David Thomson is. And you should be too.
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A momentous yet troubling anniversary falls this year. Fifty years ago, on May 1, 1941, at the R.K.O. Palace Theater, on Broadway, in New York City, Citizen Kane opened to the public. War was close, and the age of unthinking happy endings was nearly over. The role of movies in America was shifting. Not that Kane's debut rivaled those of, say, Pretty Woman, Ghost, or Home Alone. Many reviews at the time acknowledged the arrival of a movie that had enlarged the ambitions of the whole medium, but Kane did not open "huge."
On its first run, it lost $150,000, about a quarter of its cost. The public found it perplexing, cold and daunting. And they were right enough, I think. They felt a kind of contempt in the film. They sensed, perhaps, that though Citizen Kane spoke of citizenship, it did not really like the public.
There was a stir at Kane's opening. Indeed, there had been an expectation of outrage ever since its maker, Orson Welles, arrived in Hollywood. For he was, in a way, the first movie brat, a brilliant kid who had taken radio and the theater by storm, and who had resisted several overtures from the picture business until it made him an offer he couldn't refuse. R.K.O. had told him do whatever you want. This "carte blanche" was exaggerated, of course, not least by Welles himself. In reality, the studio set budgetary limits and it had to approve the story. But Welles and his ego required and got exceptional invitation and liberty, if only to affront every long-haul, dues-paying professional in the picture city. From the outset, Welles disdained the ways of American movie-making just as avidly as he sought to be king of the heap. He was in so many ways the master of mixed motives.
Welles had taken a long time to make Kane out of his liberty, long enough for many to say he was a sham regardless of the outcome. In person, Welles was charming, insolent, vain, domineeringly articulate and so self-educated he seemed to carry all at once the traditions of a great library, a fine restaurant and an exotic brothel. He was untoppable--and so he had to fall. The business saw that. But I think he knew it himself, and he watched for what would happen with a mixture of mischief and curiosity. For while he was very vain, there was another, conflicting trait in the man: he had no belief in himself. By which I do not mean to say he was insecure; rather, he believed his great talent was somehow hollow.
If this seems contradictory, then we have come to a vital part of Orson Welles. Welles had assisted all the envious urges against him by creating a film that made fun of William Randolph Hearst, a power in the land and in Hollywood. He had courted disaster and defied reason. Look at the film and you will see the very same self-destructive hubris in Charles Foster Kane when he opts for ruin rather than compromise. And yet Welles smiled: for if the public gossiped that Kane was about Hearst, its maker knew that, most profoundly, it was a portrait of George Orson Welles. That's why he'd had such a grand time playing the lead. Kane was an insult to the business and to ordinary, career filmmakers. But it was the kiss of death for Welles. It was also the best film ever made in this country, the guarantee that we will remember him.
Citizen Kane came and went, in 1941. There were those who knew, unerringly, that a genius had made a daylight raid on a very old-fashioned store. Gradually, an influence was felt. For example, the dark, lustrous look of the film helped identify the shadowy dread in film noir. But in 1941 Citizen Kane slipped away, and for over a decade, it was rarely shown.
In London, England in 1955 (when the film and I were both 14), I had only read about it in one of the few film books then available, Roger Manvell's The Film and the Public. That evidently earnest and educational book said Kane was extraordinary and, at the same time, both un-American and yet impossible from any other country. Then a nearby repertory theater announced its coming, for just three days. I went there for the first showing, walked out of the afternoon sunlight into the dark, where I was literally alone with the film. Had no one else heard of it? What followed changed my life--but I'm still not sure whether to be grateful or to curse that smiling Orson Welles who did it.
You see, I had never watched a film before. I had watched the stories they told, just as I had believed in their world. I had absorbed pictures of, say, James Stewart or Grace Kelly, and reckoned they were lovely and natural--they were life, rendered directly, with all of photography's helpless truth. But in Kane the beauty was not direct or natural: it was on the screen, like paint on a canvas. The very mannered photography was less life-like than resonant with purpose. I felt as if I were inside Kane's head--and the feeling was not quite comfortable. But I began to see that films were made--put together, directed. And as I watched the director I heard the magician breathing.
No wonder the next generation of would-be filmmakers found this movie. Citizen Kane advertised both its own clever-ness and the medium's magic. Welles, who was himself a dedicated magician, had called movies the biggest toy train set a boy ever had. William Friedkin owned a print of Kane, ran it regularly and was inspired. Steven Spielberg purchased what is supposedly one of three sleds used in the production. Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom became friends to Welles: they wanted to help him, and have his talent and daring rub off on their films. In Day for Night, Francois Truffaut played a director with a recurring dream: he is a child in the city at night who comes to a locked and barred movie theater that is playing Citizen Kane. The boy cannot get in, but he steals a still. Kane was the talisman and the treasure for young directors.
By the late 1950s, the reputation of Kane was climbing. In critical polls run by the British magazine Sight and Sound in 1962, 1972, and 1982, Kane was voted the best film ever made. (Interestingly, it had not even made the top ten in 1952.) The 1992 poll is unlikely to dislodge it. What has arrived to threaten its reign? And yet, something has changed, I think. Something now allows us to see Citizen Kane's premonitory intelligence as well as its curious hollowness.
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.
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.
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David Thomson is the author of Suspects, Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, Silver Light, and a forthcoming biography of the Selznick family.