Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 1)

It’s a film bursting with objects—the treasure troves of Xanadu, a snowglobe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner’s cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film’s plot are expressed tangibly. Kane’s mind-boggling wealth isn’t an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings—gold mines, oil wells, real estate. And the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one’s hands: a newspaper. Kane, too, is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was “news,” as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they’re made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast, empty planet around which objects swirl. What’s at his core, then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane bets that just one fact—the identity of “Rosebud”—would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it’s in the sum total of his possessions. Yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane’s actions won’t tell us who he really was. So what, then, determines his or any identity? What’s the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for? Their actions? Or something still deeper? Wes & Erin discuss possibly the greatest film ever made: from 1941, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: It's a film bursting with objects. The treasure troves of Xanadu, a snow globe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner's cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film's plot are expressed tangibly. Kane's mind boggling wealth isn't an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings, gold mines, oil wells, real estate and the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one's a newspaper. Kane, too is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was news, as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they're made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast empty planet around which objects swirl. What's at his core then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane, bets that just one fact, the identity of Rosebud, would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it's in the sum total of his possessions. And yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane's actions won't tell us who he really was. So what then determines his or any identity? What's the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for their actions? Or something still deeper? Today we're discussing possibly the greatest film ever made from 1941. Orson Welles, citizen Kane. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:47 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. 1:49 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I'm curious. If you had to name one object that is most important in your life or that somehow represents you, what would it be? No pressure. Just one thing and you can't. No redos. 2:08 Wes: Does it have to be from childhood? 2:10 Erin: No. 2:12 Wes: Probably my iPhone. 2:15 Erin: No. I knew you were going to say that. 2:17 Wes: Everyone isn't. That everyone's. 2:19 Erin: That's your rosebud. 2:21 Wes: But at this point, they start out in early childhood with it. Do TikTok. 2:27 Erin: It is a rectangle. 2:28 Wes: We used this company all our life. Now. Yeah. Right. We can't. It's not big enough to ride down 2:34 Erin: a snow hill, but maybe one day. 2:38 Wes: But let me think of a. Let me think of a more. Something with more sentimental value. The first thing that comes to mind that I have from childhood. Let's do that. Is a teddy bear that I got from my mom when I Was five years old. And I still remember her giving it to me on my birthday. And I named it Charlie Honey Bear. I still have it. It's one of the few things I have because when we came over from Ireland when I was nine, it's a long story, but we lost all our possessions that we had in Ireland, and the only things that I had on my person did I end up keeping. So all my everything from childhood was gone except for good old Charlie Honey Bear. Well, fun fact, the back of his head is burnt because I dropped him in the fireplace at some point. He still has this soot stained back of his head, but he's still running strong. They used to make him really durable back in the day. How about you? 3:41 Erin: Oh, I don't have an answer for this. I'm putting you on the spot. 3:44 Wes: Screw you. 3:47 Erin: I'd really have to think about it, 3:48 Wes: but I regret telling that story. 3:50 Erin: I know I trapped you. I trapped you. No, but I was thinking about whether or not that's. I was thinking about this idea of a totem object and whether or not people have these things if they can name off the top of their heads, you know, you're part of my social experiment. If they can name off the top of their head something that they would save in a fire, obviously, you know, Charlie Honey Bear narrowly escaped. But fun fact, Charlie Honey Bear is Susan's nickname for Kane. