I recently had the great pleasure of re-watching Citizen Kane, one of my favorite films, with the added pleasure of watching it while I listed to Roger Ebert’s great commentary track. Ebert, as many of you may know, has had cancer surgery that resulted in the loss of both his voice and his ability to eat, so it is a great gift that we have for posterity this commentary from him on one of the greatest films of all time.
As noted above, Kane is a favorite, though not THE favorite… I have to say that Chinatown and The Godfather tend to alternate in my personal top spot, depending on my mood and whatever I had just re-watched. But Kane is up there, and after watching it again I have to say that I understood the central character far more than I had ever before.
Charles Foster Kane, in many ways, is a man-child, someone who was thrust into greatness based on luck: his mother inherited a deed to a mine that resulted in unexpected riches. He stood fast on principles in his youth, then quickly and simply compromised them for his own selfish reasons.
But Kane was not just selfish – he was impotent. In four parallel scenes he is not in control of what happens to him. When you look at the beginning his fate is decided for him by his mother. After he is given to the banker Thatcher to take care of him, you see a boy enraged at this disruption and separation, and he attacks Thatcher. In the last one (when his wife Susan leaves) he breaks out in complete impotent rage… just like he did against Thatcher, only with a full life’s worth of rage behind him.
He has grown old, but he is still incomplete… he has searched for something to complete himself his whole life, collecting artifacts from around the world. But the closest thing that does so is a sled that reflects a distant memory of family, home, completeness. Of his mother.
He dies, alone. And we empathize with him, because that is one of our common fears. No one wants to go alone.
I also think that Kane is, in many ways, like our own country – young, with great opportunity… and eventually, in many ways, corrupted. It was no accident that the original title of the film was “The American.”
One quick, final note: I also recently watched the fantastic documentary on the great writer Harlan Ellison, called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Ellison, unlike Kane, has never compromised on his principles (and this has hurt his career in many ways). Whether you like him or not (and if you don’t like him, be careful, he may sue you), he is consistent. And, like Kane, Ellison’s wife’s is named Susan.
The same as mine.
Comparing myself to the two “characters,” I aspire to be more like Ellison… but am afraid, every day, that I am turning into Kane.