Who's Afraid of Citizen Kane

Fifty years ago, Welles divined the way in which most movies were "about" a set of rules for life that was not real life, but only life on screen. He saw that the illusion of photography had stopped us from seeing how closed, limited, and unreal most movies were. I am not sure how far he knew this consciously. But in his being and his acting, he knew that the movies were a trick. And so he had made a film about a search for meaning that appears to arrive at an answer but really goes only into a dead end. In Buenos Aires, when it first played, the writer forge Luis Borges had put his finger on it: he said that Kane was "a labyrinth without a center." This dauntingly deep film had another contradiction for us: it revealed how essentially shallow the medium of film was.

How can this be? Consider two types of performance: an actor playing King Lear, and a magician succeeding in his best trick. Our concentration is more acute and focused in the second show. The trick is more compelling. After all, in Lear, we have to digest the context of the situation and its unfolding in time, to say nothing of the language. Whereas the magician has a wonder to reveal; we hardly dare blink in case we miss the instant of transformation. But this great impact is shallow: the trick has only two options--like the light, it can click on or off. Once it is over, we do not ask what it means--we say how was it done? We can escape the disappoint-ment that knows the marvel was a con, a fake. Whereas Lear--even a poor or incomplete performance--may grow in our heads and last all our lives. We take away not just the prowess of the actor but the pity of the terrible old king. With Lear, we look out at the world; but with the magic tricks we face the emptiness left once illusion has died.

As Welles progressed from school theatricals by way of magic acts, Broadway, and the radio outrage of "The War of the Worlds", making a movie seems to have been his last unqualified obsession. Film was not just the most intricate train set or the most breathtaking magic. It also reached the most people. Welles was aroused by that power in the way live performers or dictators respond to real audiences. He worked ferociously on Kane. The meticulous density of the film is a record of his excitement, and that came from his learning how movies worked, but also from his exercising his own young, tragic sense of himself. He loved Charlie Kane (even as he satirized him) because the tycoon was so like him: brilliant, beguiling, spellbinding, but rootless, manipulative, alienated. Kane and Welles are twins, and what joins them is the same pathological juxtaposition of sincere voice and cynical personality. Welles made Kane as a lament for the self-destruction that seemed the only proper end to his futile greatness. Kane (or Cain) is an outcast, not a citizen, and the picture scorns the real, diverse, crowded and democratic America in which Kane is placed historically. Instead, it looks yearningly at the hallucinatory back projection, the psychic decor, that Kane sorts through in the moments before death.

Let me try to explain. Citizen Kane begins in somber, nocturnal mood, as the camera is drawn in past the barriers and "No Trespassing" signs of Xanadu. It is as if Kane cannot die without a witness for his emotionalism--the great mouth sighing to us, whispering the last confession or open sesame, "Rosebud." The sound feels deep in our heads. Only we hear it: the film makes it clear that the nurse comes into the room after the word has been uttered. The door is seen opening through the broken glass ball, the world that slipped from Kane's dying grasp.

Deathliness is then pushed aside by the exuberant newsreel obituary, which is characteristic of Kane's yellow journalism and so many American movies: drop-dead effects that save us from thought. The obituary may be the best ever made. But Welles fools us--with sleight-of-story-telling, he has the newsreel men tell themselves the obit is not good enough, while all it lacks is proof for Kane himself that people loved him. So Citizen Kane presses on. It is as if, from the grave, Kane had sent his old reporters on a search--to justify him.

Thus, the inquiries of the film, and their flashbacks, are not only informational, filling in the man's past. They are heavy with the emotion of Kane looking through the remains of his life and tempting us with the chance of some grand meaning. The ostensible inquirer, Mr. Thompson, is a faceless silhouette over whose shoulder the camera observes. He is the spokesman for us, the audience, testing the boundaries of screen and auditorium.

The flashbacks show how fully Kane lived in a drama, as opposed to a life. He carried a stage wherever he went. Nothing in him was more self-destructive than his chronic acting. The witnesses who deliver the flashbacks have suffered under Charlie; they seem to address the damage done by his bogusness. Yet they admit they can hardly get him out of their heads--hardly let him die. In this dream-like structure, they are Kane's creatures, called into being so that he may die thinking well of himself.

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