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Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences Author(s): Robin Bates and Scott Bates Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 3-26 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225336 Accessed: 17-06-2016 15:02 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences by Robin Bates with Scott Bates

When I first saw Citizen Kane with my college friends in 1941, it was in an America undergoing the powerful pressures of a coming war, full of populist excitement and revolutionary foreboding. But cynical Depression kids that we were, we had little hope for salvation through armed uprising. Nor did we believe any longer in America's self-proclaimed values. Nevertheless, those values were still part of us, and it was America's blind self-destruction that we instinctively recognized in the shattering experience of watching a little wooden sled go up in flames. From the moment the huge lips opened and said "Rosebud," to the sled's final immolation in the furnace of our desires, we were both thrilled and terror-stricken. It was the flaming consummation of sex and politics that we had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives. We somehow knew that we had experienced our own flaming love-death and that it had taken place in the tragic heart of our country. Welles and Mankiewicz had revealed, in two short hours of perception, how en- ergetically Miss America had been raped of her dream, of her promise, of her rose; and then how she had dutifully prostituted us, her own bastard children. We no longer had a place we could call home. Pessimistically, and yet with the hope of finding some sort of transcendence through great eschatological events, we let ourselves get drafted into the army.... -Scott Bates'

For my father, a freshman at Carleton College, the final moment of Citizen Kane was cathartic. As the sled was thrust into the burning furnace and the rose and the lettering took over the screen, he and other members of his generation were convinced that Thompson, the reporter in the film, was wrong: one could sum up a man's life in a word. As Tangye Lean wrote for Horizon, "If you accept the discovery of 'Rosebud' as something more than an 0. Henry ending, a vast pattern of interrelated human themes becomes clear-as a different one does in the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu."2 And Cedric Belfrage raved in the leftist film review Clipper, "The people are going to see Citizen Kane, and not one of them will be quite the same person after seeing it as he was before. It is as profoundly moving an experience as only this extraordinary and hitherto unexplored medium of sound-cinema can afford in two hours. You leave it with regret, wishing you could see it all through again, feeling all of your own belief in the medium restored, all of your shattered illusions made whole."3 Although there were several attacks on the Rosebud plot, especially from

Robin Bates is associate professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Scott Bates is professor of French at The University of the South. He is currently completing a book on eroticism and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 3

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms the left,4 many viewers had an experience somewhat like Belfrage's: The film seemed to have healing powers. Yet the Rosebud revelation has now become a critical embarrassment. In 1963 Orson Welles dismissed Rosebud as "a gimmick really, and rather dollar-book Freud,"5 and others have followed suit. In an important PMLA article, Robert L. Carringer sums up the recent critical down- playing of Rosebud's importance, and he himself regards it as "a rather shameless piece of melodramatic gimmickry."6 The tendency now, in line with general deconstructionist thought, is to regard Rosebud as indicating a deferral of mean- ing. Thus Carringer sees it as a Hitchcock McGuffin, a way of "making us care about one thing when it's really something else that matters." The real meaning of Rosebud, he says, is the way that "there are parts of Kane that are knowable and-others that will always remain beyond our interpretation."7 In the most recent article I have seen on Citizen Kane, Leonard J. Leff takes a similar approach. The film only seems to say that Rosebud is the answer, but then undercuts it with what Leff regards as anticlimactic closing shots and the Mercury Theatre tail credits. He concludes: "Our consistently revised assumptions permit us to experience and learn the very object lesson, the danger of closing on a text."8 This article attempts to reconstruct what the Rosebud search meant for middle-class liberal males of the 1940s and 1950s, the group for whom the film probably had the most profound impact. It will also speculate on why we no longer share their response. I am involved in more than an attempt to understand why the film means so much to my father, although this is what propels my search. The task is undertaken with the assumption that a text will show different faces to different historical periods, and this multifaceted nature is part of its complexity: A text engages with a particular set of audience needs and expec- tations and changes as these needs and expectations change. Therefore if, as Pauline Kael claims, Citizen Kane was more highly praised by the American press than any other movie,9 that response has to be taken seriously. If, on the other hand, the Rosebud search seems a plot gimmick today-if the end product seems too insignificant, or the closure too final -it is not because we have become more sophisticated, but because audience needs have changed. Today's "gimmick" may have been yesterday's icon. Early liberal audiences found in the Rosebud revelation a successful con- densation of their major psychological, aesthetic, and political concerns. The film articulated their deepest anxieties in these areas and then, in the final shots, provided a symbolic transcendence. To understand their response, I will follow two lines of investigation. First, treating Rosebud as a totalizing symbol, I will determine what associations rosebuds and roses had for audiences at the time. In the intersection of the private associations that roses had for Mankiewicz and Welles (and even for Hearst), one can see how the Rosebud symbol became a locus for the psychological, the aesthetic, and the political. Second, disassembling the symbol, I will isolate these concerns and show how the film works on each level separately. Thus, when viewers explained their response, they praised the film for its psychological complexity, its artistic virtuosity, and its political audacity.

4 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Rosebud worked for these viewers, I believe, because it offered revelatory insight into the historical moment and suggested a way to situate oneself in a world on the edge of cataclysm.

Mankiewicz, Welles, and Rosebud. Citizen Kane started as a screenplay about William Randolph Hearst. As Mankiewicz and John Houseman worked on the script, they noted how it became a film about Orson Welles. And if one reads Richard Meryman's illuminating biography on Mankiewicz, one realizes the extent to which the film is about the scriptwriter.'? The critical debates over authorship-who is really responsible for Citizen Kane?-are irresoluble because the overlap is so great. This overlap can be seen most clearly in the rose symbolism and what it meant to Mankiewicz and Welles. The conjunction of private as- sociations points to a more general significance. It is necessary to clear up one point before exploring private associations. Rosebud could not have been the brand name of an actual boy's sled because no self-respecting boy would own a sled called Rosebud." For one thing, in the nineteenth century, rosebud was a word applied almost exclusively to little girls and virginal debutantes. By the twentieth century, the word had become too effeminate even for the Girl Scouts, who changed the "Rosebuds" to the "Brown- ies." We may sense that there was never a sled called Rosebud as we watch the final shots, and yet curiously, the significance of the word has hardly been explored. We may have avoided looking into the fire too closely because of what we were afraid we would see. According to a rumor that has circulated in Hollywood for years, Rosebud was in actuality the nickname that Hearst gave to the genitals of his mistress, Marion Davies.'2 Kenneth Anger speculates that Mankiewicz picked up the information from Louise Brooks, a good friend of Davies.'3 If true, then new light is cast upon Kane's huge lips (rosebud lips) muttering the word, and the scene suddenly becomes an astonishing inside joke, played by the self- destructive Mankiewicz on a man who had the power to break his career. The joke would have been reinforced had Mankiewicz been able to keep his original name for Kane: Rogers, slang for "fornicates." The Rosebud rumor may or may not be reliable, but there are other indicators that Rosebud might have such a source, and a plausible psychological scenario emerges from what we know of Hearst. First, rosebud is found throughout Victorian pornography as a code word for the female genitals and other private parts,'4 and Hearst, as a Victorian playboy, would have been aware of such associations. Second, an interesting vignette uncovered by Carringer in a 1936 Hearst biography shows Hearst, as a child, fascinated by actual rosebuds. In an almost literary manner, the story, which features an Edenic walled garden, a threatening mother, and an innocent childhood playmate nicknamed (of all things) Pussy, foreshadows Hearst's later relationship with the girlish Davies. In any event Mankiewicz is sure to have encountered the story and to have read into it his own obsession with the Victorian duality of female sexuality and innocence:

