The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  3

  Citizen Kane

  Citizen Kane is the product of an individual artist (and a company of his associates) working at a particular movie studio at a particular historical moment. This fact ought to be self-evident, but one needs to state it because the question of the film’s authorship has become the oldest, worst-tempered, and most confused argument in movie history. The debate was revived by Pauline Kael, whose long essay for The Citizen Kane Book forced numerous angry replies from movie historians eager to defend Welles’s contribution to the script. For those readers interested in a more complete, authoritative account of exactly who wrote what and when on Citizen Kane, I recommend Robert Carringer’s study of the production history of the film. Carringer, who researched the RKO archives, examined all seven revisions of the script, and spoke to most of the people concerned, found documentary proof that Welles was one of the principal authors of the screenplay. In other words, the credits as they appear on the screen are fairly accurate: Kane was produced by Welles’s company, coauthored by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles (John Houseman was offered screen credit but declined), and directed by Welles, who also played the leading character.

  Notice, however, that there are two sets of credits for the movie: at the beginning we are told that Kane is a Mercury production “by Orson Welles,” and at the end, after the coat-grabbing finale, we are given a complete list of contributors, in which Welles’s name plays a subsidiary role. Interestingly, both of these views of the film’s authorship are correct—the first does not cancel out the second, and the truth of the film’s origins can be understood only by keeping both in mind simultaneously.

  Actually, the entire film works according to an identical principle, so everything evokes its opposite and all statements about the protagonist are true in some sense. There are, to choose one minor example of the method, two snow sleds. The first, as everyone knows, is named “Rosebud”; the second is given to Kane as a Christmas present by Thatcher and is seen only briefly—so briefly that audiences are unaware that it, too, has a name. If you study the film through a Moviola or stop it at just the right spot on a DVD, you will discover that for a few frames sled number two is presented fully to the camera, its legend clearly visible. It is named “Crusader,” and where the original has a flower, this one is embossed with the helmet of a knight.

  Welles was probably unconcerned when his symbolism did not show on the screen. “Crusader” was a tiny joke he could throw away in a film that bristles with clever asides. I mention it not only because I am foolishly proud of knowing such esoterica but also because it is a convenient way to point up the split in Kane’s character and in the very conception of the film. In many ways it is appropriate that Thatcher should try to win the boy over with a sled named “Crusader.” Kane will repay this gift by growing up to be a crusading, trust-busting newspaperman, out to slay the dragon Wall Street. (William Randolph Hearst, Kane’s counterpart, had been known for the way he embarked on crusades, and in his earlier days, when it suited him, he had been the enemy of the traction trust.) On another level the two sleds can be interpreted as emblems of a sentimental tragedy: Kane has lost the innocence suggested by “Rosebud” and has been transformed into a phony champion of the people, an overreacher who dies like a medieval knight amid the empty gothic splendor of Xanadu.

  The essence of the film, in other words, is its structure of alternating attitudes. It is an impure mixture of ideas, forms, and feelings—part magic show, part tragedy; part satire, part sentiment—as divided as Kane himself. In fact the contrast between “Crusader” and “Rosebud” is only the most superficial instance of the way the film deliberately sets images, characters, and ideas against one another, as if it were trying to illustrate Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion that good art always reconciles discordant elements. Thus the Freudian aspects of the screenplay create an ironic, almost playful effect, whereas the imagery of “Rosebud” tries to pull the audience’s emotions back in the direction of mystery, demonic energy, and pathos. Nearly everything in the story is based on this sort of duality or ambiguity, so we are constantly made aware of the two sides to Kane. He has not only two snow sleds but also two wives and two friends. The camera makes two visits to Susan Alexander and two journeys to Xanadu; it even shows two close-ups of “Rosebud”: once as it is being obliterated by the snows of Colorado at Mrs. Kane’s boardinghouse, and then again as it is incinerated in the basement of Kane’s Florida estate. Finally, in the most vivid clash of all, we are given two endings: first the reporter Jerry Thompson quietly tells his colleagues that a single word can’t sum up a man’s life, and the camera moves away from him, lingering over the jigsaw pieces of Xanadu’s artwork; after Thompson’s exit, however, the same camera begins tracking toward a furnace, where it reveals the meaning of “Rosebud” after all. The film has shifted from a darkened, intellectual irony to a spectacular dramatic irony, from apparent wisdom to apparent revelation.

