Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 2)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextfree and use code subtextfree for free breakfast for life. 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 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Citizen Kane. We had just gotten done talking about the complicated way that Kane comes across, especially in that scene where Gettys is threatening him. And Gettys doesn't come across entirely as simply a villain. In contrast to Kane, Kane is just as much as a villain in that scene. And something you said, Erin, I thought was very interesting, which is that he never does anything good. And I'm trying to think if he ever does anything good. And it, you know, on first blush, that seems right to me. And it would be interesting to think of what if the film had him do something that was unequivocally good. That's kind of save the cat moment in the film where the protagonist is made likable to the audience, whatever his trajectory is going to be. It might make the tragic downfall. It might give it more emotional heft. I don't know. In that first Scene where we first see him as an adult in the newsroom. Young Orson Welles. There's at least a hint of that. There's a kind of idealism there, it seems it makes you think that maybe you're gonna see him actually do good things with his newspaper. Maybe he is gonna expose someone's corruption. And the one. The person whose corruption he does expose, Gettys. That again, that is made more complicated by the fact that he wants to defeat Gettys politically and is using his own newspaper in a corrupt way to support his own campaign. 1:53 Erin: Thinking through this, I can think of one instance in which he does something we might call good. And I'm thinking that this might actually turn out to be a lot more significant, maybe symbolically, than I had considered before. And that's when he's distracting Susan when she has her toothache. 2:12 Wes: Right. 2:12 Erin: I love that scene. I mean, I think it's a really sweet scene. I also think that maybe in the previous episode, I said that Emily comes across as being sympathetic in the confrontation scene. I'm actually not sure why I said that. I don't 100% think that's true because I don't think that Emily is a very sympathetic character overall. And I think it's ironic that, you know, Hearst's biggest issue that he took with the film, it seems, which is very gallant of him, is the fact that he felt it maligned. Marion Davies, who. Susan is sort of. Susan is like the funhouse mirror version of Marion Davies. And actually, I think that Susan is an extremely sympathetic character. Okay? She's shrill, she's too loud of a voice. And maybe she's a little bit idiotic at times, but. But I really like her. I mean, of anybody in the movie, I think I have the most emotional connection to her, perhaps. I mean, I'm in love with Orson Welles, but that's beside the point. Anyway, so she's extremely childlike, right? And in this scene where she has a toothache, which is really funny. I love that first scene where she starts laughing at him on the street. When she first sees him, we see that she has no idea who he is. So she has this inherent innocence. She's not out to get some rich guy or anything like that. Not at all. And in order to distract her, he puts on a little bit of a show. And it allows time, I suppose, for the medicine to kick in or for the toothache to totally subside. It's unclear. And she forgets all about it and is cured. And there's a metaphor there to the movies perhaps. Right. Especially in the middle of 1941 or 1940 really, when the film was made, hadn't gotten into the war yet and were still in the throes of the Depression. And movies were obviously this great escapist entertainment. And maybe the suggestion is that Cain's papers are also a kind of escapist entertainment, that they're giving people something to distract themselves from their toothaches or something. I don't know. But I do think it's significant that if we can argue, and maybe there are other instances I'm not thinking of, you can tell me. But if we do argue that this is kind of the one good thing that Kane does or the one time that he really shows a sort of selflessness or a desire to authentically please someone else versus sort of throwing gifts at them or doing all these other self aggrandizing things that he does throughout the film, like making her into an opera star, which we could talk about is really self interested on his part. Right. If this is the one moment in which he loses that self interest and is just focused on making someone else happy, how significant then that this is his downfall? Right. That because of this affair, this is the self sabotage that's going to ruin everything for him. 5:02 Wes: Yeah. And it's interesting because when he meets her, he says, I was on my way to the western Manhattan warehouses in search of my youth. Do you remember that? Did you mention that? And then I've forgotten that you mentioned that. 5:18 Erin: I talked about it a little bit in terms of. In the previous episode. I think this is where Mary's stuff is held that he keeps on. That he hangs onto. So this is presumably how he still has the sled. 5:29 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it suggests that he's on his way to find his sled. Is that what's going on? 5:37 Erin: I think just look through the old garbage heap from Colorado. His mother's dead at this point. Right. Or maybe she just died and he's gonna go on a. Oh, he even says it. He's gonna take a sentimental journey. Right? 5:50 Wes: Yeah. Yep. So you were asking about the. Or you were. You were suggesting that he does something good here by help. By distracting her from her toothache. What does he do? He moves his ears. He does the shadow puppets. 6:04 Erin: Yeah, of course, you know, she doesn't. Yeah, I was just going to say of course. It's also an instance in which he gets to show off and be the center of attention, but he doesn't have to exert himself in these ways. Right, right. 