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 5

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Willie Hearst was conscious of all beauty. When his mother bought new French dishes he pointed out the rosebuds to Pussy. One day his head appeared at the top of the fence and excitedly he called, "Pussy, come and see the 'La France'!" Pussy had never heard of a La France, and so she hastily climbed the ladder to see this new exciting object. "Why," she exclaimed, "it's just a rose!" "It's a La France," corrected the boy.... "Isn't it lovely?" exclaimed Pussy. "I can't believe it's real." "Pussy, if I wasn't afraid my mother would be mad, I'd cut the La France and give it to you."'5 Writing Hearst's private nickname into the film is in part a "good old boys'" joke, and there is some evidence that Hearst, even as he allowed his minions to attack the film, appreciated the humor.'6 The joke, in fact, is double: Hearst, like Howard Hughes (the planned subject of another Welles film), had an abnormal fear of death and would not let it be mentioned in his presence. To have "Rosebud" muttered by a dying Hearst, therefore, was an extra twist. Furthermore, by associating death and sexuality, the shot brings to mind "le petit mort" of sexual orgasm. All in all, it is a clever though cheap shot directed at an old man living with a young mistress. But jokes, as Freud has taught us, are deadly serious, and the rosebuds in Hearst's life helped Mankiewicz to understand Hearst. Or at least they became the point of projection. Through the rosebud, he was able to relate Hearst's obsessions to his own and also find what it was in himself that was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the publisher. In Mankiewicz's own life, the Rosebud sled was, according to the Meryman biography, a bicycle. There was also a crystal ball, and the linkage between bicycle and crystal ball points to a Mankiewicz family Oedipal drama that reappears in the film. Mankiewicz's bicycle was his boyhood love and the locus of many conflicts with his authoritarian father. When it was stolen, Mankiewicz's father refused to replace it (Mankiewicz had been disobeying parental orders), and Mankiewicz's mother did not back her son. One can imagine the whole scene coming out in the orthodox Freudian therapy that Mankiewicz had undergone for two years shortly before writing Citizen Kane: he came to equate bicycle with hatred of authoritarian father and longing for insufficient mother love. (Meryman notes that the psychiatrist remarked that Mankiewicz's Oedipal conflict with his father was a "real return to the womb.")'7 Other associations, too, prompt a link between sexuality and bicycle. True, there were no Rosebud bicycles for the same reason that there were no Rosebud sleds. But judging by a photograph in the Meryman biography and by wholesale house catalogues in 1907, Mankiewicz's bicycle was probably a "Red Head King," the most popular bike in America and one of the few bikes made especially for boys ("Characteristic red head and red center tube").'8 The change from "red head" to "rosebud" would have been easy and natural for Mankiewicz, even if

6 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms he hadn't known that "rosebud" was a private Hearst referent. Mankiewicz, like Hearst, would have been aware of Victorian pornography's use of the word. While an English major at Columbia, Mankiewicz earned money by renting out pornographic classics to his fellow students. There are several reasons why the bicycle would have become a sled. Bicycles and sleds are the kind of children's games that Freud associates with dreams of flying, which he interprets as sexual excitement.'9 Mankiewicz thus builds into the film his childhood dreams of flying, with the young Kane coasting upon a partially invisible background. The boy's prone position, Freud's view of boards (and wood in general) as female dream symbols,20 and the fact that the sled has an emblem closely resembling vaginal lips, reinforce the sexual resonances. One can imagine Mankiewicz making all the psychological connections as he recalled key childhood moments for his psychiatrist. The sled also provides a natural link with another important object at the time of Mankiewicz's therapy, a crystal ball snow scene given him by the mother figure whom he married. (John Houseman saw Sara as a "beautiful, indestructible Jewish madonna," and Sara was to call herself "Mank's only original authentic rosebud.")2' Meryman reports that Mankiewicz would sit in his bedroom chair, "reflectively shaking the ball and watching the snow swirl up inside and settle down on the tiny scene."2 The ball, Meryman believes, would undoubtedly have brought back recollections of his boyhood winters in Wilkes-Barre. Given the Oedipal frustrations of his youth and his psychological search for consolation, it was necessary that Mankiewicz link the word, the sled, and the ball. Therefore the script goes to great pains to make these links: in an early version of the script, we hear, "Rosebud," followed by a cut to the snowstorm and the ball, and then "Rosebud" three more times.23 In the final version, the word is bracketed by shots of the ball. Buoyed by a Freudian psychoanalysis that seemed to explain his life, Man- kiewicz projected his own longings onto Hearst, whom he now hated with the same intensity as that with which he had once admired him. A follower of Hearst in his earlier populist and trust-busting days, court buffoon at the sumptuous San Simeon, and then implacable enemy as Hearst became a leading apologist for Hitler, Mankiewicz never escaped the newspaper magnate's orbit. Rosebud pro- vided the point of contact with Hearst, a symbol through which Mankiewicz could articulate his longing for an innocent childhood and a pristine America, while expressing his combined sense of his own personal failure and Hearst's political betrayal. Independent of Mankiewicz, Welles too meditated on roses, as revealed in a striking manuscript, something like a prose poem, appearing in his early miscellaneous papers located in the Indiana University Welles collection.24 The poem is remarkable since it lays out, albeit in highly coded form, the interrelation between psychology, politics, and aesthetics that is to be found in Citizen Kane, directed a few years later. Welles employs the rose in his attempt to reconcile his leftist politics with his cult of beauty, as well as with his humanistic indi-

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 7

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms vidualism. The poem shows Welles, like Mankiewicz and perhaps Hearst, torn by sexual and political anxieties, inspired by individualist dreams, and longing for childhood warmth and security. The manuscript, perhaps written close to the time of Welles's twentieth birthday, may well be a reaction to his early encounters with political theater less than two months before.25 Welles's first political role upon returning to America from Ireland was as the lead in Archibald MacLeish's Panic. Panic is an experimental drama in which a banker, faced with Marxist predictions of economic doom, loses his nerve and jumps from a window. Following the third and final performance of the play, a panel discussion was held in which Vincent Jerome, cultural commissar of the American Communist Party, criticized the play for the way it humanized the capitalist's struggle while rendering the masses faceless.26 Welles meditates in his early poem on a counter aesthetic: The economic animal has no truck with the rose.

But we grow roses and call them a million marvelous names after which we dance with them in our teeth and give them to the most wonderful person in the world. We cry over them and sneeze over them, and we go to war over them. We make them into candy and perfume and poetry and we fling them wildly at men who have killed men for us and ladies who have sung us a song. We give them to friends because they are happy, because they are sad, because they're alive or because they're dead. We put them at tomb-stones and champagne-bottles. We put them in flags and press them in books and we've even woven them into a crown of thorns.

Nothing in all communism can be said to apply faintly to the rose unless perhaps it be that tragic symbol on a field of blood, the sycle [sic].

We may be rugged and we are certainly individuals, a less angular, a more complex and more than economic creation. We are still persuaded that we are somthing [sic] holier and more human.

We are such stuff and nonsense as dreams are made on. And if we see no further than the end of our nose, an organ not only for breathing and smelling but for love and laughter, and suspect those who see further, there have been Cyrano's [sic] among us whose noses reached to the moon.

Maybe the workers can formulate a New Nose and breed a race like a wallpaper, but the nose is still a passionately private enterprise, and the creature supporting it would be hard to outmode. He has private passions and private cabbage patches. He has a hearth and a heart.

And in an earlier draft of the above:

Take the rose which rhymes so perfectly with nose as it does in prose.

passions and private cabbage patches. We send secretly for seed packets (we raise

8 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms up roses tenderly and throw them tenderly away), we grow roses and call them [second paragraph repeated]....

If this be reaction make the most of it.