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I was reading a little bit about what Welles thought about the word rosebud, that maybe even Kane didn't know or remember what that meant, that it was just a kind of an unconscious word that was floating around in his mind unconsciously from childhood, that maybe he wouldn't even have been able to say that it was written on the sled. And so whether or not that word as divorced from the object even means something even less tangible or less, I don't know, somehow explainable than the sled itself. That memory is such an unpredictable, unstable kind of thing, and our relationship to our own childhoods can become so romanticized, estranged, somehow we take sometimes, as memory often works, we take memories, memorable events from things that are utterly inconsequential, and somehow those become the things that we remember best from certain periods of our lives. Anyway, all of that to say that I was just thinking about the significance of Rosebud and whether this rang psychologically true on a contemporary level. I mean, it must, it's very significant. People seem to agree this is a pretty good movie. 5:43 Wes: So which, whether, which part rings psychological? 5:47 Erin: The idea of Rosebud of a singular object, of a life reduced to. Yeah. Or something that one carries with you, even if it's just a word that you don't even know the significance of. 5:59 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. When you started to ask that question and you said the word object, I started to worry that you were going to ask me which of his antiquities I was most impressed by. And I thought, oh, am I supposed to know what some of those are? Because I don't know any of them. You know, one of the things I had reflected on is that that sled ends up in the big, huge room before it's burned. It's in there with all his possessions, including all those statues and other antiquities. And I. By the way, it's a scene that reminds me of the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the Ark kind of is kind of a sled too. Right. Or it looks like one, maybe. Could be. It could be repurposed as a sled. It. What the final scene suggests to me is that what replaces the sled in his adult life are all these statues and other antiquities, these possessions, which, you know, whereas the sled is something that can be used for play and childhood fun. And like I said, you can take it down a snow hill. There's a certain element of vitality and freedom associated with it. The antiquities are more about. You get the impression he's trying to aggrandize himself both by having those possessions, but also by identifying with whatever is the subject of a monument. I don't know if that answers your question. Your question was about. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. 7:42 Erin: Whether this was psychologically accurate to the way that we relate to objects. I mean, I think that the final scene, they're taking inventory and they have two categories for the stuff that's in that room. Junk and art. Right. And the $2 stove, part of the estate of Mary Kane Charles, mother from Colorado, that's in there, too. Right. And so he seems to have amassed, and we're told earlier in the film, I think, right. That he has a big warehouse in western Manhattan where he stored everything from his mother's estate and from this house in Colorado. Right. So the fact that all of these things are in the same kind of junk pile together or maybe in the same warehouse, or in this instance, in the final scene in the atrium altogether, implies the people going through an inventorying are trying to figure out what to throw away and what to save. What's junk and what's art. But of course, like any mother saddled with a macaroni necklace that their child has made for them, knows sometimes the junk is a lot more valuable or of much more psychological importance than some expensive vase or something like that. Right? 8:54 Wes: Yeah. So the question is whether it's psychologically realistic. So you don't. Do you have anything from childhood that 9:02 Erin: I have Lots of things. I mean, too many things. I think that's. Maybe that's the question that I have, is the fact that one can reduce everything to the sled. I have probably if I sat down and thought about it and made a list, I could think of 25 things that each represent some area of my life that are still kicking around somewhere. At my grandmother's house, at my parents house, in my apartment, in somebody's basement, you know, things that I've held onto. And so maybe it's the singularity of the sled or the fact that one could be reduced to a single object. Like, I think I'm interested in the fact that Kane can't be pinned down. It seems like Kane is almost like a vacuum in the middle of the film. Of course, the point is that the sled doesn't explain everything, right? But the interest in the fact that this guy who is sort of everything and nothing and who is vast and simple at the same time, who has conflicting motivations and seemingly like a very complex personality, that he can be a explained and not explained in a single object, I think is. I mean, maybe that just increases his complexity or something, that he has all these objects and really just one is the thing that has haunted him or something. It's these sort of opposed binaries united across all vectors of his personality, so that he would be a collector of