The Real Fascination of Citizen Kane: Welles's

CHAPTER 3

THE REAL FASCINATION OF CITIZEN KANE: WELLES’S MASTERPIECE RECONSIDERED

One aspect of Citizen Kane (1941) has always puzzled me: why, aside from the opportunity it afforded them to display virtuoso technique, did Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz make a film about the dead Kane instead of a film about Kane while he was living? To my knowledge, no one has ever attempted to answer this question; yet, probably more has been written about Citizen Kane than any other American movie. If, as most critics believe, the “message” of Citizen Kane is the mystery of the titular character (McBride, 42; Sarris, 120–121; Carringer, “Rosebud,” 192; Naremore, Magic World, 66–68), then couldn’t that mystery have been presented in traditional narrative form, a condensed “Life of Charles Foster Kane”? Couldn’t that mystery have been represented more subtly in this way? After all, it is pretty clear once Thatcher’s “story” about the young Kane is over and Bernstein’s begins, with an immediate contradiction of Thatcher (“It wasn’t money [Mr. Kane] wanted. Thatcher never did figure him out”), that what we are going to get in the film is several more or less conflicting viewpoints on the man, none with any real depth, as much because given hastily or sketchily to a newspaper reporter who did not know Kane, as because given by a biased individual. The “storytellers” simplify Kane, that is, to make their own points about him. No matter how many times I have seen Citizen Kane, therefore, I always become impatient the moment the reporter, Jerry Thompson, begins his interview of Bernstein, Kane’s former business manager and now chairman of the board. I know somewhere inside myself that this method will not deliver, at least not the traditional narrative result: an ambiguous but fully developed, complex, sympathetic character. Kane is not sympathetic in the traditional sense because we get to know him only through others’ eyes. By contrast, Bernstein, Jed Leland, and Susan Alexander are sympathetic, because we get to know them through the eyes of the filmmakers, in the “narrative present.” But the film is clearly not about these three, or about Raymond the butler, the last of the storytellers. (Thatcher is dead; Thompson reads Thatcher’s “story” of Kane from the former’s memoirs.) It is about Charles Foster Kane, and to believe the critics as well as Orson Welles himself, whose obfuscatory words these are, “the point of the picture is not so much the solution of the problem [the mystery of Kane] as its presentation” (9). But my point is, the presentation is apparently loaded: anyone could tell you that if you ask five different people about a man, you’ll get five different stories or

23 Chapter 3 interpretations. Those stories, of course, will reveal less about the man than about the bias of the individual storyteller. They will add up to nothing in particular because a human being’s motives can never be satisfactorily fathomed by those closest to him. They can, however, be fathomed somewhat by the “objective author,” or by this author posing as someone who knew the man. That is, presumably, what much art is about: the providing of “answers” or motives for particular characters so that larger questions of life and character can be explored. So I pose my question again: presuming that they were aware of what I have just said, why did Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz choose to make a movie about the dead Kane, through the eyes of others, rather than about the living Kane, through their own eyes? Is Citizen Kane, then, one large piece of chicanery, a contribution less to film art, according to Charles Thomas Samuels (171), than to the art of making films? (For a doubly negative view, that Citizen Kane is essentially both one large piece of chicanery and a retrogression in screen technique, see Otis Ferguson’s original review, 169–171.) Or is the film, on the other hand, as David Bordwell claims, a great achievement because it fuses “an objective realism of texture with a subjective realism of structure”? (Gottesman, Focus on Orson Welles, 105).

Figure 6. Orson Welles: Citizen Kane, 1941 (United States)

Bordwell believes that the method of Citizen Kane is its meaning. He writes the following:

24