The argument here asserts the primacy of the world of art, the artist as "unacknowledged legislator of the world." The masses, by contrast, see no further than the end of their noses (in other words, they are "economic animals") and are dully material (they think noses are only for smelling, not for "love and laughter"). The "New Nose" of the workers (i.e., communism) doesn't acknowl- edge that the individual is a "passionately private enterprise" who cannot be outmoded. Communism has "no truck with the rose." The romantic artist, on the other hand, celebrates individuality and makes dreams out of the "stuff and nonsense" of reality. Other things are going on as well in the entry. First of all, the sudden shift from "rose" to "nose" signals a psychological subtext. Nose is fairly clearly a code word for phallus, at least in part. (Noses are not normally used for "love and laughter"; Welles was both sexually insecure and obsessed with his short nose, which he regarded as his major physical defect.)27 Sexual puns abound: Welles talks about "cabbage patches" (like rosebud, a common slang word for vagina), "secret seed packets," and roses which are "thrown tenderly away." The sexual and political intertwine in interesting ways. Communism, in Welles's view, levels the romantic individual, and in such a sexually charged discussion, levelling resonates with castration anxieties. Therefore, there is the (otherwise inexplicable) metaphor of "breeding a race like a wallpaper" (why this flattening?), and the reference to communism's "sickle on a field of blood" (note the focus on the sickle, not the hammer). In an assertive register, the piece is veering between two poles. At one end is the romantic, the capitalist, and the potent, Cyrano noses that reach to the moon; on the other is the longing for self-contained works of art and wombs-the "heart and the hearth." In a defensive register, the poem is alternately fascinated by communism's "rose"-the revo- lution -and fearful of the way it threatens to swallow individuality. The registers reflect and mutually constitute each other. Given this turmoil, it makes sense that Welles would also lament in his early writing on the end of childhood and regard maturation as a far greater tragedy than even death itself:

The great tragedy, is summer not winter

The end of Spring and of childhood not autumn and death Even in death we arrive in life End of spring like the end of Eden Adam's awakening on the first morning of exile28 Welles is not only speaking as a spoiled aesthetic prodigy, but as someone

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 9

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms who is living in a world in which capitalism is literally bankrupt, in which the political alternative seems problematic, and in which national tensions are growing dangerously. Welles's mixed feelings about the individual, like Mankiewicz's Oedipal anxieties, are probably related to the powerful world figures that were shaping world destiny-Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt-whom he was closely associated with (albeit vicariously) in his various roles on radio's March of Times series. Roses were a point at which Mankiewicz and Welles could come together, because roses meant similar things to both of them.

The Freudian Subtext of Citizen Kane. Complaints about "dollarbook Freud" (Welles) and "popular Freudianism" (Kael) scarcely account for the response Citizen Kane received in 1941. The review in Time,--"It is as psychiatrically sound as a fine novel.... It is a work of art created by grown people for grown people"29-testifies to the psychological power that it had for many. Belfrage called Kane "the most three-dimensional human being who ever walked and talked on the screen-I would almost say the only one."30 Tangye Lean wrote, "Life is like this..., but not up to now, Hollywood."3' It is true that Freudian thought intervenes heavily. Freudian thought ex- perienced great popularity in 1930s America, and Mankiewicz's original name for Xanadu was Alhambra, the Freudian rest home where he had spent two weeks. The film does indeed put Hearst and other capitalists on the psychiatrist's couch. But the filmmakers are not merely toying with Freudian thought; rather, they have incorporated it in some fundamental ways. The film itself is, more than most, structured as a Freudian dream. It establishes equivalents for the dream's two contents--the latent and the manifest (or the primary and secondary processes) -and then provides a version of therapy which leads to resolution. In the film, the opening sequence, where dream-like artifacts loom in the mist and objects speak with strange power, corresponds with the latent content, which is fragmented, mutilated, inaccessible. Freud says the dream work takes this raw material and turns it into a narrative, which in the film appears as the newsreel, the public version of Kane. As a result of the secondary process, "the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible meaning." But, Freud adds, "this meaning is very far removed from the real meaning of the dream."32 The producer Rawlston senses this same distance in the newsreel and sends out his reporter to find "the real meaning" of Kane. The reporter's search functions as the dream therapy, and the final private revelation of Rosebud hits with therapeutic force. The opening sequence is the film's version of the primary dream content. It is a dream infused with guilt. The audience is clearly on forbidden ground in the opening shots as the viewer penetrates the heavy gates. The camera appears to move the viewer toward the castle, although- in dream-like fashion-the camera does not actually move but cuts through a series of lap dissolves. It is within Kane's innermost chamber that we hear articulated what I will argue is

10 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms the forbidden Oedipal desire. At the same point we see the crystal ball, which becomes linked with "Rosebud." But even as desire is voiced in all its intensity, so, with the same intensity, does the audience experience the gap between desire and attainment. The falling snow that covers the Swiss chalet functions as a veil and carries with it overtones of oblivion (one thinks of Joyce's "The Dead"). We are removed from whatever it is that lies beneath the snow and within the chalet, the unnamable object of desire. The quick backward track of the camera that reveals the glass ball enforces the sense of distance. Visually the drama is presented as follows: The audience sees the snow and takes it as real; it falls across the screen as presence, and we see it as the man apparently does. Then, forced back, the audience sees the scene's containment in a glass toy, and the camera, which has inexorably penetrated to this point, begins a retreat. Viewers have been taken to the threshold of that which is desired and then have experienced its inaccessibility. After the ball shatters in an explosion that the audience interprets as the man's death, there is a reversal of the sequence that began the events of the inner chamber. At first the audience saw the snow become contained in the glass ball. Now it sees a nurse, first seemingly enclosed in the ball, walk out of it to loom over the dead man. The whiteness of the snow against a dark background, and the dark, snow-covered house, is repeated in the whiteness of the nurse with her dark, hidden features. She comes at the moment of death, called by the voiced desire and the shattering of the ball. As a nurse she is both mother and death angel (in this case a cold and bureaucratic death angel), one who brings forth life and one who witnesses death. The shattering of the ball suggests birth, but it is a birth into death: Desire is fulfilled when one no longer desires. Yet the disquiet of this scene modulates as we watch the figure alone on the bed: He is dead but at rest. Then the trumpeting of News on the March jolts the audience out of the sequence, and it is forgotten. Nevertheless, it works sublim- inally throughout the film so that, after the reporters have left Xanadu at the end of the film, the audience recognizes, with a sense of deja vu, the music and ambiance of the opening sequence. The newsreel seems to wake the audience up, apparently taking it from dreams to reality, or from expressionism to realism, as David Bordwell puts it.33 In the terms of our framework, the film has moved from the primary to the secondary dream process. That the newsreel so closely parodies the style of the actual March of Time newsreels gave 1940s audiences the impression that they were leaving the world of film for the world of actuality. But Hollywood realism is still a product of Hollywood, and the result is a more public form of a dream that all Americans would have recognized: the American Dream of attaining fabulous wealth and using it to build a better world. In documentary fashion the filmgoer watches a figure who seems capable of achieving the dream and who then squanders his potential. Although appearing a bit overblown now, News on the March would have seemed realistic to audiences of the time, more so because

