[Each year for
the last couple, I’ve followed
up my Valentine’s series with a week AmericanStudying
some things of which I’m not as big a fan. Please share your own
non-favorites for a crowd-sourced airing of grievances this weekend!]
On two very
American problems with one of our most important films.
Since its
release in 1941, Orson
Welles’ Citizen Kane has consistently
been defined as one of the most innovative and significant American films; in
recent decades it has almost always occupied one of the top
spots in film critics’ and scholars’ lists of the best
American films (or even best films period) of all time. There’s no doubt
that Welles’ film pioneered
a number of film techniques that quite simply changed the game when it came
to filmmaking, on technical as well as story-telling levels, and I both defer
to and (based on my limited knowledge) agree with my more informed FilmStudiers
on those aspects of Kane. But at the
same time, D.W.
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
(1915) was also a pioneering and innovative film, and yet one that featured a deeply troubling set of themes
and perspectives on which film scholars and historians can now agree. I’m
not arguing that Kane is anywhere
near as problematic as Birth (I know
of few mainstream American films that are), but Welles’ film has at least a
couple prominent—and telling—flaws nonetheless.
For one thing, Citizen Kane represents one of the most
overt cultural depictions of the Great Man
theory of history I’ve ever encountered. It’s true that Welles’ Charles
Foster Kane, a media tycoon
modeled in large part on William Randolph Hearst, is far from an idealized
hero, but that’s not what the “Great” in the Great Man theory implies—indeed,
the theory suggests that both the strengths and weaknesses of these singular
and influential historical figures have been the dominant forces in our communal
stories. They’re “Great” in the sense of size and significance, and Kane
embodies those qualities: his life at every stage, from the most inspiring to
the most corrupt, exercises an over-sized influence on his society and world. The
problem with that narrative isn’t just that it reinforces the egotism and
delusions of grandeur of men like Hearst (and contemporary ones like, y’know, the
Donald), but also and most importantly that it portrays American history as
a battleground between a few towering figures, rather than the far messier,
more democratic, and most of all more accurate concept of encounters
and conflicts and connections between cultures and communities. Men like
Hearst were part of that history to be sure, but as participants within it, as
we all are.
[SPOILER ALERT
for Kane in this paragraph.] And then
there’s that sled. I know that the film’s final revelation, that the
great mystery of Kane’s dying word that drives the movie’s investigations
into his life turns out to be just a nostalgic longing for a long-lost childhood
toy, is likely meant to be ironic, and could be read as undercutting the
narratives of Kane’s Greatness. But I have to admit that to my mind the Rosebud
reveal undercuts the film itself at least as much. So someone on his death bed
was thinking back to his life and longing for the simpler pleasures of
childhood? A man who seemingly had everything was missing a symbol of what he
had lost along the way? For one thing, Captain Obvious
approves. And for another, the answer to Kane’s mystery humanizes the character
in only the most superficial ways—again, it’s an obvious and certainly
universal way to imagine self-reflection and –definition, but it elides a
deeper examination of the historical and social forces that have truly defined
Kane’s life and identity, and that a different mystery plot (such as that at
the center of John
Sayles’ far superior film Lone Star,
for example) could open up for viewers. Great but frustratingly limited—that
defines both Charles Foster Kane and Orson Welles’ film about him.
Next non-favorite
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Pushback on this post, or other non-favorites you’d share?
