t fully intentional. And that does feel a bit gimmicky at times if the movie doesn’t hold you fully in it. I feel like we both experienced that slightly with Bellezza - I experience it with a lot of so-called auteur filmmaking. But not all! And you yourself, I think, tolerate it more in, let’s say, a Kurosawa movie than you do in this movie. If I had to guess at why, I would posit that Kurosawa actually gets that there have to be moments of relief; there have to be sequences where we’re not being quite as serious (I’m thinking specifically of Seven Samurai only here, cannot speak to his whole oeuvre). I don’t think Sorrentino or Welles are willing to give us that; they’re like “you better not be fucking folding the laundry while you watch my movie.” Does that make sense? Can you think of other art films that don’t feel gimmicky to you in the way that this one does?
Well, you slipped in the term “art films” there that we could spend another few pages unpacking. But let’s assume we agree on what that is. Paul Thomas Anderson’s films don’t feel gimmicky to me. The Coen Brothers. Even Stanley Kubrick. I think those are directors who have amazing cinematography (and work with the right cinematographers etc.) and are very stingy with the camera gimmicks.
I’m not sure I’d put Sorrentino and Welles together like that. I agree as to Sorrentino, but I think Welles had no conception of laundry-folding as movie watching pastime because that wasn’t possible in 1941.
Okay, not laundry folding - necking with your date? Getting up to go to the bathroom?
I suspect it was more of a “ok, you paid your money folks, look at all this shit we got here for you!” Because at the time he saw going to the cinema as a natural extension of theater-going, which it more arguably was at that time. When directors today complain about how streaming (and Covid) is ruining the cinema experience, to the extent they’re not being curmudgeons and/or rightfully recognizing the fascist cesspool that is superhero cinema, they’re recognizing that the public doesn’t see movie-watching as the special event they wish it was. And that may be why I don’t really connect with the film to the same degree as prior generations of critics and directors; movies for me have always been primarily a home-viewing experience. Notably, the 2012 Sight and Sound directors poll had Tokyo Story at the top, and that’s a film that is fairly small in scale and plays just as well on a small screen.
We should probably wrap this up. I guess I’d say in closing that I do think I understand why Citizen Kane has been so highly regarded for so long. And while I did appreciate it, mostly I feel a bit let down that I no longer have Citizen Kane out there, to be watched. I guess I sort of enjoyed knowing that one of the greatest films of all time was still out there for me, even if (or perhaps because) I suspected it wouldn’t be the greatest film of all time for me personally. Know what I mean? Are there any films out there that fit that bill for you?
Sure. We haven’t subscribed to the Criterion Collection and I hear there’s a lot of amazing French cinema in there. I’m not even sure I could name five French films from the 20th century, but I would like to think that if another lockdown situation happens when we don’t have a small child to take up all our time, we could stream some Truffaut or whatever and blog about it.
I have seen Truffaut’s name a million times and I know very little about him. Also, I think I was supposed to read his essays on Hitchcock and I either did not, or instantly forgot them.
He’s like the figurehead an entire cinematic movement that I know nothing about, but I know enough to know that there is a lot there for me if I ever get around to it. I also think there are more “great” books out there that I haven’t read, à la Proust, that I would someday like to summit, and I do find it comforting to know that I will never run out of those. My dad has started keeping track of all the books he reads, and given his currently annual rate of books read (around 40 or so) he now knows for certain that there is not enough time before he dies to read everything he wants to read. I think it bums him out, but it would bum him out more if he got to the end of the good stuff and felt like there was nothing left to last him through retirement.
I remember a high school math teacher or something, telling me that until the mid-1700s it was possible for a single rich English person to have read every famous book and learned literally everything there was to know about every mathematical and scientific discipline. It’s great to live in a time when the production and distribution costs are low enough, and society is wealthy enough, that the arts and sciences match the infinite diversity of human experience.