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 1 1

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms it is such a straightforward version of their hopes and disillusionment. By setting forth the American Dream in a newsreel, and by then claiming that the newsreel is unsatisfactory, the film would have guided the viewer toward the latent dream content, the "real story." If we apply Freudian dream analysis to the newsreel, we find the same pattern of desire and frustration that is to be found in the film's opening sequence. News on the March begins with Xanadu and proceeds to follow a pattern of assertion and deflation, moving forward toward a climactic high and then collapsing. It begins with images of tremendous potency- Xanadu's phallic tow- ers, military statues imported from Europe, giraffes lifting their long necks. But this sequence culminates in shots of Kane's funeral ("Here this week is laid to rest a potent figure of our century"). The hype begins again-"the greatest tycoon of this or any generation"- and the audience watches an escalation from "humble beginnings," a "dying daily," to Kane's news empire (rings radiating on a map). Virtually every phallic symbol imaginable is tossed into the representation of Kane's wealth: paper mills (a huge roll of paper thrusts out toward the viewer), apartment buildings (sky- scrapers jut into the sky), smokestacks (the same), forests (a large tree crashes into the water), the Colorado Lode (a river of gold pours across the screen). The sequence ends weakly fifty-seven years later when a bald and tottering Thatcher (whom the audience first takes for Kane) denounces Kane as a communist. The escalation begins again: Kane was a man who once made history. It deflates: he is an old man hobnobbing with fascists. His marriage to Emily Monroe Norton, a president's niece (shot against the White House) ends with the death of Emily and the child; his marriage to Susan (shot against the Chicago Opera House) ends in a divorce; his "lightning political career" ends in the love nest scandal; the career overall ends in economic ruin (the rings shrink and disappear) and impotent old age. The newsreel itself conforms to this pattern: the blaring of News on the March that ends the newsreel peters out as the film runs out of the projector. And there is a hint that the pattern could continue indefinitely when someone shouts to the projectionist, "Stand by, I'll tell you if we need to run it again." In a sense, the producer Rawlston seeks to end this compulsive repetition when he sends the reporter Thompson on his search. In psychoanalytic terms, Rawlston acts as a therapist. Unsatisfied with the manifest content of the dream, he seeks to recover the latent. His method is analagous to the talking cure in which the therapist (the reporter in this case) elicits narratives which will fill in the gaps and fissures of the manifest content. Thompson interviews Kane's closest acquaintances but, by the standards of 1930s psychotherapy, he fails to understand Kane and manages only to identify the gaps in the narrative: "Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or some- thing he lost.... I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece." It is when the psychoanalytic process admits defeat-in other words, when it acknowledges the inaccessibility of the latent dream content-that this content

12 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms wells forth again, defiant and unexplained. The dream-like opening scenes are recalled by the final scenes. For the 1940s viewer, however, there has been a psychological breakthrough, which would have made the final shots immensely powerful. The experience of watching the film would have been something on the order of being led by a psychiatrist to the verge of a breakthrough and then being provided with the missing key. That the dream is Oedipal becomes clear when we look at the life of Kane. As Beverle Houston points out, Kane's relationship with Susan is a "dirty accident" that deflects him from his mother.34 Kane compulsively replays the separation drama with his wives. The explanation for his adult behavior is laid out in the snow scene of Thatcher's reminiscence. Here is to be found all the elements of the film's opening sequence: the snow-covered cabin, the "Rosebud" referent, and the crystal ball (a snowball) which, upon shattering, calls forth the cold mother (Kane throws the snowball at the sign "Mrs. Kane's Boarding House," bringing the mother to the window). As Thatcher's account opens, Charlie is sliding down endless white vistas in an undifferentiated world that is innocent but also cold. After Charlie throws his snowball, the film moves into an interior where forces are planning the young child's life. Significantly, the snow scenes are the only extended outdoor scenes, and from here on Kane will be locked into suf- focating rooms. As if in anticipation of this life-long entrapment, Kane's snowball works as an act of unconscious aggression against the mother. All is summed up in the ambivalence of the mother's parting embrace: ". .. he's going to be brought up where you can't get at him," she tells the threatening father, and then sends her son to the sheltering womb of a bank ("Mother Bank," as the institution was known in the nineteenth century). The empty mausoleum with skylights in which Thompson reads the memoir is just another version of this cold shelter, and Thompson's flip remark to the austere Thatcher librarian is truer than he thinks: "You're not rosebud, are you?" She is, at least, another face of it, an icy guardian of a womb which is a repository of childhood images. That Kane has two fathers (as did Welles) may be a boy's version of the psychological drama that Bruno Bettelheim describes for girls in a story like "Snow White": the nurturing mother of early infancy is replaced by a mother enforcing social rules, and the child attributes the behavior switch to the death of the first mother.3 In this story, Charlie's first father is a boyish companion, one who will play or fight with him. He is replaced by a father from the adult world. Charlie's attack against Thatcher with his childhood sled is a reaction against growing up. But the expensive eastern model given him by Thatcher, according to James Naremore, is a "Crusader" model,36 implying that Kane's newspaper crusades against Thatcher are simply part of an adolescent rebellion, and that Thatcher will always control the relationship. Caught in perpetual rebellion, Kane can never surpass his social father or attain maturity. His real goal in life, as he tells Thatcher, is to become "everything you hate." But Thatcher bests him, buying out his bankrupt newspapers in an act akin to bailing out a

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms son in trouble. Even at this late date, Kane still calls his former guardian "Mr. Thatcher." Kane's sense of betrayal by the mother who forces him to grow up carries over into his relationship with his wives. Replaying the history of his own perceived abandonment, he torments them and forces them to leave him. That he torments his wives as he was tormented is spelled out most clearly when he takes over the desires of Susan's mother in forcing Susan to become an opera singer. "You know how mothers are," Susan says, and Kane nods, understanding only too well. (The crystal ball, meanwhile, sits on her dressing table.) The cut that ends the parlor scene makes sense only in light of this psychological drama: Kane's applause for Susan's piano playing merges with applause for his guber- natorial candidacy at a political rally. He will force Susan to fulfill social ex- pectations the same way that he himself has been forced to fulfill them. Driven by his mother's social expectations, Kane creates large projections of himself (the campaign poster at the rally), and, to show that he is successful, he buys things. But his adult aspirations clash with his desire to remain a child, and he bankrupts himself with his buying, which, above all, focuses on headless statues of the rose goddess Venus. If he goes bankrupt, it is because he didn't make mature "investments" (in other words, he did not delay gratification but spent impetuously). Sometimes this inner clash takes very curious forms: Kane is one of the leading stockholders in a trust that his newspaper crusades against. Why, one can ask, doesn't he just sell his stocks or use his influence to change company policy? "The trouble is," he says to Thatcher, "you don't realize you're talking to two people." In the audience's last view of him, as he walks through the arches and the mirrors, he has become an infinite number of Kanes, caught in the infinite regression of an overpowering narcissism. All of the dramas are played out in surrogate centers of the womb: the breakfast room, the boarding house parlor, the tent, the bedroom, and, of course, the crystal ball. Even in those rooms where Kane seems most dominant-in the election night headquarters he towers over Leland-he is pressed down by the ceilinged sets, a constant limitation. He is destroyed politically by the "love nest." His greatest act of phallic assertion results in the greatest womb, Xanadu. Built on the "deserts of the Gulf Coast," Xanadu is actually designed for the only two people that, according to Leland, Kane ever loved: himself and his mother. To this point the narrative has been escalating toward an ever-intensifying sense of Oedipal impasse, mirroring Kane's unimaginable anxieties over his love/ hate relationship with his mother. The coldness of the mother has held her son at bay, and Kane has fixated on this coldness, finally yielding to the death angel. The film's power lies in the way that it can triumph where Kane cannot. Breaking free of the icy thrall, the film indulges in long-repressed Oedipal desire, killing the father (Hearst, after all, was not yet dead), and proclaiming its desire for the mother. Moments before the Rosebud revelation, in the inventory of Kane's effects, we have learned of "one stove from the estate of Mary Kane." But now the cold stove has been replaced by fire. The forbidden is named in the vaginal

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms furnace, a sinful consummation or love-death with resonances of hell-fire. The sterile power of the glass ball has been shattered. The film spoke to the viewer's deep anxieties and frustrations and seemed to transcend them in this cathartic moment of liberating recognition.