  Such perfect contrasts keep our feelings qualified, in suspension, leaving most audiences unsure whether to regard Citizen Kane as high seriousness or as some kind of brilliant conjuring trick. At every level the movie is a paradox: Kane himself is both a villain and a romantic, Faustian rebel, as much like Welles as he is like Hearst. The style of the film—and under this rubric may be included the various contributions of script, acting, and camera—is both derivative of earlier Hollywood models and self-consciously critical of them. The leftist political implications of the project adversely affected Welles’s entire career, and yet in many ways Kane evades the concrete issues; it does, of course, mount a powerful attack on Hearst, but the attack is somewhat oblique—actually, Kane is almost as deeply concerned with the movies themselves, and with the potentially deceptive, myth-making qualities of the media, which are linked by extension to the deceptions of the Hearst press. Hence it produces a certain ambivalence not only toward its subject but also toward the very methods that are used to disclose the subject.

  Some of these tensions and internal divisions may be seen in the following close descriptive analysis. Taken together, they help make Kane both a rich psychological portrait and a subtle commentary on its own text—a film that reveals all the paradoxes and contradictions of the Welles myth in general.

  I

  The movie opens with an act of violation. The dark screen slowly lightens to show a “No Trespassing” sign, which the camera promptly ignores. To the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s haunting, funereal “power” music, we rise up a chain link fence toward a misty, bleak, studio-manufactured sky. The camera movement is accompanied by a series of dissolves that takes us first to a new pattern of barbed-wire, elongated chain links and then to an arrangement of iron oak leaves, presumably adorning a gate. I say “presumably” because the opening montage is meant to captivate and confuse the audience, leaving them slightly unsure of where they are at any given moment. The point here is not to reveal Kane’s private world but to provide fascinating glimpses, frustrating the viewer with a baffling subjectivity. Thus, as we are taken beyond the gigantic “K” atop the fence and progressively nearer to a lighted window in a castle, we encounter a surreal combination of images: monkeys in a cage, gondolas in a stream, a golf course. Only the window provides continuity; in fact it seems to defy the logic of space by remaining at exactly the same point on the screen in each shot, growing portentously larger with every dissolve.

  Kane’s castle looks a bit like the home of a sorcerer, chiefly because of the stereoscopic, Snow White–like effect of the RKO art work. Welles has to be credited for the way he allowed the talents of Perry Ferguson, Van Nest Polglase, Vernon Walker, and the Disney animators to come into play throughout the film. He had the wisdom to turn the rough cut of “News on the March” over to the newsreel department for editing, since they could best duplicate the style, and here he is able to use the art department with equal intelligence. Who else but Hollywood designers could have created such a spooky, compelling, vulgar design, a brilli
ant mixture of kitsch and idealism, satire and mystery? Except for the crepuscular lighting, their vision of Xanadu compares with the architecture of a Hearst-like estate that had recently been described by Aldous Huxley in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939):

  On the summit of a bluff and as though growing out of it in a kind of stony efflorescence, stood a castle. But what a castle! The donjon was like a skyscraper, the bastions plunged headlong with effortless swoop of concrete dams. The thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic with a Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century. . . . It was mediaeval, not out of vulgar historical necessity, like Coucy, say, or Alnwick, but out of pure fun and wantonness, platonically, one might say. It was mediaeval as only a witty and irresponsible modern architect would wish to be mediaeval, as only the most competent modern engineers are technically equipped to be.

