The Magic World of Orson Welles (17 page)

Although
I Loved a Woman
contains some veiled references to the career of Samuel Insull, it, like
The Power and the Glory
, is a mediocre and sentimental film, interesting chiefly for its possible relationship to
Kane
. And what both of these earlier works show is that Mankiewicz and Welles were using one of the oldest and most effective ploys of Hollywood melodrama: they were disguising, condensing, and displacing the social issues—using a love story to illustrate the character flaws that would presumably make the tycoon a danger to the public. The only difference at this level between
Kane
and previous films is the degree to which its politics are tilted to the left.

But even though the shift into sexual themes results in a kind of evasion, the basic issues are not entirely subverted. Susan Alexander is only very roughly similar to Marion Davies, but that is obviously not because Welles and Mankiewicz feared Davies's wrath or wanted to protect her. Susan serves as a reminder to the audience of Hearst's domineering patronage of his mistress, and, more important, she becomes a symbol for his treatment of the
society at large. As Leland tells us, she represents for Kane a “cross-section of the American public.” She has had a middle-class mother who gave her music lessons, and when Kane meets her she is also a working girl, under-educated and relatively innocent. (Like most of the characters in the film, Susan has mixed motives; she is not the addle-brained gold digger some critics have made her seem.) She comes from a social level similar to that of Kane's own parents, and his relationship with her is comparable to his relationship with the masses who read his papers. It is true that Kane showers her with wealth, but this merely confirms Leland's remark in the desolated, postelection newspaper office: “You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.” In fact, all of Leland's accusations and prophecies about Kane's relationship to his readers are fulfilled in Susan's part of the film. “You talk about the people as though you owned them,” Leland says. Kane's treatment of Susan is a confirmation of this charge, and it also reminds us of the violence he is willing to use to have his way; thus in the last reels, which show Kane retreating more and more from public life, Susan is reduced from a pleasant, attractive girl to a harpy, and then to a near-suicide.

The film emphasizes the fact that Susan sings unwillingly, at the command of her master. During the election campaign, Kane establishes his “love nest” and the relationship is summarized in a single shot: in the foreground Susan is poised awkwardly at a grand piano; farther back in the room, Kane is enthroned in a wicker chair, applauding slowly and grinning in satisfaction; still farther back in the frame, visible through the archway to another room, is a sumptuous double bed. After his marriage to Susan, Kane tells the reporters, “We're going to become an opera star,” and he hires Signor Matiste to begin the arduous, comically inappropriate series of music lessons. The backgrounds in this part of the film grow more and more opulent while Susan becomes increasingly driven and humiliated. Her singing becomes not only a painful form of work but a kind of involuntary servitude as well. As a result, her resemblance to Marion Davies fades. She looks more like those Peruvians toiling at gunpoint in Hearst's copper mines, even though she is certainly getting better pay.

The choice of opera rather than movies for Susan's career is also significant. It not only brings references to Welles's boyhood, to Insull, McCormack, and Sybil Sanderson into the film, but it also highlights the difference in social class between Susan and the patrons for whom she works. We see her kneeling on satin pillows, pitifully frightened and garishly made up, singing “Ah! Cruel” to a dozing, tuxedoed audience, while up in the rafters a laborer
holds his nose and shakes his head sadly. “I'm not high-class like you,” Susan tells Kane in an even shriller voice when she kneels again on the floor and reads the Leland-Kane review, “and I never went to any swell schools.” She attempts to quit the opera, reminding Kane, “I never wanted to do it in the first place.” Kane, however, orders her to continue, saying, “I don't propose to have myself made ridiculous.” In a scene that is remarkable for the way it shows the pain of both people, his shadow falls over her face—just as he later towers over her in the “party” scene, when a woman's scream is heard on the soundtrack.

Leland has warned that the workingman will not always tolerate Kane's patronage: “You're not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means your workingman expects something as his right and not your gift.” This, of course, is one reason why Susan leaves Kane. Naturally we sympathize with Kane when he recalls “Rosebud” and when the camera reveals his secret in the closing moments; in some ways the Susan Alexander plot has clouded the issues, replacing political with personal concerns, but in other ways it shows how the public and sexual concerns are interrelated. Rather like the symbols in a dream, Susan helps to censor the content even while she preserves its underlying significance.