Kane as the "American Kubla Khan." This psychological explanation for the film's power is intertwined with another aspect of the film that dazzled 1940s audiences, its virtuoso quality. Audiences responded to the film by adulating Orson Welles. Jesse Zunser of Cue, for instance, wrote, "It is an astounding experience to watch Orson Welles, twenty-five-year-old Boy Genius of the Western World, in the process of creating on the screen one of the awesome products of his fertile imagination."37 Hyperbole wasn't limited to the popular press. Belfrage wrote, "He is the biggest man in Hollywood today. And he is the Prince Charming whose bold, smacking kiss on the brow of a bewitched art puts us all in his debt."3 The film was not merely a film about a tycoon or about William Randolph Hearst. It was about Orson Welles taking on Hollywood and right-wing America. Formally, Welles elicited such comments, not only by virtue of his technical advances, but also by the way he trumpeted his artistry. He foregrounded the genius of the auteur. The flashy sound cuts, the dramatic camera angles, the long tracking shots, the expressionistic lighting, everything was to be read as Welles triumphing over the Hollywood bureaucracy, Welles rising above cinematic mediocrity. Few if any critics of the time were able to separate the Welles aura from the film. Welles's meditations on roses show him celebrating the mission of the tran- scendent artist. By inserting the opening lines of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" into the film, by naming his mansion Xanadu, and by having the newsreel label Kane "an American Kubla Khan," Welles asserted his affinity with the Coleridgean poet. In choosing the great "dream poem" from the romantic period, Welles was fixing on the work that many in the 1940s regarded as artistic creativity laid out in archetypal fashion. Like Coleridge's poet, Welles could regard himself gazing with poetic detachment at a monarch caught in tragic contradictions, watching Citizen Kane "the American," builder of "an empire upon an empire," discover hollowness at the core.3 In other words, when Welles changed the Alhambra in Mankiewicz's script to Xanadu, he added a self-conscious artistry to the psychological exploration. Or perhaps more accurately, he made manifest the romantic assumptions in the psychiatry of the time. In any event, the result was that he elevated himself to the status of dangerous poet. Simultaneously, he buried Mankiewicz since, as both Welles and his audience would have agreed, romantic creation is not col- laborative. In "Kubla Khan" the monarch's "sunny pleasure dome" is counterposed to a "lifeless ocean" and "caves of ice," located at the heart of the pleasure dome. In Citizen Kane, Xanadu is counterposed by the crystal ball snow scene, the antithesis of Kane's public self and yet, paradoxically, the genesis of that self.

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Coleridge's intricate relationship between the chasm and the pleasure dome- how the chasm at one point throws up an orgasmic river in tune with Khan's vitality, and at another receives that same river in a sterile embrace, points to a psychological impasse similar to that in which Kane is caught. Kane is another Khan, his most phallic acts resulting in the most oppressive wombs. At the end of his life he is left, like Khan, staring in horror at a lifeless ocean. G. Wilson Knight's description of Kubla Khan in a 1941 critical work applies nicely to Kane: Khan is caught in "conflict unceasing and mazed wandering pain between mystery and mystery."40 The film breaks free of Kane's impasse in the same way that Coleridge breaks free of Khan's. The film is itself the symbolic triumph over the contra- dictions of the world. (Not coincidentally, new criticism, with its notions of the autonomous work of art, was beginning to gain a foothold in the 1940s.) Kane, like Khan, can only stare at the caves of ice, perhaps deriving some consoling numbness in doing so. But the filmmaker, wielding a mysterious and even dan- gerous power, can join opposites, turning the suffering of the capitalist into a thing of ecstatic contemplation. The filmmakers elevated themselves above Kane in a way that pedestrian filmmakers could not. Rawlston may be dissatisfied with his portrayal of Kane, but he and his underlings cannot escape from Hollywood conventions (the News on the March newsreel) and remain in bureaucratic shadow. By contrast, the filmmakers of Citizen Kane saw themselves as the transcendent artists celebrated by the 1930s and 40s. They demonstrated their mastery, both in their handling of the subject and in their formal control. On the one hand, they showed the essential connectedness between Kane's vitality and his sterility. On the other, the film flaunted, in addition to its technical virtuosity, its formal symmetry. Citizen Kane balances beginning and end, ice and fire, shattering ball and burning sled. Proudly proclaiming its audacity, the film tackled contradictory and for- bidden subjects-the attraction and sterility of the desire for the mother, the hopes and death of the American Dream, the greatness and triviality of William Randolph Hearst. In so doing, it gave audiences raised on formula movies the sense that they were seeing an artistic masterpiece. Little wonder that viewers were amazed to see such a film come out of Hollywood and that the Hollywood studios were so nervous. The film added to the Welles aura as he became the poet with flashing eyes and floating hair, and all cried, "Beware! Beware!"

Citizen Kane and the Politics of World War II America. To understand the film's political impact on audiences, one needs to understand that much of the political attack is conveyed through the sexual portrayal of Kane. Critics today tend to see Citizen Kane as mainly psychological. Kael, for instance, points out how some of the more political scenes were systematically cut from the film,4' and James Naremore lists all the accusations the film chose not to direct at Hearst: his use of thugs during the Chicago newspaper wars, his mining operations in Peru that were virtual forced labor camps, his opposition to child welfare and

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms union legislation. Naremore concludes that the film consistently veers from the political into the sexual.42 Many 1940s viewers, by contrast, saw the film clearly as a daring political attack. Cedric Belfrage wrote, "There has never... been a more exciting press show. For on that screen the slaves, the houris, and the camp-followers of the press lords saw some of the truth told about what enslaves, degrades and makes prostitutes of them." The film, he noted, is an indictment, "not of a man but of environments and social and economic factors which make him what he be- comes."43 "Most of the people who have seen the picture so far have come away with the solid conviction that they have beheld the image of an unscrupulous tycoon," wrote Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.44 Crowther's review is interesting because he then goes on to anticipate Naremore's comment that the film actually treats Kane rather mildly. (He had to attend the film a second time to make sure.) But in accord with modernist assumptions, he had to rely on the notion of an objectified text-in-itself: the film "seemed" political-even if it really wasn't-because Welles was playing on the "personal preconceptions" of the audience.45 Tangye Lean, by contrast, did not see the film veering from the political to the personal but regarded the themes as parallel: the "sexual flop" is as complete as the "political flop." Rosebud is equally susceptible to Marxist, Freudian, and even agnostic interpretation, he concluded.46 Roy A. Fowler also picked up the parallel themes when he looked back at the film four years later: Citizen Kane "gave the most searching and complete analysis ever made on film of an individual, imaginary or real. It succeeded in recreating as no other film has ever done seventy years of American life in the most realistic and vivid manner."47 Mankiewicz and Welles saw the film as an attack on right-wing figures like Hearst, and it is scarcely likely, given their strong antifascist beliefs, that they would have pulled their punches. They were, after all, dealing with a man whom the left constantly alluded to as "America's number one fascist," who red-baited viritually every theatrical production that Welles directed, along with his radio productions, and who had a hand in ending the WPA theater program, thus costing Welles a job. The first two films that Welles had planned, it should be recalled, were allegories directed against proto-fascists, while his last two New York Theater productions were not so subtle warnings against American isola- tionism in the international crisis.48 In short, Welles and Mankiewicz were not so much skirting politics as assuming that their sexual expose was a political statement. Their antifascism was so deep that they didn't think it needed stating. Attacking Hearst on sexual grounds was attacking him politically. The attack is twofold: Kane, an embodiment of capitalism, is rapacious; even worse, he is impotent. The relationship is spelled out particularly clearly in two works by Archibald MacLeish, a close friend and supporter of Welles who shared his fears of a fascist take-over in America. "Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's Center" appeared shortly before Welles's performance in Panic (1934).