everything in the world on the one hand, and then just wanting, not wanting, but being explained by one object on the other hand. 10:39 Wes: It's associated early on with his loss of his parents and his capture by Thatcher. Is that the name of the person who runs the trust? Thatcher? So I think it must have even more significance than many an object, childhood object, would have for us. He attacks Thatcher with it. Thatcher tries to give him a new one. And that forms the basis of a transition from childhood to adulthood. We jump over a whole bunch of years by kind of sledding over it, I guess. And the first act is really about that conflict with Thatcher. So I think this led. It is about, as someone says later on, at the nearly very end of the film, it is about something he's lost, but it's also about what he becomes. Because his desire to become a tabloid newspaper operator who can make or ruin people's reputations in the name of representing the people. That is obviously framed as part and parcel of his defiance against Thatcher. I want to become everything you hate, he says near the end of the first act, and even to the point where he's willing to publish articles that are not beneficial to companies in which he has lots of shares of stock. So I think the sled is also a representation of, or it's representative of defiance. And somehow that defiance went awry and turned in on itself. It didn't have the forward momentum that it was supposed to have. It went off track. So that whereas he starts out wanting to be a man of the people and to fight for justice, the whole act of being involved in this use of information to create whatever reality he wants to create for his own purposes, that becomes something. It becomes about his own reputation. 12:54 Erin: Yeah, I'm thinking about that replacement sled and what that's maybe representative of. Right. Because we have the early sled is rosebud, obviously, which is suggestive of nature and innocence and femininity with his mother, his relationship with his mother. And then we have this replacement sled that Thatcher hands him, which has crusader on it. It's the name of it. 13:20 Wes: Oh, really? Okay. 13:22 Erin: Yeah. Interesting. And, of course, this is something tough and, you know, representative maybe of. We think of a crusader, I think of armor, something protective that's donned against the world, against attack. But there's also something romantic about being a crusader, being a knight in shining armor, a protector, or someone who goes out on a kind of a mission, obviously. And so I'm interested in the fact that this crusader sled is Thatcher, hands it to him in the same way that Thatcher kind of hands him the money, so to speak, that makes Kane able to be the defender of the people that he seems to wish to become. And that itself is a kind of crusading effort to. So obviously the two sleds represent one Kane in childhood, the other Kane in adulthood. But I suppose I'm interested in the fact that Thatcher supplies this sled to him. It's symbolic to me in that Thatcher, of course, has, like, affected his maturation by coming into his life and being his trustee and changing everything. But also this idea of crusading, which seems to run against, as you're pointing out, seems to run against Thatcher's personality, or, you know, it's a way of Kane trying to defy Thatcher by being the defender of the people or whatever, is also lent to him. It's like an idea that's been lent to him by Thatcher as well. Perhaps just in negative. Right. In defiance of what Thatcher represents, but also literally in terms of this sled. Yeah, yeah. 15:03 Wes: The money both gives him a target of his crusade and his discontent and something to fight against and then it gives him the means for conducting the fight. So it creates a kind of contradiction or paradox for him from the beginning. And it's an odd situation for him to be in where he's not rebelling against his own father and there's this suggestion by the mother that she's sending him to be brought up where the father can't get him. So there's the suggestion that the father has abused him, but instead of going through that kind of rebellion against his own parents, he's doing it against a surrogate who is. What, he's not a foster parent? Exactly. Although I suppose he must have played the role of a parent up to a certain point. But really he's the provisioner of the trust of the money. He's the source of the money. And it's clear that the defiance that he feels towards Thatcher is directly translated into the interest in the newspaper. We get this jump after the sleigh, Thatcher trying to give him the new sleigh. We get this immediate fast forward to Thatcher hearing that he wants to run a newspaper. And then there's this montage of all this bad press that's been given to various companies which Kane presumably has holdings in. Right before the end of the first act, we get to see, we get introduced to Charles, to Kane as a young adult. And it's interesting, he's very confident and self possessed in that very Orson Welles kind of way, given the circumstances, given the. What's happened to him as a kid. He's awfully self confident and it seems like that self confidence is built on top