Rotten to the Core

Citizen Kane

by Poly Phemos, www.cinemonkey.com

y friends kept urging me to get a DVD player, but I resisted until a few months ago, when I finally bought one. That makes me what the marketing people call a "late adopter."

I was worried that once I bought a DVD player, I would spend all my waking hours watching DVDs. As it turns out, the dangers of owning a DVD player are worse, much worse than merely wasting time. I am writing with a simple message to all readers; if you don't own a DVD player, don't buy one. If you do own a DVD player, please destroy it at once.

A DVD of a classic movie, with commentaries and other extras, will suck you in. You will find yourself listening to the commentaries, and worse, rethinking your assumptions about movies you have always regarded as masterpieces. This happened to me with the DVD of Citizen Kane. Watching and rethinking it has been a brutal experience. I will carry the mental scars to my grave.

he world is an uncertain place, but I thought I knew at least one thing for sure; that Citizen Kane is a masterpiece. Watching the DVD and listening to the commentary by Roger Ebert, I learned some new things about the movie that increased my admiration for the cinematographer Greg Toland as well as the people involved in set design, optical effects, sound effects, other aspects of this amazing production. Ebert said that this film is important in the history of cinema because Welles made use of all that was known about movie making at that time, as did D.W. Griffith decades earlier in Birth of a Nation. Welles used the most creative and competent people available in Hollywood to tell the story of a complex and contradictory American. After watching the DVD, I had even more respect for Greg Toland and others involved in the realization of Welles's vision.

Ebert discussed the use of deep focus in the film and the way keeping all parts of the frame in focus allows the viewer to choose which part of the scene she wants to focus on. He said deep focus was essential in Citizen Kane because it supports the theme of the film ,which was that no one individual really knew the complete truth of Charles Foster Kane. The viewer must see all of the important scenes in Kane's life and draw his own conclusions about who Kane really was. This is illustrated especially vividly in a scene near the end of the movie where Kane, wandering aimlessly around Xanadu after his wife has left him, walks between reflecting mirrors so that we see multiple images of him. Which one is the real Kane?

hen I began to think. I couldn't help it. Ebert compared Citizen Kane to Birth of a Nation, and I began to think about whether Birth of a Nation is a great movie. I really like this film. Lilian Gish is the most beautiful woman who ever has or ever will appear in any film. Her rescue by the Ku Klux Klan at the end of the movie is an absolute delight.

Birth of a Nation, however is a bad film. I do not mean,bad in a technical sense. I mean bad in the moral sense. Birth of a Nation presented an immoral view of American race relations. Therefore, all the technical brilliance of the film merely helped to spread its racist message, helping the Ku Klux Klan to increase its membership in the 1920s. Birth of a Nation is rotten at its core.

Watching the Citizen Kane DVD made me think about the core of this film. It seems to be about a complex and contradictory person, Charles Foster Kane. However, is Kane really a complex person? At the beginning of the film, in a newsreel, we hear two unidentified voices suggest that Kane was both a Communist and a Fascist. But do people who really knew him give contradictory descriptions of him? There are four individuals who give their recollections of Kane: Mr. Thatcher, Mr. Bernstein, Susan Alexander Kane, and Jedediah Leland. Do any of these people make statements about Kane that any of the others would disagree with? Kane was a rich man who spent his adult life trying to buy people and things to make up for his childhood loss. He wanted love but he was unable to really love anyone. You hear this same story consistently from his ex-wife, his ex-guardian, his ex-associate, and his ex-friend. You may say, "It's not that simple," but I think it is. The story of Charles Foster Kane is actually so simple and straightforward that by the end of the film we feel we know him, the way we can only really know a two-dimensional character. In terms of the complexity of his character, Kane is less like Hamlet or Lear than Daddy Warbucks. Citizen Kane is not rotten at its core, just sort of simplistic. Not very interesting.

Does this kind of story really require deep focus? Why does the viewer need to observe everything in the frame clearly and draw her own conclusions? There is only one correct interpretation of the story of Kane. Why do we need to be shown multiple mirror images of Kane when there is only one Charles Foster Kane and he is a cartoon? The more I thought about these questions, the more I came to feel that the Welles's story was not worth the amazing talent devoted to realizing it. I blame my DVD player. I don't want to think these things about Citizen Kane, but the machine is forcing me to.

ike the computer HAL, like the Golem, like the monster Caliban in The Tempest, and like the living broom created by sorcerer's apprentice Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, DVDs and DVD players were created as servants but they have become monsters. Now that I have one, I cannot stop watching classic DVDs, and this monster is slowly and surely destroying my worshipful love of cinematic masterpieces. Still, I can't give it up. As Prospero said of Caliban in The Tempest, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."

I have just gotten the DVD of Seven Samurai. God help me.

incerely,
Poly Phemos

3/02

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