THE MAGICIAN & THE MASS MEDIA

Citizen Kane (1941)James Naremore

Context

The work of the young Orson Welles Proto-Fascist demagogues After the whispered “Rosebud,” is “Don’t believe

everything you hear on the radio.” Against one of America’s most wealthy media

moguls Mrs. Kane sits at the right foreground, her face

the very image of stern puritanical sacrifice The mise-en-scène under fairly rigid control

Scene

Analysis Two snow sleds

The first is named “Rosebud” & is given to Kane by his mother

The second is a Christmas present from Kane’s guardian, Thatcher

Which is called “Crusader,” is presented fully to the camera

The title character has not only two sleds but t & two friends

In its last moment, the film shifts from intellectual irony to dramatic irony, from apparent skepticism to apparent revelation

Analysis Voyeurism inherent in the medium, and each

leaves Kane an enigma In the first shot, we see a “No Trespassing” sign

that the camera promptly ignores All the while encountering a bizarre montage:

monkeys in a cage, gondolas in a stream, a golf course

As voyeuristic as anything in a Hitchcock movie Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera is an

“inquirer,” are like teasing affronts to our curiosity

Aligning himself first with the progressives & then with the Fascists

Analysis

As a mythical character like Noah or Kubla Khan Everybody is involved in a dubious pursuit It’s a film about complexity, not about relativity Once again the search for “Rosebud” seems

tawdry ex. Thompson’s abortive interview with Susan She never heard of Rosebud With a mild shock or a witty image at the

beginning & a joke or an ironic twist at the end

Analysis In a charmingly exuberant & altogether anti-realistic

montage, he constantly turns to face the camera, muttering in disgust as the young Kane grows up, founds a newspaper, & then attacks Wall Street

Capital, it seems, is always in charge of Kane’s life Kane and Leland in The Inquirer offices Bernstein always places personal loyalty above

principle Bernstein’s reminiscences are chiefly about

adventure & male camaraderie

Analysis

As the doggedly loyal Bernstein Hinting that his involvement with Kane has

sexual implications Where Kane unsuccessfully tries to interest

Leland in a woman, but even without that scene he seems to have no active sex life

It is Leland, not Emily Kane, who behaves like a jilted lover

Analysis The comic toothache scene is Susan Alexander’s apartment

The closing line of Susan’s song concerns the theme of power; it comes from The Barber of Seville, & roughly translates “I have sworn it, I will conquer.”

Large-scale effects with a modest budget Painted, Expressionistic image suggesting Kane’s

delusions of grandeur & the crowd’s lack of individuality.

Everything is dominated by Kane’s ego: the initial “K” he wears as a stickpin, the huge blowup of his jowly face on a poster, & the incessant “I” in his public speech

Occasionally we see Kane’s supporters isolated in contrasting close-ups; but his political rival stands high above the action, dominating the frame like a sinister power

Analysis Just at the moment when Kane’s political ambitions are wrecked, the film shifts into its examination of his sexual life

His tyranny is his treatment of Susan An absurd plagiarism case against Welles & Mankiewicz She represents for Kane a “cross-section of the American

public.” When Kane meets her, she is a working girl,

undereducated & relatively innocent, his relationship with her is comparable to his relationship

with the masses who read his papers “you talk about the people as though you owned them,”

Leland says. Kane’s treatment of Susan illustrates the truth of his charge

Susan is reduced from a pleasant, attractive girl to a near suicide

Analysis Begin the arduous, comically inappropriate

series of music lessons She attempts to quit the opera, but Kane orders

her to continue because “I don’t propose to have myself made ridiculous.”

In a scene remarkable for the way it shows the pain of both people, his shadow falls over her face – just as he will later tower over her in the “party” scene, when a woman’s ambiguous scream is heard distantly on the sound track

Personal concerns, how the public & the personal are interrelated

Analysis

Throughout, Kane is presented with a mixture of awe, satiric invective, & sympathy

The surreal picnic, with a stream of black cars driving morosely down a beach toward a swampy encampment, where a jazz band plays

Both shots are impressive uses of optical printing. In response, Kane blindly destroys her room & remembers his childhood loss

Thompson becomes a slightly troubled onlooker Here it might be noted that Welles was uneasy

about the whole snow-sled idea

Analysis

A child-man, he spends all his energies rebelling against anyone who asserts authority over his will

Imprisoned by his childhood ego, Kane treats everything as a toy: first the sled, then the newspaper, then the Spanish-American War

Ultimately settling on the “No Trespassing” sign outside the gate. We are back where we began. Even the film’s title has been a contradiction in terms

Conclusion Richard Nixon, the “Hotel Xanadu” In translating Hearst into a creature of fiction, he

& Mankiewicz borrowed freely from the lives of other American capitalists (among them Samuel Insull & John McCormack).

They salted the story with references to Welles’s own biography

at several junctures they departed from well-known facts about Hearst

The Hearst press, this in contrast to the Hearst-Davies relationship

Most of these changes tend to create sympathy for Kane

By showing Kane as a tragicomic failure

Conclusion Kane clearly does satirize Hearst’s public life Kane’s manipulative interest in the Spanish-

American War In the election scenes it depicts the corruption of

machine politics with the force of a great editorial cartoon

The film is explicit in its denunciation, showing his supposed democratic aspirations as in reality a desire for power. We even see him on a balcony conferring with Hitler

Kane suggests that the process of discovery is more important than any pat conclusion

Watching a movie rather than reality itself

Conclusion

Because of the power he wielded in Hollywood The paradox is that Welles had no desire to

wreck the motion-picture industry. Kane was held to a relatively modest A-picture

budget Industry bosses perceived Welles as an “artist”

& a left-wing ideologue who might bring trouble He would never again be allowed such freedom

at a major studio