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MacLeish's "Frescoes" is a longing for a once pure America and an attack on nineteenth-century robber barons (specifically Mellon, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan) for having sullied it. The attack is couched largely in sexual terms. MacLeish imagines a virginal America that he describes as a nude: "She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country." Modern feminists will point to the essential connection between this longing and the rape that MacLeish proceeds to describe, but MacLeish sees no relation between the founding fathers and the robber barons. Rather, the rape is a betrayal of an original promise: You have just beheld the Makers making America: They screwed her scrawny and gaunt with their seven-year panics; They bought her back on their mortgages old-whore cheap; They fattened their bonds at her breasts till the tin blood ran from them.. .4 MacLeish's Panic shows the sequel to the rape, the impotent capitalist reaping what he has sown. He can no longer control his destiny or desire his mistress. The Great Depression is capitalist sterility. But significantly, MacLeish believes that a great man can redeem the situation. (Roosevelt was to become such a man for both MacLeish and Welles.) Unfortunately, McGafferty is not such a man. Beset by spiritual malaise and unmanned by the masses, he remains deaf to the pleading of his faithful mistress and commits suicide.50 Kane carries with him America's early promise, and he too ends with failure. He is born into a "great republic" with resonances of the founding fathers (New Salem), Abraham Lincoln, and the westward expansion. The pioneer father has degenerated, however (a variant not found in MacLeish), and Thatcher, sup- posedly based on J. P. Morgan (one of MacLeish's villains), has stepped into the vacuum. For a while, however, it appears as though Kane can regenerate the old values, and it is in this light that Leland regards him. Leland is New England blueblood, an example of those values in decay (his father shot himself). But the promise withers and, in what seems to be a veering from politics to sexuality, Kane's political ambitions are thwarted by the "love nest scandal." Like MacLeish's robber barons, he has begun to grasp after "the breast and mouth [read Rosebud] of no other country." If the film were not integrally linking sexuality and politics here, it would be unclear why Leland regards the scandal as a political betrayal. Impotence is the reverse side of rape, and capitalism in its decline shows Kane, like McGafferty, increasingly impotent. The final proof of his impotence is seen in his inability to hold on to a woman: Kane's failure is underlined when Susan walks out on him. In the eyes of the filmmakers, the political scenes they cut-to take one example, the failed fascist coup attempt by Kane's son-were not as strong political attacks as this. The connection between rape and impotence is laid out in one of the film's most powerful scenes, the violation of Susan's room. Yet the filmmakers cannot entirely rejoice at Kane's defeat, as such a mis- ogynistic laying out of the issues would seem to imply, and there is a certain amount of political and sexual complicity. "If only Kane were a real man," the

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms film seems to say. The complicity can be seen in the grudging admiration it shows for his role in the Spanish American War. What criticism there is of his role (and some of the criticism was cut) is counterbalanced by Kane's youthful bravado and by his apparent ability, while only an individual, to plunge a nation into war. This ambivalence toward the capitalist makes it necessary to talk about the socialist/communist left, which is barely mentioned in the film. However, in the film's dynamics, it is the perceived inability of the left to offer a viable alternative to Kane's capitalism that creates a political impasse on the same order as the psychological impasse described earlier.51 A glance at MacLeish once again helps us see how the film maneuvers in this arena. The communists had attacked Panic for the way that, despite the attack on McGafferty, the initiative remains with him while the working class never rises above the status of "faceless threat." "The capitalist does not fall," asserted cultural commissar Jerome. "The proletariat drops him."52 Citizen Kane is fixated on Kane, the capitalist entrepreneur, in the same way that MacLeish is fixated on McGafferty. Historically, this fixation may have been because, in the New Deal com- promise that was bringing the government, corporate America, and the individual into a new conjuncture, even liberals who endorsed the New Deal programs felt Kafkaesque anxieties over the implications for individual autonomy (witness Welles's adolescent meditations). In a strange sort of way, then, the entrepreneurial capitalist who seemed to be dying out became a figure of fascination. Kael points out that a key conflict in the film is between Hearst's personality, yellow jour- nalism, in decline, and Luce's (Rawlston's) faceless machine journalism.53 If these were seen as the only two options, then viewer anxiety would have been intense. The film, however, did not embrace socialism or communism because these appeared as just another version, perhaps a projection, of state capitalism. Welles and Mankiewicz, as a result, were caught in a love/hate relationship with strong men. A survey of Welles's plays reveals a fascination that his psy- chiatrist might have called Oedipal. In addition to McGafferty, there was his "Freudian" Dr. Faustus, involved in almost a homosexual love affair with a black Mephistopheles.4 Welles played Brutus as an impotent liberal against a Mussolini- like Julius Caesar and a fascist Antony. He directed a voodoo MacBeth, and he was the fanatical St. Just in Danton's Death. In the two films that he planned before he turned to Citizen Kane, he created a Kurtz modelled on Adolph Hitler (Heart of Darkness) and a congenial fascist who tries to take over America (Smiler with a Knife, modelled on Howard Hughes). The planned final speech of Kurtz rings with Nietzsche's contempt for the multitudes in Genealogy of Morals and contains not a little ambivalence: Understand this much.-Everything I've done up here has been done according to the method of my Government. Everything. There's a man now in Europe trying to do what I've done in this jungle. He will fail. In his madness, he thinks he can't fail-but he will. A brute can rule only brutes. Remember the meek,-the meek.- I'm a great man, Marlowe-really great-I know the strength of the enemy-its

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms terrible weakness. the meek-you and the rest of the millions-the poor in spirit. I hate you-but I know you for my betters-without knowing why you are except that yours is the Kingdom of Heaven, except that you shall inherit the earth....55 Obviously Welles is not endorsing Kurtz's Nietzschean philosophy, which views democracy the same way Nietzsche viewed Christianity, as a doctrine for weaklings. But playing and directing such roles gave Welles the opportunity to indulge in them. Confronted by the failure of capitalism but seeing the only alternative as becoming one of the "meek," the "poor in spirit" in a soulless system, he had to engage in this contradictory dance, the dance of the transcendent artist. He had no other options.56 The oncoming war combined with the breakdown of capitalism to give the age an apocalyptic aura. For middle-class males who had been raised in the belief that they had individual power, the sense that they were powerless to avert the approaching cataclysm was unbearable. This political impasse parallels the psychological impasse described earlier in this essay in which the individual is caught in the whirlwind of desire and wants to retreat from the turmoil. It parallels the artistic impasse in which creative individuals, while dissatisfied with their work, do not break free from a stifling environment. It can be seen in the wasteland philosophy of liberal artists and intellectuals of the time. All was articulated in Kane building Xanadu while longing for the snowy enclosure of the crystal ball, a Merlin longing for the entrapment of Vivien's crystal cave. For these individuals, Xanadu was, in Houseman's words, "the ultimate American vision of Heaven on Earth."57 But as in the psychological and aesthetic realms, the film provided an outlet which audiences found breathtaking. It pointed to the existential vision which artists and intellectuals would flock to later in the decade and in the 1950s. The Rosebud revelation was that the entrepreneurial capitalist, the embodiment of the American Dream, was dead. His value system was exposed as corrupt, and rejecting him was an admission of the dark truth about America, a throwing over of illusions. One could now look upon the world with a naked eye; an act of self knowledge freed one of systems. The solitary grandeur of the existential journey into the night was accen- tuated by the private way in which the Rosebud revelation is made. I can recall no other film where the mystery is revealed only to the viewer, remaining hidden to the detective figure. Each viewer alone had the momentary chance to choose her or his destiny in this work of art, in this Oedipal moment, in this world on the edge of apocalypse, before the heavy iron gates closed again. To gaze upon the burning sled without blinking was to free oneself momentarily from the shadows.