of his defiance. This crusade, you know, what you've called a desire to engage in a crusade. And there's even this remark about, I don't know if it's at this point, but you know, oh, I'll provide the war. As if he's going to be able to use his newspaper to I guess create. To cause a war, the war with Spain, I guess. Is that what it is? Yeah. So there's a certain kind of, there's a certain kind of power in that. But I guess the point I was trying to make is that we get a different kind of father son conflict than usual here because in a way it's not so personal and he's not fighting the person who raised him in the most important formative years. But in a way he's fighting against the person who kidnapped him. And we don't ever get the sense that he's going to. I don't know when it is. He gets his independence and money, I assume at 18, but we don't. 17:56 Erin: 25. 17:57 Wes: 25, okay. We don't. Right. Yeah. We don't get the sense that we don't know what's happened to his parents. Correct me if I'm wrong about that. And we don't ever see him even considering the idea of reuniting with his parents. We don't know how much contact he's had with his parents over the years. I guess we have to assume that he didn't have any. Or did he? I don't know. But again, what I'm really trying to stress is this kind of displaced father son conflict where the conflict is with the concept of power and money in general that plays out with him his desire to fight the establishment and be the establishment at the same time. 18:38 Erin: Yeah. With this talk of his confidence, this is something that maybe. I certainly registered it too. I was thinking about the contrast between Kane and Hearst and I think that the most marked one is the fact that Hearst was not self made. He was a guy who maybe curiously thought of himself as standing up for the little people. At least that was his motivation at the beginning. And that was strange. Right. Because he was never one of the little people. Right. He didn't have. He was not someone who made his own fortune or something like that. In Kane it's more understandable that he would want to stand up for the little guy seeing as he, he grew up in poverty. But maybe what isn't as explainable is precisely this unearned confidence that comes with money and privilege. So, so they're, they're sort of at cross purposes that way. And the, the. I think that the one thing, maybe not the one thing, but one of the only things that threatened to make this film really libelous, though it was gone over I think by lawyers. But the one thing that threatened to make it libelous was this anecdote which was entirely borrowed from Hearst's own life about. You supply the prose poems, I'll supply the war. Charlie Kane says Hearst said almost the exact same thing to. I think it was Frederic Remington who was on the staff of, of his paper the. Now I'm getting all the names mixed up. The Examiner, I think was Hearst's paper and he had the rival just like we have in the film, it's the Inquirer, and the rival is the Chronicle. I think in real life, it was the examiner, and his rival was Pulitzer's paper, which was the World, I think. So, anyway, he sends Frederic Remington down, who's on the artist, on staff of the examiner, and Remington writes back and says, there's no war here. And Hearst says, you provide the pictures, I'll provide the war. And so this is one of the few possibly apocryphal but famous Hearst quotes that's actually repurposed for this film. So I understand Kane, and I don't understand him precisely because of the fact that. Of this confidence that you're talking about. He does mention his mother twice in the film, I think, at one point. And I should do. I should do a search for this before I say anything definitive, because I noted the two times that he mentions her. I think that at one point he mentions that she's dead and that she died a while ago. There's also the suggestion that I think they were receiving some kind of annuity for themselves, the parents. $50,000. 21:20 Wes: Right. They were. 21:20 Erin: Right. Yeah. So when she died, and whether or not his. It was maybe during his boarding school years, and he couldn't. He couldn't be with her. He. You know, he was forcibly kind of removed from her until the point that she died. It's unclear, but. Yeah, sorry, Now, I'm kind of gone off on a little mental tangent, but I'm interested in this idea of this. Yeah. This proxy war that Kane is waging against this parental figure. And it seems that he's able to keep the parents in this very exalted mental position precisely because of the fact that he has a proxy with which to. On whom he can blame everything that has happened to him in a way that parents would normally absorb those blows. Right. Instead, the parents remain like rosebud, like the sled, especially the mother, of course, the father. Maybe there's no love lost there, but remains this person who's untainted by the vicissitudes of a long relationship or of what happens when you go into puberty and become a teenager and start rebelling and lashing out. Right. All of that is absorbed by Thatcher rather than the parents. So the parents remain like museum figures or something, or like something in a