The Magic World of Orson Welles (13 page)

Welles's artistic flamboyance and unrestrained power also had a somewhat paradoxical effect on the films themselves, because from the beginning of his career his leading themes were the dangers of radical individualism and unlimited power. As we shall see, most of his films are about tyrannical egotists, men who try to imitate God. His major characters usually try to live above the law, in contempt of ordinary human restraint, and as a result they cut themselves off from their community, becoming prisoners of guilt, self-delusion, and old age. Nevertheless, Welles's own public philosophy was consistently humanistic and liberal, and nearly all of his Hollywood films
were grounded in social commentary. The question naturally arises, then, whether there was a tension or contradiction between Welles's philosophic stance and the personality that is implicit in his style.

Clearly there was such a tension, and it is echoed in other aspects of Welles's work, especially in the nest of conflicts and oppositions in
Citizen Kane
, which are discussed in the next chapter. For example, Welles's typical way of dealing with a film story was to begin at the level of social satire and then to become preoccupied with “tragic” issues so that he seemed to be responding to two distinct urges. His preference for the gothic or “expressionist” mode is a further sign of an emotional dualism: gothic writers have typically been political rebels of a sort, trying to depict the corruption and degeneracy of an entrenched order. Even so, as Leslie Fiedler has noted, there is a contradiction between the “liberal uses and demonic implications, the enlightened principles and reactionary nostalgia of the tale of terror.” Thus the tyrants at the center of Welles's films are usually more fascinating and sympathetic than the naïve, commonplace figures around them—this in spite of the fact that Welles puts many of his own political sentiments into the mouths of “starry-eyed idealists” like Jed Leland, Michael O'Hara, and Mike Vargas. Actually, the demonic, obsessive drives of the tyrant begin to take on a sort of moral purity, as if egomania and self-delusion were partly a reaction against a sickness in the society at large.

Welles never attributed the sickness to any clear systemic causes; in fact, he was more given to explaining his sympathetic tyrants in terms of neurotic sexual obsessions, or to contrasting the madness of America with momentary glimpses of preindustrial “innocence.” But the stylistic quality I have been describing above—the density and manic extremism of Welles's typical scenes—is perfectly expressive of the displaced libidinal urges that lead his protagonists to launch their frustrated drives for power. And even though Welles was critical of these Faustian types, they had something deeply in common with the personality of the director himself, as is suggested in the gorgeous excess of his style. According to his friend Maurice Bessy, Welles lamented the fact that he was “made to follow in the footsteps of the Byronic adventurer, even though I detest this sort of man and everything he stands for.” Such a remark suggests an extraordinary division in Welles's own character and may help explain why he often portrayed the romantic egotist as a driven and deeply interesting person; certainly his ironic treatment of Kane or the Ambersons did not conceal his fascination with their absurd grandeur. His overreachers tend to be tyrants in spite of themselves, pathetically trying to determine their own fate even while they are doomed by their
childhood and victimized by a society beyond their control. As Bessy has pointed out, the Wellesian tyrant, for all of his destructiveness, is a wielder of sham power: Kane tries to construct his own world at Xanadu; George Minafer thinks he can become a “yachtsman”; Macbeth believes he is a king; Mr. Arkadin imagines he can eradicate his past; Mr. Clay attempts to gain immortality. The ambitions of these men are at once awesome and laughable, much like those of the young Welles himself. None of them is really in control, and most of them are naïvely, ludicrously out of touch with reality, motivated by psychological urges they never fully understand. Therefore the Faustian proto-fascist in a Welles movie usually turns into a sort of perverse Don Quixote, a man in tragicomic rebellion against a world that conspires to inhibit his dream of autonomy and control.

When Welles's films are viewed in this way, the connection between his heated, sometimes outrageous style and his rather philosophic subject matter becomes more apparent. In one sense Welles was critical of romantic egotism—that is why he often combined German expressionism with the sort of absurdist comedy that has always been at the heart of the American gothic. At the same time, however, the Orson Welles who tried to master Hollywood was himself a victim of his childhood and his romantic character. While intellectually Welles may have been a liberal, emotionally he was something of a radical; as we shall see, his fascination with passing time and human mortality, his preoccupation with characters who are slightly out of step, his interest in a past when everything was somehow better than it is now—all of these things indicate that at one level he was both a rebel and, in one sense, a reactionary. Thus John Houseman was right to say that Welles pushed “theatrical effect” far beyond its “normal point of tension.” In this way Welles's films suggest how much he had in common with his characters, to say nothing of what he had in common with the romantic agony that runs throughout American literature. It is precisely this quality of his style that made his career in American movies so difficult and that made his own life seem to imitate that of one of the protagonists of his stories.

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.

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 brilliant 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):