Conclusion. Much of the power of Citizen Kane in 1941 came from just those elements that cause critical embarrassment today. From a psychological point of view, we are less confident that we can find a referential key that will open the door to psychological disfunction, or that, finding such a key, we can effect a

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms cure. Aesthetically, we no longer believe in self-contained works of art or see assertion of the romantic imagination as triumphing over historical impasse. Politically, I am suspicious of how the film seems to fixate on the capitalist. I do not like what I see as an overly easy dichotomy between the self-realizing individual and a faceless bureaucracy, nor the way the film mythologizes women. Like other critics today, I am fascinated by the notion of a search without an answer, and with answers that are not answers. I go out of my way to look for conflicts in the narrative accounts in Citizen Kane and am particularly intrigued by reports that Welles at one point suggested a Rashomon structure for Citizen Kane. I look for gaps in the film and see, in the very articulation of the Rosebud desire, a gap between language and some posited unity. That Rosebud might have been a private nickname makes sense because I see the filmmakers, both phallic-assertive males in a patriarchal society, defining the vagina as a Lacanian lack, and thereby getting caught in a desire for absence, a downward spiral of despair. The notion that a concrete referent can stop this spiral seems naive. And yet when critics apply such analyses to Citizen Kane, they often become overly clever and violate the film in some way. Leonard Leff, for instance, engages in an elaborate dance around the meaning of Rosebud as he tries to protect the film from charges that it opts for a simplistic closure. Note the string of qualifiers in the following passage: "If not 'the principal insight,' however, Rosebud is an insight. And although it may not unlock the psychology of Kane's character, it provides a referent for the film's first spoken words and grants us at least nominally what for almost two hours we have longed to know."58 My father, who in 1941 instinctively recognized in the burning sled "America's blind self-destruction," would find such a passage anemic. Much stronger, he would assert, to see Rosebud as the locus of the political, the sexual, the artistic, and the mythical: the capitalist longing, the rape of America, the sterility of acquisitive desire. My purpose, however, is not to choose sides (although even this decision is a contemporary one since my father would want an encompassing synthesis). Rather, it is to try to understand why each set of viewers has responded as it has. Middle-class anxieties in 1941 were intense, with the rise of new totalizing systems abroad, with the New Deal redefining the conjuncture between govern- ment, business, and the individual, and with the war in Europe. The type of closure that one finds in Citizen Kane may be recognition of the new stage that capitalism was entering. The New Deal society would not be consolidated until the 1950s, but Citizen Kane was already signalling the death of the past and indicating the new ground upon which individuals would have to negotiate a sense of self. If the film seemed to say, "This is it," to a generation of viewers, it was because they were able at one and the same time to let go the figure of the capitalist entrepreneur, the individual who rises from rags to riches in the American Eden, and to begin a new trek as existential "man," the individual without illusions who wanders through a meaningless world answering only to

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 21

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms her or his own code. Even though many admirers of Citizen Kane embraced the programs of the New Deal, one does not give up the past without intense anxieties, and Citizen Kane helped effect the ideological breakthrough that was necessary for the new society. Thus my father at eighteen could regard the oncoming war both as the end of a set of illusions and as the beginning of something new. To understand why we are today so attracted to the deferral of the Rosebud meaning, why we look for gaps and fissures in Citizen Kane, I am drawn to two ways of looking at our relationship with 1941. The first sees us as continuous with it, the second as discontinuous. In the first case, we can recognize what the 1940s were experiencing with the onset of state and corporate bureaucracies, Rawlston's shadowy figures. The shadows have only darkened since then, and we are even less optimistic that the light of the burning sled can drive them back. Ralph Cohen sees such a world as he examines the reason why critics seek out "the statements literary texts do not make." In a synthesizing article that looks at most of today's leading literary theorists, Cohen concludes that, "for us, the concealed, the unstated, the suppressed constitute the precious depths of individual privacy not yet made anonymous."59 We do more than see the burning sled-or revelation or closure-as powerless against the shadows. The burning sled is too vulnerable because too blatant, and our critical strategies are designed to protect it as we push our quest into the hidden inner recesses of the film. A second way of looking at our relationship with 1941 is to see ourselves in a new historical stage. The New Deal state has been consolidated, and con- sumption and the service economy now define the society. Gerald Graff has argued that capitalism no longer has to establish a cohesive identity or underlying unity, and instead has to do away with any checks to consumption. This historical development, which Graff traces to the 1960s, regards fixed referents and fixed values as obstacles. Avant-garde art and deconstructive criticism, Graff concludes, provide a justification for the necessary decentering.60 Applying this explanatory framework to our responses to Citizen Kane, we could say that the free play engendered by the film receives a check from the concrete referentiality of the burning sled, a check (or sense of closure) that was important in 1941. To hold on to such checks now, Graff says, is to appear reactionary or old-fashioned. Therefore, in response to historical pressures, we either have to turn our attention to other aspects of the film, or explain Rosebud as an answer which is not really an answer. The importance of studying audience responses for film criticism is that such studies reveal the multidimensionality of film. A study of a work's initial reception shows us how our relationship to the past is both continuous and discontinuous. To the extent that the past is still with us, we can understand our own viewing better if we study earlier viewings. If, when the camera tracks into the burning sled at the end of the film, there remains some cathartic power- even if the scene does not strike with the force felt by early audiences-we nevertheless have another perspective to understand our response. We are heirs

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This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms to a viewing which, if now somewhat muted, nevertheless is still part of our make-up. But insofar as there has been a break and our response has become signifi- cantly different-if we see Rosebud as "dollarbook Freud," for instance-we should not use the occasion to congratulate ourselves on our advancing sophis- tication. For we learn, in studying audiences of the past, that they were no less sophisticated than audiences are today. Rather, needs and concerns have changed. Reading the film historically allows us to turn our discomfort into insight. Instead of fighting the readings of our parents, anxious over their influence, we should take these readings absolutely seriously, however difficult this may be. Then the work will not be reduced to a pretext for the theoretical needs of each generation, but a point of union between generations, an occasion to assess historical difference and, in the process, to admire the many voices with which a text can speak.

Notes

1. My father's recollections of his first viewing-quoted from a conference paper (in circulation) on "Eroticism in Citizen Kane"-was my guide in exploring the power of the film. The way the article historicizes this response is my own contribution, but many of the initial ideas and much of the research are my father's. I must also acknowledge the aid and forbearance of Andrea Hammer, Hans Lofgren, Rachel Kranz, and my wife Julia Bates, all of whom, without any prior warning, suddenly found Charles Foster Kane a part of their lives. They donated many, many hours to this project. Thanks as well to Becky Gibson in the Lilly Library for her aid, and to my mother, who had to put up with the same mania from two generations simultaneously. 2. Tangye Lean, "Review," Horizon 4 (November 1941): 359-64; in Focus on Citizen Kane, ed. Ronald Gottesman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), 62. 3. Cedric Belfrage, "Review," The Clipper 1 (May 1941); in Focus on Citizen Kane, 55. Belfrage's italics. 4. One of the few recorded responses by a woman viewer, a partially negative one, is particularly interesting and shows why one has to delineate carefully between different audiences and their responses. Joy Davidman of the left-wing New Masses complained that Rosebud was an irrelevance in a magnificent film, and that it represented Welles's tired use of a Hollywood convention, "the smirking thesis that the important thing about a public figure is not how he treats his country but how he treats his women" ("Review," 13 May 1941, 28). 5. Quoted by Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), 49. 6. Robert L. Carringer, "Rosebud, Dead or Alive: Narrative and Symbolic Structure in Citizen Kane," PMLA 21 (March 1976): esp. 185, 193 (footnote 1); The Making of Citizen Kane (University of California Press, 1985), 19. 7. Carringer, "Rosebud, Dead or Alive," 192. 8. Leonard J. Leff, "Reading Kane," Film Quarterly 39 (Fall 1985): 19. 9. Kael, The Citizen Kane Book, 41. 10. Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1978), 21. All my information on Man- kiewicz comes from this biography. 11. Rosebud was custom built by the RKO property department. For background in-