museum themselves. And I was really interested in this idea of the proxy, which most often in the film is visually expressed with paintings or statues or some kind of effigy of somebody appears almost for every major character, I think, except for the Parents. Right. So maybe they're. Or the mother. So she, it seems to me, is the sled. 23:04 Wes: I think that's a very good point. He never has a chance to become disenchanted with his parents, so they remain idealized. And when he's collecting these statues and other antiquities, he's. In a way, it's not just about self aggrandizement, but it's about the idealized mother, maybe, which is a feature, of course, of narcissism. The connection to that ideal which has not become disappointing enough and has not been mourned, let's say. So in the end it's. Yeah. What does it mean for him to say Rosebud? I mean, is it a recognition of loss? Or is he, in a way, just holding on to the. The ideal, to the very bitter end? I don't know if we can know that, but. 23:55 Erin: Yeah, I think now that I'm thinking about statues and ideals, you know, in that last scene when they're cataloging everything, I think someone makes a joke about one of the statues of Venus. There are many of them in the shot. Some of them have heads. Right. But one of them makes it, makes a joke. One of the reporters says, you know, $25,000, that's a lot to pay for a dame without a head, you know, so presumably that one that he's referring to is headless. All those Venuses in that shot. And the fact that the one that's singled out is the headless one, and we're talking about the fact that the sled might be a kind of proxy for the mother or a symbol of the mother. All those Venuses, all those women, of course, would be symbolic as well. And we should talk about Cain's relationship with women and how this is related to his relationship with his mother. But I think that headlessness is significant because it does seem like it suggests, I think, the estrangement at the heart of Cain's idealization of his mother. Right. That this is something that has no face, something that you can't. You can't see the face. It's misty, it's shrouded in memory and many years. And I mean, maybe it means something still deeper than that. Right. The headless statue is so evocative of so many things, but something that can't be pinned down, easily understood. Maybe I'm wrong to connect that with a mother. 25:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good association because it. I mean, on the one hand it's not. It seems to suggest he's not being Seen, which is something that, of course, has become very important to him. And people accuse him of. Well, they accuse him of wanting to be loved. But in this case, wanting to be loved has something to do with wanting to be admired and seen. And then the other aspect of that is, I think you can associate headlessness to objectification. So the object is no longer a full person, which is part and part of idealization, but is a body. Right. So that makes sense in explicitly sexual terms, but it can also be made sense of in terms of a more narcissistic orientation towards another person, in which their subjectivity is not so much at stake as your own. So in a way, it can represent two very different things. One of them, the sense of not being seen. And then the other one, you're the only one who's important or should be seen. Something like that. I don't know. Is that what you're getting at? 26:38 Erin: No. Yeah. This is great. This is great. 26:41 Wes: Yeah. 26:41 Erin: I mean, I want to go. I want to talk about the two wives. But before I do, I think it's important, since we've been talking about this motivation question, the desire to be loved, perhaps Leland says something about Kane, that maybe he had some sort of private greatness, but Leland never really knew what it was. And I'm interested in that expression, too. Or in any of these. Right. In any private sort of greatness. Okay, that's what he says. 27:09 Wes: Where is that? 27:10 Erin: Leland says it during the interview with Thompson. At some point, he tells Thompson, you know, I suppose he had some sort of. I suppose he had some private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. That, of course, is. That has a couple of different meanings, too. Right. Giving oneself away, like. Like betraying his private thoughts. And also, like, physically speaking, he wasn't maybe generous, didn't give things away to people. So. But this idea of his motivation and of the fact that he had a private sort of greatness, I'm very intrigued by this idea, because even Leland, who maybe knew him better than anybody, doesn't know what this is. And I'm interested in this idea of greatness. He had greatness, if you like, thrust upon him, but not greatness necessarily, but just a great deal of money. Right. In a way, Kane is kind of like just one of these figures who's famous for being famous. There's no there there. You know, he didn't do anything to get this money. He wasn't special in any way. And it gave him the ability to have the career that he had. It maybe gave him to the. This confidence that we're talking about to have the career that he had. But otherwise, without it, he would have been no. 1. Probably. I don't know. Maybe he would have built up an empire on his own. I don't know. 28:31 Wes: Sled manufacturer, right? Biggest sled conglomerate in the world. And then he would have diversified into sleigh or sled. 28:39 Erin: Sled, yeah. I think sleighs are bigger. Sleighs are like. You can. 28:43 Wes: Oh, right. 