But if concrete political issues are somehow present in the film, Kane himself continues to be depicted as a mystery to be unraveled. The wide-angle, deep-focus photography in the later sections enhances the mystery by frustrating Welles's inquisitive camera, setting up a feeling of space that can never be crossed no matter how many “No Trespassing” signs are disregarded. Throughout, Kane has been presented with a mixture of awe, satiric invective, and sympathy. He has provoked widely different responses from the people around him: in the newsreel he has been attacked for different reasons by both capital and labor; at his death, the
Inquirer
has shown a distinguished-looking photo with the banner headline, “
CHARLES FOSTER KANE DIES AFTER A LIFETIME OF SERVICE
,” while the rival
Chronicle
has pictured him glowering under a dark hat brim, with the headline reading “
C. F. KANE DIES AT XANADU ESTATE
.” To Thatcher, Kane was a spoiled do-gooder who was a menace to business; to Bernstein, he was a hero who helped build the country; to Leland, he was an egomaniac who wanted everybody to love him but who left only “a tip in return.” Ultimately the audience has been made to feel that no single response is adequate, and near the end the disparate judgments take the form of a single, complex emotion. Thompson, functioning as the audience's surrogate, remarks to Susan Alexander, “You know, all the same I feel sorry for Mr. Kane.” Susan, the only character we've actually seen
Kane victimize, the only person who could condemn the man outright, gives Thompson a harsh look and a terse reply: “Don't you think I do?”

Susan's comment crystallizes the film's divided attitude. In the later sequences where Kane nearly destroys Susan, the images of his massive form towering over the submissive woman are more than simple evocations of tyranny: we fear along with Susan, but we also feel sympathy for Kane, who is pained by age and thwarted desire. This feeling of pity is especially strong toward the end, where the most powerful and intense moments, the enraged breaking up of Susan's room and the discovery of the paperweight, are played off against the predatory Raymond (Paul Stewart) and the vast, chilly labyrinth of Xanadu. As the inquiry has deepened, the tone of the film has shifted subtly; the comic blackout sketches that characterize the Thatcher and Bernstein sections have been replaced by a darker, more grotesque mingling of comedy and tragedy that belongs to Leland and Susan—the scenes near the big Xanadu fireplace, for example, with Susan's voice echoing, “A person could go crazy in this dump”; or the gaudy picnic, with a stream of black cars driving morosely down a beach toward a swampy encampment, where a jazz band plays “This Can't Be Love” against a matted background of sinister RKO bats. Each phase of the movie becomes more painful than the one before, until we arrive at the most cynical of the witnesses, Raymond, who is ironically responsible for the most intimate part of the story: Susan leaves, her image receding down a corridor into infinity (another brilliant use of optical printing), and Kane blindly destroys her room, the crisis bringing back memories of childhood loss and rejection.

As Kane has grown increasingly isolated, the camera has stressed the space between him and other people; Thompson never emerges from the shadows, but by the end of Raymond's story he has become less like a reporter and more like a sympathetic, slightly troubled onlooker. (It seems to me a mistake to speak of him as a fully developed character, as some commentators do. Even the acting of the role is clumsy—William Alland being in fact an amateur who suggests a man wandering into the fiction from outside.) Finally he gives up his search, knowing too much to expect a simple answer. We, of course, are in a more privileged position and are given, if not a rational explanation, a vision of “Rosebud,” an image that both transcends and unifies the various witnesses to Kane's life.

Of course Welles was uneasy about the whole sled idea. He dismissed “Rosebud” in a famous remark, calling it “dollar-book Freud” and emphasizing that Herman Mankiewicz thought it up. Pauline Kael has said that it is “such a primitive kind of Freudianism that it . . . hardly seems Freudian
at all.” It should be noted, however, that some of the psychoanalytic ideas in
Citizen Kane
might indeed have come straight from a textbook. According to Freudian terminology, Charles Foster Kane can be typed as a regressive, anal-sadistic personality. His lumpen-bourgeois family is composed of a weak, untrustworthy father and a loving, albeit puritanical mother; he is taken away from this family at a prepubescent stage and reared by a bank; as an adult he “returns” to what Freud describes as a pregenital form of sexuality in which “not the genital component-instincts, but the
sadistic
and
anal
are most prominent” (
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
, 1917). Thus, throughout his adult life Kane is partly a sadist, who wants to obtain power over others, and partly an anal type, who obsessively collects zoo animals and museum pieces. His childhood, as Joseph McBride has pointed out, seems far from idyllic; nevertheless, it is a childhood toward which he has been compulsively drawn.

