Who's Afraid of Citizen Kane

Yet Kane--and Welles--are using these characters to inspire us. For we felt the intimacy of his dying message; we succumbed to the showman's spell; and we believe there will be a meaning at the end of this search. And so, when the reporters give up, remarking very reasonably that one word could never explain a life, the camera remains. The film is still conscious and hopeful, full of wishful thinking.

The camera is high in the rafters of a warehouse, surveying the accumulated treasures and bric-a-brac (the imprisoned, unopened reality) of Kane's acquisitive life. For he has been so indulgent and callous that he has wanted to possess everything, without quite touching or knowing anything--this is the way a showman dominates his audience.

Then the camera begins to descend; it has regained the purpose it had at the start of the movie. It finds the "answer" overlooked by all the reporters, the sled from snowy days in Colorado, that last emblem of actual childhood and being with mother. The sled is being carried to the furnace by an unwitting workman. The camera will not be put off; it braves the flames and goes into that bright light (the strongest light in all the dark movie) to see the painted name and insignia, "Rosebud," before it burns off. Just like the climax to a trick, this answer lasts a split second.

The brevity of the final discovery and the thrill of Bernard Herrmann's music insist that we be moved. If we are susceptible to magic, and momentary, dazzling sentiment, we may believe that Kane is explained as just a hurt boy. (Even if he knew the loss all along? Even if he all along refused to live with it?) Like so many movie endings, this one works just about long enough to get us out of the theater. Walking home, we may realize how much of it is merely sorrowful special pleading--self-pity--when the issues in Kane require some-thing far more substantial--a thorough study of what power, money, leadership and responsibility mean in America. But movies are not good with such topics. They would rather tell us that the ingenuity of reporters looking like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman is a better protector of the Constitution than is our own understanding of how the ordinary madness of Richard Nixon threatened it.

When Welles had made this film--so beautiful and polished, at once of its time and avant garde, loaded with pathos and sarcasm, yet also so dismissive of meaning...what then? He made The Magnificent Ambersons, which is more conventional and more moving, as well as being broken, a film changed and re-cut after Welles had gone away. The argument still goes on about whether he deserted, or whether the studio betrayed him. The long view suggests that some kind of boredom had set in. Welles never made another film with the same intensity or conviction he had brought to Kane. He moved towards quicker, slighter films and the impatient fostering of his own unruly celebrity. Without waver or unease, his great voice went from being Othello to promoting cheap wines.

For a few years, Welles had the look and the ringing tone of presidential timber. He was a valiant campaigner for FDR in 1944, when his speeches came straight out of Kane's book. He was not yet 30, handsome, large but not yet gross, flamboyant. He had conquered three fields of show business--what else was there to engage him? In 1944, he was far more plausible a future candidate than, say, Ronald Reagan, so much duller and so apologetic an actor.

But Welles's career never developed. By 1946, he was in his second divorce, he had tax troubles, he was broke and he could be made to seem like a leftist adventurer. He was too much his own man; he would not be advised, led, helped or tamed. Hollywood was suspicious. Too many hotels had heard he left without paying. He was a wanderer suddenly suspect in stamina and seriousness. He was not trusted. He had the fatal blindness of untempered ego: he did not respect or even see the gray world of drab business. He was too volatile for such team sports as movie-making or party politics. He found it hard to believe in things. This was the malaise of the spoiled egotist--a condition that would set in everywhere in the decades to come. Many people in Hollywood adored the way Welles behaved. Why not? It was the spirit of being untoppable, youthful, and a genius. He was studied.

In his adroit, shameless harmonizing of liberal sentiments and chilly detachment, Welles predicted so much of Hollywood's political "involvement." This is the fallacy of privilege, social conscience, and Armani righteousness coexisting, and it covers Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda as much as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan.

In what remains of moviemaking, there are examples everywhere of Welles's specious, charismatic arrogance--though they are not as winning or as rich in anecdote. There is not an agent in town who can actually do magic tricks... well, not the old-fashioned kind. On our screens, there are so many wounded heroes, Nixonian recluses sitting in the dark awaiting sympathy. Our modern Kane is Michael Corleone, his evil days past, longing to be loved, subtly transforming his nature, being photographed until fascination gilds his darkness.

Long before his death, on October 9, 1985, on shows like Merv Griffin's, where he mixed story-telling, languid magic, and philosophizing, Welles would admit he was bored with movies as a form. No one, he believed, had surpassed Kane. That is not a pretty conclusion: yet it seems increasingly likely there will never be an American movie that improves on Kane.

So, at last, still the same age as the film, I must admit that I am frightened by Citizen Kane. What seemed once like a landmark toward progress now seems like an early terminus. Perhaps film was always a diversion from more valuable ways of looking and thinking; perhaps the medium is a way of losing ourselves in dead ends of fantasy--and being smart about that fate. Fifty years ago, this astonishing, forbidding film foresaw the likelihood of American film never having any larger theme or preoccupation than the mechanics of magic and the vanity of actors.

Rosebud be damned! We deserve roses. They have this great quality denied rosebuds: they bloom and then they die. They do not depend on arrested development.

___________

David Thomson is the author of Suspects, Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, Silver Light, and a forthcoming biography of the Selznick family.

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