28:44 Erin: But, yeah. Horse drawn. So the. I have gotten my brother to pull me on a sled like it was a sled. But anyway, yeah, so I don't. This question of his greatness. I was wondering if you had any theories about if you think he's great or not. And if you do, what you think this greatness is, where we can locate it? Is it in his spleen? I don't know. 29:06 Wes: Yeah, it's a good question. See? Great. He's driven, he works very hard. Right. We get the early scene where he kind of moves into the office. Is he working from bed? He moves a bed in there, right? Is he working from bed at some point? In any case, he's devoting himself entirely to this project. And he might have ended up as the kind of trust fund kid who devoted himself to nothing or kind of trying one thing here or there, not putting in a great deal of effort, or not being totally committed and moving on to the next thing. So that part of the film interests me that he's able to throw himself into something like that, even though he has all this money, because the money could become sort of a tar pit in which he sinks for the partially examined life. We're reading Kierkegaard right now. Kierkegaard tells in either or the second book of either or now we're in, which is about the ethical sphere. So there are these three spheres for Kierkegaard. The aesthetic, the ethical, and then the religious. But the point is that if you get everything you want, then you could call that a fortune, Right. Having so much money that you've made a fortune or that you have a fortune. But in a way, it's the greatest misfortune. And it's the greatest misfortune because it allows you to live what he calls the aesthetic life, really, which is an ambiguous term, but in this context, it just means a life of desire, a life of being able to. Having the power and resources to satisfy all of your desires. And the idea is that it can't do that. And it creates a very unique kind of unhappiness to have the resources to live a life of desire. But it's not like the same sort of unhappiness as everyday unhappiness where we might fantasize about having all that money and power, but we don't, so we can't be corrupted by it. But in this case, he does have, essentially, for his purposes, unlimited amounts of unlimited resources, and. And yet he's able to get some forward motion, which I see as the sled part of this. He's able to immerse himself in a project where, at least in the beginning, he's not going to get sucked down into the tar pit of cash and live a dissolute life. And yet, tragically, that doesn't work. His attempt to escape. He has an instinct right there. As a kid, even when he attacks Thatcher, he has this instinct that this is not good for him. It's not just about losing his family, but something is coming which could really overwhelm him, and it's that sense of defiance which is going to help him maintain some sort of an identity and be someone. But that defiant project just gets absorbed by the very thing that he's trying to defy, tragically. So that's the most interesting part of the film to me. So, yeah, in that sense, you could see him as tragically great at the psychological level. He's making this enormous effort to escape the perils of winning the lottery and does something that you think would be the surest path to escaping that, which is wasting all of his money at first. Right. He's wasting a million a year, although that could last 60 years, I guess, is what he says. But still wasting a lot of money on newspapers until it starts to make him a lot of money as well. But I don't think that's not the tragic turning point. I think the turning point is just how it affects his view of the world. And I think the way it affects his view of the world is this is kind of another omnipotence of thought thing. He develops the idea that he can make anything he wants happen in reality, whether it's war or getting Susie to become a famous opera singer or anything else. He can make that happen by manipulating information, by manipulating people's reputations, which is something, of course, Hearst did, and he tried to do it to Hollywood and Welles. Right. He tried to. He went through. Took a lot of effort to prevent the film from even getting released. It's amazing. I didn't I only vaguely knew that story and only I had forgotten it. And just reading that again in preparation for this episode, I was astounded by the efforts he went through to prevent the film from getting released. But it's about the manipulation of reputation. So that's the means by which he's going to fight this fight against the wealth and privilege that are dangerous to him is to do tabloid journalism. What does he say? At some point, this is like another old wives' tale thing to spread the gossip that wives talk to each other about. We're going to put that on the front page and that becomes a new sort of peril which sucks him