THE MAGICIAN & THE MASS MEDIA
James Naremore
Context
The work of the young Orson Welles Proto-Fascist demagogues After the whispered “Rosebud,” is “Don’t believe
everything you hear on the radio.” Against one of America’s most wealthy media
moguls Mrs. Kane sits at the right foreground, her face
the very image of stern puritanical sacrifice The mise-en-scène under fairly rigid control
Scene
Analysis Two snow sleds
The first is named “Rosebud” & is given to Kane by his mother
The second is a Christmas present from Kane’s guardian, Thatcher
Which is called “Crusader,” is presented fully to the camera
The title character has not only two sleds but t & two friends
In its last moment, the film shifts from intellectual irony to dramatic irony, from apparent skepticism to apparent revelation
Analysis Voyeurism inherent in the medium, Y each leaves
Kane an enigma In the first shot, we see a “No Trespassing” sign
that the camera promptly ignores All the while encountering a bizarre montage:
monkeys in a cage, gondolas in a stream, a golf course
As voyeuristic as anything in a Hitchcock movie Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera is an
“inquirer,” are like teasing affronts to our curiosity Aligning himself first with the progressives &
then with the Fascists
Analysis
As a mythical character like Noah or Kubla Khan Everybody is involved in a dubious pursuit It’s a film about complexity, not about relativity Once again the search for “Rosebud” seems
tawdry She never heard of Rosebud With a mild shock or a witty image at the
beginning & a joke or an ironic twist at the end
Analysis
In a charmingly exuberant & altogether antirealistic montage, he constantly turns to face the camera, muttering in disgust as the young Kane grows up, founds a newspaper, & then attacks Wall Street
Capital, it seems, is always in charge of Kane’s life The inquirer offices He always places personal loyalty above principle Bernstein’s reminiscences are chiefly about
adventure & male camaraderie
Analysis
As the doggedly loyal Bernstein Hinting that his involvement with Kane has
sexual implications Where Kane unsuccessfully tries to interest
Leland in a woman, but even without that scene he seems to have no active sex life
It is Leland, not Emily Kane, who behaves like a jilted lover
Analysis The comic toothache scene is Susan Alexander’s apartment The closing line of Susan’s song concerns the theme of
power; it comes from The Barber of Seville, & roughly translates “I have sworn it, I will conquer.”
Large-scale effects with a modest budget Painted, Expressionistic image suggesting Kane’s delusions
of grandeur & the crowd’s lack of individuality. Everything is dominated by Kane’s ego: the initial “K” he wears as a stickpin, the huge blowup of his jowly face on a poster, & the incessant ”I” in his public speech
Occasionally we see Kane’s supporters isolated in contrasting close-ups; but his political rival stands high above the action, dominating the frame like a sinister power
Analysis Just at the moment when Kane’s political ambitions are
wrecked, the film shifts into its examination of his sexual life His tyranny is his treatment of Susan An absurd plagiarism case against Welles & Mankiewicz She represents for Kane a “cross-section of the American
public.” when Kane meets her she is a working girl, undereducated & relatively innocent, & his relationship with her is comparable to his relationship with the masses who read his papers
“you talk about the people as though you owned them,” Leland says. Kane’s treatment of Susan illustrates the truth of his charge
Susan is reduced from a pleasant, attractive girl to a near suicide
Analysis Begin the arduous, comically inappropriate
series of music lessons She attempts to quit the opera, but Kane orders
her to continue because “I don’t propose to have myself made ridiculous.” In a scene remarkable for the way it shows the pain of both people, his shadow falls over her face – just as he will later tower over her in the “party” scene, when a woman’s ambiguous scream is heard distantly on the sound track
Personal concerns, how the public & the personal are interrelated
Analysis
Throughout, Kane is presented with a mixture of awe, satiric invective, & sympathy
The surreal picnic, with a stream of black cars driving morosely down a beach toward a swampy encampment, where a jazz band plays
Both shots are impressive uses of optical printing. In response, Kane blindly destroys her room & remembers his childhood loss
Thompson becomes a slightly troubled onlooker Here it might be noted that Welles was uneasy
about the whole snow-sled idea
Analysis
A child-man, he spends all his energies rebelling against anyone who asserts quthority over his will
Imprisoned by his childhood ego, Kane treats everything as a toy: first the sled, then the newspaper, then the Spanish-American War
Ultimately settling on the “No Trespassing” sign outside the gate. We are back where we began. Even the film’s title has been a contradiction in terms
Conclusion Richard Nixon, the “Hotel Xanadu” In translating Hearst into a creature of fiction, he &
Mankiewicz borrowed freely from the lives of other American capitalists (among them Samuel Insull & John McCormack). They salted the story with references to Welles’s own biography, & at several junctures they departed from well-known facts about Hearst
The Hearst press, this in contrast to the Hearst-Davies relationship
Most of these changes tend to create sympathy for Kane
By showing Kane as a tragicomic failure
Conclusion Kane clearly does satirize Hearst’s public life Kane’s manipulative interest in the Spanish-
American War In the election scenes it depicts the corruption of
machine politics with the force of a great editorial cartoon
The film is explicit in its denunciation, showing his supposed democratic aspirations as in reality a desire for power. We even see him on a balcony conferring with Hitler
Kane suggests that the process of discovery is more important than any pat conclusion
Watching a movie rather than reality itself
Conclusion
Because of the power he wielded in Hollywood The paradox is that Welles had no desire to
wreck the motion-picture industry. Kane was held to a relatively modest A-picture budget
Industry bosses perceived Welles as an “artist” & a left-wing ideologue who might bring trouble
He would never again be allowed such freedom at a major studio