Citizen Kane

Spent today watching as much material as I can out of the rather sizable stockpile I have at the moment. Am on the brink of finishing another anime series, The Count of Monte Cristo, by the same studio which also did Last Exile, Gonzo. I'm told that it is really nominally based on the French original of the same title written by Alexandre Dumas, but I haven't read the original, so I can't really say. It's definitely a decontextualisation, a rather strange merging of classical Parisian architecture and digital-age technology, in which empires are stellar rather than territorial, and being a "provincial" means you're an alien and not simply from the countryside.

There are moments in this series that really do grip me, especially when they seem to play the kill-main-character card to exquisite dramatic effect in a duel to the death, only to reveal that the vanquished character in the suit of armour is not who we think it is, but, in a move that is even more tragic, is actually his friend, who took his place to save his life. But then, in a jolt, I realise that the story is rather similar to your usual melodrama arc, with tangled romances and past intrigues coming back to haunt the characters, and then the magic dies away. And I figure that the rather bizarrely exuberant colour combinations and animation techniques are meant to signal that we're supposed to look at the story from another angle, a different perspective, in the way that the studio has decontextualised a French classic, but it still hasn't struck me what exactly is the alternative perspective that I'm supposed to use.

Well, four more episodes before what I predict will be a satisfyingly good ending. We'll see then if there is another magic moment. At this point, the story is good fun, and is gripping, but I don't think it will be memorable in the way that Last Exile is. And, incidentally, I detect a trend in anime, or at least in Gonzo anime: the characters like to use certain phrases rather frequently, to the point when I am beginning to learn them - "honto" is the top scorer, followed closely by "gomen". I guess that also says something about the Japanese mindset or perspective on society...

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More importantly and impactfully, though, watched Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' best-known, and arguably only known, work. Recommended by Joel as it is reputed to be the best motion picture ever made, and picked it up a few days ago from the library. I have to say that, on first watching, it didn't strike me as "the best film ever made". Certainly, there is remarkable technical mastery in the camera shots, the props and the acting, but on first watching it, I didn't get any thrill of sympathy or shock. It didn't tell me much that I didn't already know of, in terms of ideas, but to be fair, it was probably the first film to portray the ideas that I know of now; I just encountered them elsewhere before watching Citizen Kane, and that has robbed this film of its breakthrough value.

But it does bring out an important point, I think, in why people think this is the best film ever made. Watched a documentary on the film that came on the bonus disk, and you encounter opinions that talk about how the film was unprecedented, groundbreaking, unheard of in that time. Welles got a contract that gave him so much control over the film that it had rival directors hating him out of envy; Kane was the first film he made, and he got more say over it than accomplished directors ever dreamed was possible. And he took a shot at a media mogul, a sort of role model for Murdoch, who struck back at the silver-screen satire of his decadent life by using his newspapers and influence to try to kill any chance of the film being screened. In this way, then, Kane is the best film of all time because of its context, because at that point in time, its content set a lot of precedents for approaches, devices and ideas that we take for granted in today's cinema. From the perspective of a latter-day viewer, therefore, the significance of this film is derived more from its historical and social significance, than from the inherent genius in the film itself, for many people after Kane have emulated his style, and some have, I daresay, improved upon it.

In this way, then, Citizen Kane is not the best film of all time, because that depends on who you ask and what they mean by "best". But it certainly was an influential film; possibly, it was the most socially influential film of all time, in that it captured the imagination of the public, became a tool in the fight for freedom of expression against the overwhelming power of the establishment, became a symbol of an epic struggle between two American personalities of epic proportions. In terms of its social impact, therefore, the making and screening of Citizen Kane can be said to be a defining moment in American, if not world, cinema. The film entered social folklore; it earned a place in the American consciousness because of what it came to symbolise not due to its own content as much as due to how Welles, the real-life Kane (a newspaper publisher called William Hearst), the studio and the public seized its existence as a cause celebre.

The film is certainly full of tropes, themes, symbolism, clever camera angles, nifty lighting and impressive stage design (Kane's palace of decadence, Xanadu, is an architectural marvel in its own right; there is a scene in which the great hall in the castle-mansion is filled with crates of everything imaginable, because Kane allegedly collected everything - it looked like they simply photographed the prop store of the studio). Much of its meaning and its significance, though, I can't guess, because I suspect that much of it is extratextual, and would make more sense if viewed in the context of the time, and are therefore sort of like inside jokes that are temporally out of reach of my comprehension.