right back into the very thing he's trying to escape. It's not our function to report the gossip of housewives, is what Carter says to him. This is after he's just taken over the Inquirer. If we were interested in that kind of thing, Mr. Kane, we could fill the paper twice over daily. And Kane, that's the kind of thing we are going to be interested in from now on. Mr. Carter, right now I wish you to send your best man up to see Mr. Silverstone. Have him tell Mr. Silverstone if he doesn't produce his wife at once, the Inquirer will have him arrested. Have him tell Mr. Silverstone he's a detective from the central office. If Mr. Silverstone asks to see his badge, your man is to get indignant and call Mr. Silverstone an anarchist. Which is great because Kane gets called an anarchist or a communist by Thatcher. I think he's called everything communist, fascist, anarchist. Yeah. Jed at one point jokingly calls him an anarchist. Or is it the other way around? I forget. But, yeah, I like this. I think this is an important aspect of the film, the idea. Well, the old wives' tale aspect, the idea of producing old wives tales or gossip for the sake of political purposes. It's almost like a platonic noble lie of a sort of a very different sort. He's gonna be the citizen. He's gonna be the champion of people, but he's gonna do it with this particular method and. 36:04 Erin: Yeah, well, that's the question, though. I mean, does it ever. Is it ever noble? I mean. So he seems to be very canny about the fact that all this stuff will sell. I don't think that takes a tremendous amount of intelligence to know that. I mean, he seems to be kind of inventing the tabloid in the film, but. So of course this is going to sell, but. But it doesn't seem that desire for success is tuned to Any particular direction. In other words, it doesn't seem that his intention is to inflate readership with these kinds of tactics and then become powerful enough to stand up for the little guy. He always seems to have this intention that he's going to stand up for the little guy. He has the declaration of principles which he makes, which is important enough that I think I should. I should. 36:59 Wes: Yeah, let's do it. 37:01 Erin: So he. It's a two sentence, I think. Yeah, it's a two sentence declaration of principles. He writes, I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings. And of course, in this scene when he's writing it, Leland points out that he started both sentences with I. And later Leland will accuse him of acting as though he's personally doling out the rights of these citizens, as though he controls the tap or something. Expression he uses. Right. 37:34 Wes: Services. It's compensation for services provided or something like that. 37:40 Erin: Yeah. And so immediately he starts, immediately this declaration of principle starts with I, of course, it's all about him. But the first sentence is a lie, you know, that will tell all the news honestly. Okay, so he never seems to think that this is a contradiction. I mean, this is some sort of hallowed moment. Right. But he never seems to think that the tabloid news is some kind of contradiction. And it's never explained away as, okay, this is what I'm going to do to become popular and then I'm going to get on the people's side, tell all the news accurately. Right. And then the second sentence, I will provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings. And you know, means nothing. Just like everything he says means nothing. You know, he doesn't need to be their. The champion of their rights. How can a newspaper be the champion of their rights? I suppose by, obviously the free press is important. I'm not saying that there's no role here for a newspaper, but I'm saying that, you know, he's not the law, he's not the constitution, he doesn't actually provide them and he's not a judge and he's not, you know, like he 38:49 Wes: doesn't actually provide them with levy wars and. Well. 38:54 Erin: Right, yeah. And I suppose he might be able 38:57 Wes: to manipulate the world into war or the country into war, but he doesn't have the official power as a war maker. He's not a state that's right. He's not a representative of the citizen as he wants to be. Sorry, go ahead. 39:11 Erin: Yeah, well, and his desire to champion the little guy is never borne out. I mean, this idea of wanting to drum up a war because it would make good news is actually chilling. I mean, it's the very opposite of that. Like he wants to send people to get killed in the interest of his own newsmaking apparatus. So we don't see him really doing anything good. And his personal convictions, such as they are, if he has any, are so nebulous that it allows everyone, as you pointed out, to call him both a communist and a fascist at the same time. That he throws his support behind someone, then he denounces them. Significant shot of him with Hitler. He seems to have no core. Everything's just orbiting around this empty space in the middle. And then when we see him in his campaign speech, something very similar. It's all about him. It's aye, aye. And then in the end, all he does is he sets himself aside. Being against Gettys, who we. We never really get a clear understanding of