Do you think Citizen Kane is a good story?

Cafe Society
1

Citizen Kane. Best movie ever to some, boring to others.

Let’s set aside the movie itself, any technical advancements on screen are not up for discussion here.

Also set aside any talk of it being based on William Randolph Hearst, specifically the daring move of doing so, and how impressive it was that Orson Welles was so young.

On the table for discussion is the story itself, also the parts of the story that the movie chooses to emphasize and those it chooses to neglect.

I personally think that other movies of this type (fatally flawed but dynamic man on the make) tell better stories. A Face In The Crowd for example. I’m not in love with that movie either, but I just think it makes a lot more sense from an emotional standpoint.

As far as the whole “Kane failed” arc goes I just find it muddled and can’t make sense of it. Apparently, according to the movie, it’s a good thing Kane was sent away from his actual parents, who disappear from the movie after that. I guess they died or something. So who is Kane failing? The other characters in the movie? The world? I find that aspect underdeveloped, as the other characters are either underdeveloped or not very likable themselves. For example, in A Face In The Crowd Patricia Neal provides that element of opposition, we can understand what exactly Loansome Rhoads is failing. In Kane that element simply isn’t developed adequately. Kane apparently is failing himself, the rest of the world is even worse than he is but he’s tasked with being the savior of us all.

Also, the movie never explains to me adequately why exactly Kane winds up alone. Which is a sharp deviation from the supposed source material of Hearst. Hearst wasn’t alone and didn’t wind up alone. So why does Kane? Kane has a meet cute with Susan Alexander, seems to make him human. He is punished for this. So are his soon to be ex wife and child who are killed off screen. The movie chooses to not show how Kane reacts to this which is a poor decision on the movie’s part. I have brought this up before, people say “well we all know that Kane would be insensitive towards their deaths”, I don’t think that’s an assumption and if Kane is really a monster then that changes the movie.

Then the movie engages in the endless Susan Alexander Kane scenes. Don’t care, boring, please cut all of this. It’s all supposed to be a middle finger to Hearst I guess, but why do I care about this as a story today? It’s boring. I’m told that “Kane wanted to buy her, Kane wanted to impose his will on everything…” What I’ve seen up to this point in the movie doesn’t motivate me to care about all of this. I just find it alienating and tiresome. Again, the movie seems bound and determined to make me hate Kane, but I’m not really sure why I should since the movie doesn’t provide me enough of an oppositional framework to care.

This is all quite rambling, but hopefully I have made some points. Others are free to respond or rebut a discussion of the story of Citizen Kane!

2

Boring. Impressive cinematography for it’s time, but otherwise slow, doesn’t really tell the story well IMO.

3

Kane wanted to be loved. But he felt in order to be loved, he needed to present a false persona. So while people said they loved him, it didn’t satisfy Kane because he felt people loved the persona rather than his real self.

4

I remember liking it well enough when I saw it, but I don’t remember too many specifics about it nowadays, so clearly I wasn’t blown away.

5

But Kane was real with Susan Alexander, and the movie hated him for it. According to the movie he should have kept faking it with his first wife. But no one in the movie itself speaks to this, Kane is simply punished for his affair and dies alone.

6

I felt the Susan Alexander plotline was in keeping with the general theme I described. Kane had found somebody who loved him for himself and was happy. But he ruined it because he tried to remake Susan into somebody with a better public image. He was projecting the practice he applied to himself on to her.

7

Unfortunately, it’s been a while since I watched the movie.

I don’t really care about cinematography all that much. So long as the style that the movie is in is consistent, I tend to be fine. If I’m watching a cheesy 70s film with cheap rubber blobs glued to everyone’s face, the blood looks like red paint, etc. then so be it since nothing clashes. But if, in Terminator 2, they’d kept some of the deleted scenes in that look 70s SFX quality, those moments would have taken me out of the film. So my only thought on the presentation of Citizen Kane was that the old man makeup wasn’t done very well. Orson just came across as a tall, healthy man wearing low-quality old man makeup.

So getting to the story, I remember liking it and thinking that it was well done but, like I said, I don’t have enough of a memory of it to give a blow-by-blow of how well structured it was. If it didn’t show him reacting to the deaths of his family, I’d expect that it made sense for it to be cut like that. Nothing stood out to me as being poorly structured, at the time.

8

Well it worked for him, seemingly is the message that is sent, since he was far more loved by everyone else but her with the fake image.

Evidently she was an idiot anyway. How are you married to a billionaire and wind up singing in some seedy bar? Even if she walked away, she should have been set for life. She would have had people crawling all over her, could have had an affair herself, people she knew from way back that suddenly want to be her friend. Even if Kane is keeping her locked up in Xanadu, she had ways out, unless she’s a complete idiot. She would have to be an idiot to wind up where she wound up. If you’re that dumb, then yes you’re a fool for walking out on Kane. So the message I’m seeing here is that “keeping it real” is for fools and the more wool you can pull over other’s eyes, the better.

9

What’s remarkable about the film is the integration of style and theme, specifically: how the properties of the medium were utilized to tell the story. Separating consideration of them is like watching only half the movie.

I think this is a misreading of the film. Being sent away gave Kane untold wealth, but deprived him of the one thing he really wanted: love. Consequently, he overcompensates throughout the rest of the film trying to get others to love him by using his wealth and power to influence them.

Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (though “Loathsome” Rhodes is arguably more appropriate).

Please see the op: “Also set aside any talk of it being based on William Randolph Hearst….”
FTR, Citizen Kane is not based on Hearst. It is inspired by him.

Mostly for the sake of narrative expediency. Having served their purpose in the story, there is no logical reason to keep them around. Killing them offscreen is a quick way to get them out of the rest of the story. I’m not sure what purpose seeing Kane’s reaction to the deaths might serve, as they have been out of his life for quite a while when it happens. Seeing his reaction to Susan leaving him is far more germane to the story.

Kane takes on big business interests and corrupt politicians in the first half of the film, presenting himself as a champion of the working class even though he’s a one-percenter himself. This is why he comes off as sympathetic. In fact, it’s simply an attempt to get others to love him. It fails – and Kane “fails” - when he loses the election to “Boss” Jim Gettys, indicating he cannot buy love despite all his wealth and power.

10

Not a great story. Pretty boring. Rosebud is a sled and Soylent Green is People.

11

This is it. Susan Alexander Kane says it explicitly

Kane was taken away from his mother (Note he was sledding with Rosebud when it happened, which is why it’s such a powerful image – it’s a symbol of his lost happiness) and lacked or destroyed any sort of loving relationship from then on. Because he had nothing to give anyone but money – not love. He ended up alone among all his symbols of his wealth.

On top of that, Kane had a major ego problem. He couldn’t stand to be wrong. Thus, as Jed Leland pointed out:

Kane did like the fact that Susan liked him for himself, but because of his humiliation in the election, he had to prove himself right. Again, his obsession made him into a lonely man.

Note, too, the change in Kane’s politics. He started out as a crusader for the poor and powerless and slowly moved away. There’s that scene when he’s celebrating hiring the reporters from the Chronicle. Leland (the conscience of the film) asks

Note that, over time, Kane is less interested in helping the downtrodden as he is in spending his money. In the breakfast montage (a great example of cinema no matter what you think of the movie as a whole), note the exchange:

Idealism has curdled into authoritarianism.

Kane is a character study and how Kane ends up sad and lonely, so sad that his list words evoke the last moment he was still happy. The other characters in his life move on from him.