In and of themselves, though, both the film's inherent meanings and extratextual relationships are still rather compelling. It's basically a caricature of the life of William Hearst, and we see how Kane starts off as a whimsical inheritor of a vast fortune, and decides to devote it to the task of building a vast media empire founded upon a series of tabloids (complete with "you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war" tactics). He marries twice, is divorced twice, fails in his bid to transform his social power into political power, and ends up passing his last days in a cavernous, half-completed pleasure palace-turned-mausoleum, opening the film with his cryptic dying word: "Rosebud". The overarching impression is of a man with incredible genius, luck, determination and drive, who compulsively sets himself ridiculous challenges (first by building a newspaper from scratch, then by trying to champion the cause of the workingman, while trying to win the love of one of his wives by forcing her to realise her childhood dream of being an opera singer), careens from one to the other as if propelled by an insatiable desire and search for something, and always coming out dissatisfied.

The plot of the movie is driven by a reporter's search for the meaning of the cryptic word, and he interviews Kane's old acquaintances and colleagues, one of which gives him this interesting viewpoint: maybe it refers to something he never gained, or something that he had lost. In a life defined by a compulsive drive to acquire as much material possession of the world as possible, and characterised by an intense but ill-defined search for something, this seems like a crucial insight. Eventually, it turns out that Rosebud refers to a sledge that Kane had gotten as a child, which was burned as junk after his death by his butler. On another level, "Rosebud" was Welles' idea of a dirty joke to play on Hearst's mistress; watch the documentary The Battle for Citizen Kane for more details. But I personally think it refers to something he never got; maybe it's symbolised by the sledge, but I don't think it actually means anything concrete. The word acts as a symbol for whatever Kane was pursuing all his life, and though he could feel he was pursuing something, it is likely in my view that he wasn't really aware of precisely what he was pursuing. It functions something like "the horror, the horror!" (incidentally, Welles had proposed to make a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness, but the studio wasn't enthusiastic and turned him down; that led to his making Kane instead).

There is another possibility: that he was striving to gain people's love. It comes up twice in the film, when Kane has what may amount to heart-to-heart talks with two of the other characters. It's not clear what they mean by "love" precisely: one uses the term in relation to how he tries to gain the "love" of the voters in his campaign by trying to "make them a present of liberty", by becoming their champion, while the other says "You don't love me, but you want me to love you", in that simple inversion capturing what may actually prove to be an important distinction.

Or rather, it is an attempt to defy death and ignominity, by embedding his legacy in the world both materially (through his copious purchases) and emotionally (through his behaviour to other people, which are possibly intended to make them feel like they owe it to him to remember him). If this is the case, then the movie is somewhat elegantly triply ironic. Firstly, Kane's worldly possessions are crated and the junk burned, so his material "memory" curls up into the dusk sky from a chimney in the last shot of the film, and his emotional memory is distorted because people recall him in unsympathetic terms, arguably in terms that he would rather not be associated with in death. Secondly, it is ironic because nowadays, practically no one remembers Hearst, while Citizen Kane has immortalised his caricature. And thirdly, while Welles prevailed in getting his film screened after all, his budding career in film was effectively beheaded by Hearst's counter-offensive, so what we remember of Welles now is what survives him in Kane. In this sense, then, two larger-than-life lives have mutually neutralised each other, leaving behind only what survives of them in celluloid and monochrome. On three levels, then, characters who tried to achieve a measure of immortality have ironically managed to preserve something, but something which is far less than they had intended, and something quite different from what they had had in mind in the first place.

A final point of potential irony, then: the movie may be nominally biographical (of Hearst), but is Citizen Kane autobiographical? Some of the interviewees in the documentary remarked about how Welles seemed to merge his character with Kane's when he starred as the titular character; certainly, there are some deviations between Kane's life and Hearst's, deviations that seem to mirror happenings in Welles' early years. But what is rather striking is, as one interviewee pointed out, how Welles' life came to resemble Kane's life. Like his film character, he had risen to incredible levels of fame and influence, with his apogee at the time that Kane was made, and had been brought down by infamy to pass his final years in comparative obscurity. In a sense, then, Welles had grown into Kane; Kane had grown on Welles. And in a sense, the vanities, egotisms and hubris portrayed in the film have also come back to plague the film's very existence, and the lives of those who are related to it, in a poetic but surprisingly disconcerting way.