Did Cinema's Most Acclaimed Film Predict Trump?

The two most critically acclaimed films of all time are both about the same thing – love, and how to destroy it in the modern world.

A few months ago I wrote about the film Vertigo, which is considered by many film critics to be, always in competition with Citizen Kane, the greatest film of all time. Read the post here.

Today, I want to look at Citizen Kane - the supposed 'Everest' of filmmaking.

For decades, critics and academics have all agreed that when it comes to the art of cinema, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), in its storytelling and filmic innovation, as well as its sympathetic and withering critique of a semi-fictional American tycoon, is the pinnacle and benchmark of the entire art form.

It also happens to be Donald Trump's favourite film, something which is either highly ironic, or betrays a well-hidden self-awareness on the part of the controversial US President. We'll return to Trump later - suffice to say the Trump connection demonstrates how all truly great art is always topical.

As I wrote previously, Citizen Kane, like Vertigo, was not highly acclaimed on its release. Citizen Kane was produced under a cloud of controversy, because it seemed to base its story so closely upon the real American tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper baron, like the eponymous Kane, who built a lavish castle for himself, took up a mistress, made a fortune from ‘yellow journalism’, helped spark the Spanish-American War involving Cuban independence, and gradually moved rightward in his political beliefs. (He also gave evangelist Billy Graham his start by 'puffing' him in his papers.)

Hearst tried to destroy the film, literally, by getting hold of the physical reels, and the controversy permanently damaged Orson Welles’ career.

With time, people began to look objectively at the film, its unique way of telling a story (through multiple narrators), its cinematic innovations (such as deep focus), and its essentially American theme – the pursuit of wealth and power as substitutes for love.

Remarkably, the film was Welles’ debut (after he achieved success and notoriety in radio and theatre), and as a young man he had been given complete creative control by the powerful RKO studio. Suffice to say, he would struggle for creative independence for the rest of his life.

As with Vertigo, Citizen Kane is a detective or mystery story. There is the essential question – what does Kane’s final word in life, ‘Rosebud’, mean? – and there is a detective – Thompson, the reporter – who travels the country in quest of Kane’s hidden life story to solve the mystery.

On the surface this is where similarities between the films end.

Yet it is my contention that these two films stand out for critics because both are ultimately about the same thing, the thing possibly most important to all of us, love. And in both films, this love is presented as something which has gone terribly wrong in the modern world. This corrupt love is hidden in plain sight in both films, hidden beneath the MacGuffins of ‘Rosebud’ and the madness of Madeleine Elster – which by the end of both films, are no longer seen as vitally important to either plot at all.

For decades many literary critics argued that Shakespeare had exhausted the possiblities of the genre of tragedy. Yet it is fascinating that so many of the great films of last century are tragedies - in which a tragic hero ultimately destroys himself by means of mistakes, circumstances, and a fatal flaw. Think of The Godfather, Vertigo, Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, The Bridge on the River Kwai et al.

It is almost as though tragedy is not just a creative choice on the part of a writer - there is something very much human about tragedy; it is as though the notion that despite all our best efforts, nobody truly wins at life. And this is in itself an idea that allows us to transcend somewhat the mess of our world, for a brief moment, to experience catharsis, and to find a bit of sympathy for ourselves and others, and, hopefully, a little redemption too.

In this regard, Citizen Kane provides us with a sense of tragedy in terms of the entire concept of what it means to be American. In fact, the original title of the film was to be simply the adjective 'American'.

But let's leave the context aside - what is the actual film about?

Please be aware spoilers follow.

In a word, the film is about love. But, importantly, love hidden beneath a pile of useless things like fame and money.

Intriguingly, we only ever see the main character, Charles Foster Kane, once within the real, or 'diegetic' world of the story. This is in the opening sequence, when he dies, and utters mysteriously the word 'rosebud'. We see his death only after venturing into his personal and decrepit 'pleasure dome', Xanadu, by way of the No Trespassing sign. His death is witnessed in the reflection of the shards of glass from his broken snow globe.

The rest of the time, we learn of Kane's life from a newsreel, and the memoirs and flashbacks recounted by his forgotten friends and enemies as the reporter Thompson tries to work out for his boss what his final word in life means.

In other words, everything is second-hand except the word 'rosebud'.

We quickly learn from the newsreel and subsequently the memoirs of Kane's guardian, Thatcher, that Kane's poor family came into money and he was then legally adopted by the bank that handled his family's affairs. In short, his family gave him up to a corporation.

As the papers are being signed, we see the signature shot of the entire film - the deep focus which allows us to see both Thatcher adopting Kane and young Charlie Kane playing on his sled outside in the snow - both in focus. There are, in other words, two stories being told at once.

This becomes the story of Kane.

When he meets Thatcher outside his other's house, he hits him with his sled.

Later Charlie Kane sets himself up as both a crusading, reforming newspaperman, who will run for office to 'drain the swamp', and end partisan politics in favour of the working man - but also as an oligarch who amasses a fortune and a mansion full of statues and exotic pets. He is accused of both being a Communist and Fascist. Populist and dictator.