what makes Gettys so bad. But, you know, Kane says, very interestingly, right, that he doesn't want to make any promises because he didn't think he had a chance or something like that, right? So he's made no campaign promises. And then he says, well, the one I will give you is that when I'm in power, I'm going to prosecute my opponent, right? That doesn't do anything for people. That's not, and that's not standing for anything. That's just using, that's just using the office as a cudgel against people you don't like so well, I think it's, 40:47 Wes: it's ambiguous because it, I think Gettys is supposed to be a representative of Tammany hall corruption, right? So it makes sense to go after people who are corrupt. But also in this case, it's personal and it's just right. As you said, it's just someone. He's. Who he doesn't like and is a competitor and who he can punish as a competitor if he loses. So it's a very ambiguous situation. And I think that kind of sums up his whole position where his attempt to do right keeps getting adulterated by his own attempt at self aggrandizement or other motives. 41:27 Erin: And how is he not a symbol of corruption himself? I mean, I think I really like this little moment when Gettys, after he's blackmailed Kane in Susan's Apartment, walks downstairs with Cain's first wife. He's very gentlemanly to her, you know, offers, I think, to give her a ride in his car or something like that. 41:51 Wes: I made a note of that scene. It's very odd because what Gettys has just done is pretty corrupt in and of itself too. 41:58 Erin: Right. 42:00 Wes: But on the other hand, Gettys is kind of exposing the truth about her relationship with her husband. So he has done a sort of public service himself. 42:13 Erin: That's right. And he also has. I mean, that whole scene, that whole confrontation scene is shot in really interesting ways, as is every single scene in this film. Of course, every aspect. Lots of people have said every single shot has an idea behind it. You know, Gettys at one point is in this deep focus shot, is in the back of the scene with Kane in shadow. Emily is in the foreground. And then Gettys steps forward to join Emily in the light. So that in the background Kane and Susan remain kind of smaller and shadowed. And so the composition of such is that Emily's body and Gettys body are arguably maybe trapping the two. Right. They've, they're. They're sort of conspiring against them. But it also makes Kane and Emily look kind of evil and sinister in the background. And in fact, they have been doing something wrong. Right. And so. And that significant walk that, that Gettys makes where he's in the back in with the shadowy figure of Kane and then he walks into the light and could be read so many different ways. Right. He's exposing Kane. He's just as good. Sorry, he's just as bad as Kane, but he's going to pretend to be good or he's going to make Kane look like the bad guy. Right. But it could also be meant to show that he's kind of superior to Kane in a way. Kane stays in that in the background. Eventually he does come forward, but the shot composition changes at that point. The camera's in a different position. So the camera is maybe trying to tell us something about Gettys relative worth to Kane in that scene. And so not just visually, but also Gettys makes some significant statements over the course of that scene. He's doing this partially to protect himself and his family. He doesn't like the fact that Kane has been, I guess, you know, running things like political cartoons of Gettys in a prisoner's outfit, a striped prisoner's outfit, which is making him look ridiculous to his children. So he cares about his children's perception of him. He cares about their well being. It seems something that Kane will prove seconds later that he doesn't care about. Right. He doesn't care about his son's reputation or trying to keep this out of the press for the sake of his wife's humiliation. And he also says that Gettys also says that he thinks that Kane is going to need more than one lesson to learn his lesson. He's going to to need to be taught twice at least. And that turns out to be very perceptive. I mean, he sees that Kane is an egomaniac and it doesn't seem that Gettys is one. So I think there's a lot of ambiguity in the way that this scene is set up and kind of how we're supposed to think about the moral superiority of one versus the other. I think that Gettys at the end of this scene comes across actually. I mean, it's funny because he's blackmailing him and obviously that's terrible. But, you know, he comes off looking maybe better than anybody except for Emily in that whole setup. Yeah. 45:24 Wes: So, yeah, I think that's very interesting. I think that is. That situation is ambiguous. And the sort of complicated way that Gettys comes across reflects kind of the complicated way that Kane comes across in the whole film, which we'll talk more about. And there was something you said about he never does anything good. And I want to dig into that a little bit in the next part, so. 45:49 Erin: Sure. 45:50 Wes: So, yeah. So we're going to end our first part here and next week we will continue our discussion. Thank you. 45:57 Erin: Thank you.