The burning sled, whether it is classically Freudian or not, contributes to a coherent and, it seems to me, psychologically valid characterization. The closing scenes also provide a fascinating commentary on the limits of human power; more specifically, they are a statement about the disparity between the world as it is and the world as imagination would have it be. Throughout the film, Mankiewicz and Welles have underlined the fact that Kane is essentially childlike, a man who, for all his power, can never be completely in control of his life; just as he is not a “self-made” tycoon, so he is not the creator of his private destiny. All of his energies are spent in trying to create his own world or in rebelling against anyone who asserts authority over his will. He despises Thatcher, of course, and when he can no longer “look after” the little people, he begins to hate them. He tries to maintain a dangerous but awe-inspiring daydream, of which Xanadu is only the most obvious manifestation. Whenever the dreamworld is threatened, he responds with a child's rage. For example, when Thatcher interrupts Kane's play in the snow, the boy defends himself by striking out with his sled; when Jim Gettys interrupts the political game, Kane breaks into a terrifying but pathetic fury, his enraged voice cut off as Gettys exits and calmly closes a door; when Leland and Susan assert their independence, Kane retaliates with all the force of his pent-up anger. When we last see him, he throws a literal tantrum, regressing to the state of a child destroying a nursery.

Whatever his influence in other spheres, Kane cannot control his own fate. (In 1941, with the New Deal in ascendance and the United States entering a war against fascism, it must have seemed to Welles that Hearst was in a similar position.) He is forever imprisoned by his childhood egotism, living out
power fantasies and converting everything into toys. The film is full of these toys: first there is the sled, then the newspaper, then the Spanish-American War. (Notice, in fact, how the war has been depicted as a child's game, with the
Inquirer
reporters sporting little wooden rifles and funny hats.) Toward the end there is Susan, with her marionette-style opera makeup and her dollhouse room in a fantasy castle. The final toy, the paperweight Kane discovers after his tantrum, is probably the most satisfactory image of them all; it represents not so much a lost innocence as a striving after an imaginary, “adult” autonomy. It symbolizes an ideal—a self-enclosed realm, immune from change, where Kane can feel he has control over his life. The sled burning at the heart of the furnace therefore becomes less a purely Freudian explanation than the logical conclusion to Kane's tortured romantic idealism. It is one of those images, known to passion and the imagination, that William Butler Yeats called “self-born mockers of Man's enterprise.”

After our discovery of this sled,
Citizen Kane
concludes with still another reminder of the camera's inquisitiveness, a near-complete reversal of the process with which it began. The camera retreats from the magic castle, staring at the awesome smoke of corruption in the sky, settling at last on the “No Trespassing” sign outside the gate. Even the title has been a contradiction in terms.

As an aesthetic object and as a psychological portrait,
Citizen Kane
becomes a highly satisfying film, representing what is probably the limit to which a story could move toward self-conscious “art” and “significance” while still remaining within the codes of the studio system. As a portrait of an archetypal tycoon, it is so effective that it has become part of American folklore. And its central images keep returning in contemporary life—Nixon secluding himself in San Clemente, or Howard Hughes, before his death, owning a retreat in the Bahamas that he called the “Hotel Xanadu.” For all of its evasiveness about Hearst's crimes,
Kane
is also a deliberately political film, growing directly out of the ethos of the Popular Front. As we have seen, it continually reminds the viewer of things outside itself—either the movies, or Hearst, or the “Welles phenomenon.” Before leaving it, therefore, one needs at least briefly to shift discussion away from formalist analysis and closer to the auteur and the audience. In this way one can see that
Kane'
s biographical, autobiographical, and political complexities are logical extensions of the aesthetic and psychological tensions I have been describing.