  Our approach to this bizarre domain is as voyeuristic as anything in Hitchcock. The camera is drawn like a moth to the lighted window, where its journey is frustrated; the light immediately clicks out. Notice that the same forward movement of the camera, usually accompanied by dissolves, is used throughout the film, until it becomes a stylistic motif. One thinks, for example, of the way the camera twice crawls up the walls of the El Rancho nightclub and moves toward a broken skylight; a dissolve takes us through the broken glass, enabling us to peer at Susan Alexander. There are a number of less obvious instances of the same technique, and some of them are worth listing here:

  1. When Thompson (William Alland) enters the vaults of the Thatcher Memorial Library, the camera starts moving forward toward him, only to have a great iron door close in its face; a dissolve takes us beyond the door, the camera peering over Thompson’s shoulder at the pages of Thatcher’s diary.

  2. When the flustered editor Herbert Carter (Erskine Sanford) leaves the offices of the Inquirer, sent by Kane to drum up sensational news, the camera stands looking at an artist’s rendering of the building; a slow forward movement begins, a dissolve taking us closer to a window where Kane is writing his declaration of principles; another dissolve takes us through the window and inside the room.

  3. When Kane first meets Susan and goes up to her apartment, the camera stands quietly in the hallway looking through an open door; Kane shuts the door and the camera rushes forward impetuously, almost anxiously, stopping only when Susan opens it again.

  4. Near the end of the film, Kane walks out of Susan’s bedroom at Xanadu, going past a mirrored hallway that casts reflections of his aging body off into infinity; after he passes, the camera moves slightly forward toward the darkness of the empty glass.

  5. In the climactic moments, the camera glides forward over Kane’s possessions, a collection that looks like an aerial view of a metropolis. A dissolve takes us closer, the camera moving past the flotsam of Kane’s life: a symbolic toy-box, a set of old newspapers bound in twine, a photo of Kane circa his first marriage, an iron bedstead from an earlier scene, another photo of Kane as a boy with his mother, and finally the snow sled. Just as the camera draws near this final object, and before we can read the inscription, a workman enters and carries the sled away; another dissolve takes us to the furnaces, where the camera continues moving forward directly into the flames, at last coming to rest on the burning “Rosebud.”

  The constant forward movement of the camera through windows and doors and into dark corners is of course perfectly in keeping with the film’s attempt to probe Kane’s psychology, and it creates an appropriately eerie effect. Moreover, the ultimate revelation of the burning sled produces a vivid feeling of entropy—as if the camera had pushed as far as possible and the source of Kane’s mystery were being consumed at the very moment when it is being discovered. There is still another sense, however, in which the technique of the opening segment becomes a part of the film’s structure and meaning. It establishes the camera as a restless, ghostly observer, more silent and discreet than the journalists who poke about among Kane’s belongings, but linked to them in certain ways. Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera has become an “inquirer,” its search implicating the audience in a desire to find Kane’s private rather than his public meaning.

  The periodic frustrations the camera encounters—a door closing, a light clicking out—are like affronts to the audience’s curiosity. They also create a sense of mystery and subtle anxiety that is enhanced by other elements in the opening of the film; consider, for example, the fascinating but confusing imagery we encounter inside Xanadu. When the camera reaches Kane’s window only to have the light turned out, we dissolve to an equivalent reverse angle inside the bedroom. All we see, however, is a deeply shadowed figure lying as if in state. Throughout this sequence Kane is photographed in expressionist shadow, or else the camera is placed so near his figure that we can barely read the image. A gigantic close-up of the dying man’s lips is the largest single shot, but until the lips move and whisper the crucial word, we have no idea what we are looking at. Even when they do move, they create a slightly ludicrous impression: a big mustachioed mouth seen from so close it looks like the mountains of a strange planet.