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 23

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms formation on the sled, see Jean Callahan, "Heavy Sledding," American Film 8 (Oct. 1982): 12. 12. Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon II (New York: Dutton, 1984), 158-60; Barbara Learing, Orson Welles (New York: Viking, 1985), 205; Charles Higham, The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 153. Welles himself was fond of repeating it. 13. Anger, Hollywood Babylon II, 159. 14. "She evidently had never had a child, and her rosebud was headed with fine curly golden hair," Hughes Rebell, The Memoirs of Dolly Morton (London: Carrington, 1899), 5; "She bent downward and exhibited one of the most pretty bottoms it has ever been my good fortune to see, lobs as smooth and as compact as large pebbles gathered prettily about her little rosebud," Frank Harris, My Life and Loves in The Olympic Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 337; "Or who'll buy her rosebuds, jettyblack rosebuds, ninsloes of nivia, nonpaps of nane," James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1982), 583; "Tout s'ouvre: le bouton de roses/Et celui des femmes aussi... ," Alfred Devaux, Dictionnaire Erotique Moderne (Bale: Karl Schmidt, approx. 1876), 64; "Bouton de rose. s.m.; La tete d'une pine: le gland," Jules Choux, Le Petit Citadeur (Paphos, 1881), 65; Lucien Rigaud in his Dictionnaire des Lieux Communs (Paris: Ollendorff, 1887), 43, remarks that "le bouton de rose est tres cultive pars les poetes erotiques, parce qu'il offre un sous-entendu erotique." Lips and rose (vulva) are frequently linked in erotic literature: "the rose-lips overture presenting the cock-pit so fair," John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), 262; "Out of the tightly closed perfectly formed lips protruded a crimson petal like that of a rose.... 'Ye Gods, what a perfect and sweet fuckable Cunt,' he exclaimed," George L. Byrnes, A Sea-Side Venus at Fifteen (Paris: Societe des Erotiques, 1933), 59. More prosaically, Freud regards the nether lips as a common displacement for the upper. "Love nest," the newspapers' term for Susan Alexander's apartment, is also slang for the vulva: "Her soft white thighs revealed ... the full lips of her love-nest.... Thick fluffy, silky hair on a woman's love-nest is an alluring charm," Byrnes, A Sea-Side Venus, 70-74. 15. Mrs. Fremont Older, William Randolph Hearst, American (New York, 1936), 19; quoted in Carringer, "The Scripts of Citizen Kane," Critical Inquiry 5 (Winter 1978): 384-85. 16. Higham, Rise and Fall, 178. 17. Meryman, Mank, 21. 18. "Scarcely a town or hamlet where it's not in use." Sears and Roebuck Catalogue 117 (Spring 1908): 163. 19. "Dreams [of flying] also reproduce impressions made in childhood-that is, that they refer to the games involving rapid motion which have such an extraordinary attraction for children." "The dream of flying, in the case of male dreams, [usually has] a coarsely sexual significance," The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 315, 390. 20. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 372. 21. Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 448; Meryman, Mank, 271. 22. Meryman, Mank, 251. 23. Carringer, "The Scripts of Citizen Kane," 373. 24. Box 5, folder 2, Welles Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 25. The manuscript figures in a group of miscellaneous jottings that deal with his twentieth birthday, spring in Central Park, story plots, and meditations on Katherine Cornell's theater troop (of which Welles was a member at 19) and whether an artist should

24 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms move in the direction of Moscow or Hollywood. The spring of 1935 was the only time in the decade when Welles was out of work and at a major career crossroads- he had given up the prestigious Cornell troop for the weekend performance of Panic- so these themes, plus various adolescent spellings and attitudes in the manuscript, lead one to believe that 1935 is the most logical time for at least most of the jottings. 26. Vincent Jerome, "Archibald MacLeish's Panic," New Masses, 2 April 1935, 43-44. 27. See Higham, Rise and Fall, 157. 28. Box 5, folder 2, Welles collection. 29. Time, 17 March 1941, quoted in Kael, Citizen Kane Book, 42. 30. Belfrage, "Review," 57. 31. Lean, "Review," 64. 32. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 321. 33. David Bordwell, "The Dual Cinematic Tradition in Citizen Kane," in The Classic Cinema: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stanley J. Solomon (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 182. 34. Beverle Houston, "Power and Dis-Integration in the Films of Orson Welles," Film Quarterly 35 (Summer 1982): 7. 35. Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 67. 36. James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 66. 37. Quoted in Kael, Citizen Kane Book, 44. 38. Belfrage, "Review," 59. 39. Meryman, Mank, 250, reports that, in order to find a device to knit Mankiewicz's reminiscences of Hearst into a plausible story line, "Welles unenthusiastically offered a long quote from Coleridge." Meryman goes on to say that Mankiewicz at that point substituted the search for Rosebud. If true, the quotation was probably from "Kubla Khan," given that the poem is quoted in the film and that "Kubla Khan," along with "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," was the most popular romantic poem at the time. Rather than the Rosebud search replacing Coleridge, however, I would argue the two work in parallel. 40. G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (London: Methuen, 1941), 95. 41. Kael, Citizen Kane Book, 73. 42. Naremore, Magic World of Orson Welles, 87, 98. 43. Belfrage, "Review," 54-55, 57. 44. Crowther, New York Times, 4 May 1941, in Focus on Citizen Kane, ed. Gottesman, 50. 45. Ibid., 50. 46. Lean, "Review," 60, 63-64. 47. Roy Fowler, Orson Welles: A First Biography (London: Pendulum, 1946); in Focus on Citizen Kane, 88. 48. Yet another instance of Welles's goals as a political artist: early in 1939 Welles seems to have been interested in playing in the controversial film written by Sidney Howard from Sinclair Lewis's antifascist novel It Can't Happen Here. Metro higher-ups, who had succumbed to Italian and German pressure against the film for three years, were so smitten by Welles's reputation that they overcame their scruples against such a controversial work and seriously considered him for the film. ("Letter of William Selwyn," 10 Jan. 1939, Welles Collection.) Higham gives an excellent resume of Welles's liberal political leanings as expressed by his theater. 49. Archibald MacLeish, Poems 1924-33 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1933), 171-72. 50. Archibald MacLeish, Six Plays (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1980).

Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 25

This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 51. The film's anxieties about the left are not stated directly, perhaps because that would have played into the hands of anticommunists such as Hearst. The three instances where the left is mentioned, however, suggest that the film, like MacLeish's play, regards the left as a faceless threat. A mass rally is balanced with Wall Street in the newsreel; Kane as a young man delivers a line used by Franklin Roosevelt: "If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will- maybe somebody without any money or property"; and Leland taunts Kane with the threat of organized labor in their election night argument. The Roosevelt line probably reflects the politics of Mankiewicz, who was an anti-union, anti-communist liberal. Leland's taunt represents the only way Leland can compete with a Kane who towers above him. 52. Jerome, "Archibald MacLeish's Panic," 43. 53. Kael, Citizen Kane Book, 57-58. 54. Houseman reports the scenes between Welles and black actor Jack Carter "were played with restraint, verging on tenderness, in which temptation and damnation were treated as acts of love," Run-through, 236. Kane is in many ways a Faustus figure, especially in the way he squanders his gifts. Both figures meet a fiery end. The "Freudian" label was attached by Life, 17 March 1941, 53. 55. "Revised Estimating Script for Heart of Darkness," box 14, Welles collection, 161- 63. 56. Actually, one other option that he considered seriously was the Christ model. He had written a Christian pacifist play in the 1930s ("Untitled Play," box 7, folders 15- 21, Welles collection) and seriously looked into doing an American folk version in film of the life of Jesus in the few months before Pearl Harbor at the time he was filming Kane. In his speaking tours against the danger of fascism in America two years later, he returned to "the hopeful, daring and philosophically original assumption that the meek will inherit the earth" (speech, "Survival of Fascism," 4 Dec. 1944, Welles collection). 57. Houseman, Run-Through, 452. 58. Leff, "Reading Kane," 19. 59. Ralph Cohen, "The Statements Literary Texts Do Not Make," New Literary History 13 (Spring 1982): 390. 60. Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Moder Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), esp. 90-96.

26 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987

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