He describes himself as 'two people' in one scene - both the owner and critic of the monopolies hurting the common citizen.

When he loses his paper business in the Great Crash, he notes to Thatcher that if he had not been rich he might have been a great man. Thatcher asks him what he would have liked to have been. He responds, 'Everything you hate.'

In other words, his character has lost all positive content. He has no soul, and the tragedy is he knows it.

His closest work colleague, Bernstein, relates to Thompson his kind of superficial career greatness. He prints in his paper a Dedication of Principles, in which Kane personally promises to report the news fairly and to be a champion for the people.

Kane's best friend, Jedediah Leland, keeps the original copy of his Principles, and when Thompson visits him, we hear how they fell out as friends as Kane, in the duality of his personality, fails to keep his promises.

He recounts that Kane had some 'private greatness' but he kept it to himself - he never believed in anything except himself. He had great ideas and ideals - but didn't really leave anything behind.

Leland recounts his first marriage to an American aristocrat and the marriage is recounted in a famous montage of breakfasts, as the couple drifts apart and Kane loses himself in his work, declaring one morning that people will think 'what I tell them to think'.

Leland notes that 'all he ever wanted out of life was love', but he didn't have any to give.

That's the truth of Kane, and our, tragedy. We want love, but we don't realise you only get anything by giving it first. And yet you can't blame Kane too much - he had been given away from the first by his parents, to the pursuit of some kind of corporate greatness.

In his quest for love, he seeks the love of the voters, as a 'fighting liberal' and great reformer, and the double image grows. Intriguingly, just as Trump did to Hillary Clinton, he asserts that upon being elected as Governor of New York, he will immediately place his corrupt opponent under criminal investigation.

His political career falls apart when his infidelity is exposed (a different age!). And so one more avenue for receiving love is blocked. Leland tells him after his disgrace he talks of the people as though he owns them, and that he won't like it one bit when the working man demands something as his right rather than as Kane's gift. Kane just wants people to love him, on his own terms, according to his own rules.

He marries his mistress, Susan, with his first wife, Emily, and beloved son dying in a car accident, but that does not work either. He tries to make her an opera star despite her lack of talent, and in the most memorable scene of the film, finishes Leland's scathing review of her performance for his newspaper and then fires him.

Kane skulks around Susan in the cavernous mansion as she plays around with jigsaw puzzles. All he gives her are things, Susan notes, never anything that belongs to him. She leaves him, and he trashes his room of statues which his wife had scorned. Susan recounts to Thompson that despite it all, she feels sorry for Kane.

The film concludes with Thompson travelling to Xanadu. Kane's art collection is being catalogued and disposed of.

'What would it spell, all his possessions if you put it all together?' a colleague asks Thompson. Thompson tells them he never found out anything about Rosebud: 'I don't think a word can explain a man's life... Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.'

It seems as though nobody knows Kane really. He is a series of reflections.

Finally the camera pans over all his possessions. Once again we are seeing the life of Kane in the real world of the story. Some of the inexpensive items are being burnt in the furnace. One is a child's sled, with the name Rosebud on it. The smoke drifts out of his palace. We see it through the surrounding fence. On it is the sign from the opening shot - No Trespassing.

The message is perhaps two-fold. How do we ever know somebody, really?

And second, perhaps we lose ourselves in a series of mirrors when we fail to give ourselves to others, when we never really learn how to love, only how to desire love as the result of a kind of vacuum in our materialist hearts.

Is this the truth behind the so-called American Dream? That perhaps there is nothing really there?

Well, let's see what Donald Trump has to say about this, in a video review he gave of the film before he went politics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeQOJZ-QzBk

First of all, it is pretty interesting this is his favourite film. Kane is a lot like him! Except perhaps I don't get the impression Trump's life is as tortured or filled with anguish. He is always surrounded by family and extended family. He puts a lot of them into White House jobs!

Second, Trump does seem to have quite a bit of insight into the film concerning the commentary on wealth and happiness, but it is an insight that is also quite stunted. He describes Kane's fall as a moderate one - not the complete tragedy it was. Perhaps it is a little difficult to unpack a tragedy that so closely mirrors one's own experience. His final line is pure Trump - his advice to Kane is not to love, or to be less self-centred, but to find a better woman!

What Trump doesn't get - which is why he is a reality TV star and not an artist; a casino builder and not a builder of cathedrals - is that Citizen Kane, like Vertigo, is ultimately a critique of the whole concept of modernity, best exemplifed by America's post-religious consumerism and freedom.

In such a world, love in its call for rootedness and commitment and personal cost, is often simply a price too high when faced with the competition of constant personal reinvention.

At the same time, Trump's anti-globalisation rhetoric - Make America Great Again - is a kind of appeal to a mythical, more localised past, in which we do have rooted connection. He has more than one story. Not all of his stories are palatable.

Perhaps like Kane, perhaps like all of us, Trump is walking through a kind of hallway of mirrors. May he, like all of us, for all of each others' sake, find some unreflected light at the end of the corridor, beyond the screen of the darkened cinema.