  Nearly everything in Kane’s bedroom is presented in this dreamlike, subjective, slightly confusing way. The inexplicable close-up of a cottage (a still photo superimposed with moving snow) turns out to be a paperweight, and when the camera pulls back to reveal this fact, some confusion lingers, because everything—Kane’s hand, the paperweight, and the background—is covered with snowflakes. From this shot we cut to another view of the hand, this time shown on the opposite side of the screen—a deliberately chaotic and “bad” editing style that does not allow the audience to orient itself inside the room. When the paperweight rolls down the steps and crashes (another piece of trickery created by several images spliced together), we cut to the most confusing shot of all: a reflection in a convex piece of broken glass, creating an elaborate fish-eye effect that is virtually a parody of the lens Toland uses to photograph the movie. We can barely make out a nurse opening a strange ornamental doorway and entering; another cut, to a low angle near the head of Kane’s bed, shows the nurse placing a sheet over a body.

  These fragmentary glimpses of Kane’s world have been so fantastic, so enshrouded with darkness and mystery, that they hide more than they reveal. They tantalize the audience, only to cap the effect suddenly, without warning, by introducing the “News on the March” title card. The newsreel, once it gets under way, allows viewers to settle momentarily into a new, more logical narrative mode, grounded in presumably objective, documentary facts. It illustrates the dramatic curve of Kane’s public life, explaining the origins of the strange castle we have just seen and providing a general map for the various local instances that will be developed later in the film. Thus, as David Bordwell has pointed out, the two opening segments are like hommages to the fountainheads of cinematic “perception”—the fantasy of Georges Méliès and the documentary realism of the brothers Lumière. Nevertheless, these two modes do not achieve a synthesis. The newsreel, as much as the opening scenes, tends to remind the audience of the voyeurism inherent in the medium and leaves Kane as much an enigma as ever. If the private Kane was seen too subjectively, too close up, the public Kane is seen too objectively and usually from too far away.

  “News on the March” is a wonderfully funny parody of the hyped-up journalism that Hearst and Luce had helped to create; in fact Welles and about a fourth of the Mercury players had previously worked in the radio version of The March of Time and had borrowed freely some of its famous catchphrases, such as “this week, as it must to all men, death came to . . .” But for all of its self-important tone, the newsreel offers mainly a compilation of Kane’s public appearances, usually filled with scratches and photographed from awkward vantage points. Repeatedly Kane is shown alongside politicians, allying himself first with the progressives and then with the fascists; in his early career he is shown waving and smiling at the p
ublic in awkward gaiety, but in later pictures he becomes somber and camera-shy. We are told that “few private lives were more public,” but actually we have only disturbing glimpses into Kane’s domestic habits: a doctored photo of one of his Xanadu parties; a shot of him sitting beside an empty swimming pool, swathed in towels and going over a manuscript; a peep through a latticed gate, as a handheld camera with a telephoto lens tries to show the old man being pushed in a wheelchair. The newsreel gives the impression that Kane was always being interviewed, investigated, or eavesdropped upon, but it leaves little sense of what the man was like and only a superficial notion of his influence on public affairs. Even “1941’s biggest, strangest funeral” is shown only as a brief shot outside a pseudo-gothic pile; the image is grainy (Toland’s imitation of newsreel stock is always perfectly accurate) and the sky is a giant diffuser of light, so we can see only a few rich mourners from a distance, over the massed heads of reporters.

  Throughout this “documentary” there is a comic disparity between the awesomeness of Kane’s possessions and the stilted old codger we actually see, as if the newsreel were trying to establish him both as a mythical character like Noah or Kubla Khan and as something of a joke. Kane consistently supports the wrong politicians; he marries a president’s daughter and then gets caught in a sex scandal with Susan Alexander; he drops wet concrete over his Edwardian coat at a public ceremony; he vouches for the peaceful intentions of Hitler. He is so bumbling and foolish that little remains of him but his wealth, and even that is treated as a believe-it-or-not curiosity. But if we are awed at Kane’s money and contemptuous of his behavior, we also begin to dislike the reporters who poke microphones in his face. This feeling is reinforced when Welles detaches us from the newsreel, suddenly breaking the illusion by cutting to a side view of the screen and the projection lights, then making an aural joke: the projector clicks off and the pompous musical fanfare groans to a stop, as if somebody were giving “News on the March” a raspberry.