6:18 Wes: She doesn't know who he is, which is crucial. At a certain point he'll say, I run a couple of newspapers. Which is a line that gets repeated. In fact, near the. I think it's near the end when he's. Well, he uses it to threaten people at various points. So he says it to Susan, oh, 6:40 Erin: I've found the mention of the mother, she hadn't just died. He says that she died a long time ago and her things were put in storage out west. And yeah, so just want to make that correction. 6:51 Wes: Okay. So yeah, so the other, this whole idea of newspapers comes up again in the end where her music teacher is worried that he's going to be a laughingstock if Susie is allowed to sing in public. And that's where Kane again says, I basically, okay, I own the newspapers. Her reputation is gonna. I'm the guardian of her reputation. So there's that echo from this first meeting with Susie where he mentions running a couple of newspapers as if it's in a kind of modest or self deprecating way. She doesn't know who he is and he's not explicitly saying, hey, I'm famous. 7:38 Erin: Right. 7:39 Wes: But yeah, I think you're right. There's something about that, there's something sweet about that scene. I also found some. A little bit, I don't know, creepy, not sinister is the wrong word. A little bit creepy. When he's watching her sing for him. Definitely something a bit obsessive and controlling. And you can see that his relationship to the world has become more one of possession already at this point. 8:08 Erin: Yeah. I mean so significantly they meet in the street because she's laughing at him because he's just gotten, he's gotten mud splattered all over him by passing carriage and she says she invites him up to her apartment to get the mud off him. Right. So. So there's the suggestion here that she's going to be redemptive for him. And of course there's also, right like the, the funny sort of reverse meaning in terms of the fact that this is going to begin their affair. This is a situation in which there's the opportunity for his opponents to sling mud at him because he has this secret. Right. So she's both going to kind of clean him up and dirty him at the same time. And the redemption I think is. Yeah, it's short lived in terms of his political career, as I've already said. Like, you know, we have this moment where he does some sweet things for her but ultimately this is going to be the ruin of his Public life. We also have him being kind of sweet and receptive to this, to her as a person, and then insisting that she sing for him, which might be something sweet, but then we know that based on. Even as you're suggesting, and I agree in the way that he's relating to her in this scene when she's singing, that this is going to become a problem, that there's something sinister here about this relationship to her singing. Especially because I was almost wondering as I was watching this if Orson Welles is signaling during their conversation about her singing career that he's not quite listening to her or he's not listening to this one particular part of her story, which is that she's not that interested in being a singer, but her mother wants her to be. And you know how mothers are. And to that he says, yes, his eyes glaze over. We assume that he's thinking about his own mother. But there's also, I think, a point at which she repeats this sentiment and talks about her mother wanting her to be an opera singer. And at some point, I get the impression that he's not really paying attention. So what's curious about this singing thing is that she does make it clear that this is her mother's aspiration for her. But then he actually fills the role of the mother by continuing her singing career and by kind of forcing her into those. So he takes on this, like, oddly maternal role, which is weird. Obviously, it's connected to his own mother. That connection is, as I said, explicitly made in the dialogue. And then the really mysterious part of this, though, the piece of this that I don't quite understand is, like, why singing. Why does he take this on? You understand later that it's a point of honor for him, that he's not gonna be made a laughingstock and he's going to, you know, prop her up and insist on this career because she's been made fun of and she's an extension of him or she's an object that he own. But singing, thinking through this a little bit, it's the manipulation of the voice. Maybe he wants to be the puppet master. Right. I'm on the edge of something here, but you take over. 11:10 Wes: I haven't thought about why singing in particular. You have me thinking about the way in which he's invested in trying to make Susie a successful opera singer. And part of that is getting her lessons and seeing if she can improve. And I. To my amateur ear, they don't make her obviously, horrible, right? 11:30 Erin: No, not at all, maybe. 11:31 Wes: Right. But she just doesn't have the innate talent to really rise to the level that he wants her to rise to. And it turns out in the end, she doesn't even want to do that. She tells him she never really wanted to be a hugely successful singer. For some reason, she tells him that from the beginning. Yeah, that's right. And so for some reason, he needs to repair her and make her into something. And I assume that's part of why he's making this transition from his first wife to his second. I mean, obviously there's the famous montage scene where we see his first wife, Emily, complaining about the amount of time he's spending with the newspaper. So it's a very ordinary and typical sort of conflict that ultimately leads him to divorce. But you can also, you know, meeting Susie is the inciting incident for the breakup. And I think part of his fascination with her is her. She has a lower status than his wife, and he can give her any status that she's going to have by using newspapers to manipulate her reputation and forcing her on the world and trying to create a different reality by having all of his papers give her good reviews except for the one review by his friend, which we'll talk about in a minute, or the one review that he actually finishes and publishes, that Jed starts and Kane finishes. So his conception of being one of the people with Citizen, or being a champion of the people, or loving other people, doing good for other people, it involves, again, the use of manipulation. It involves this idea that he can manipulate other people's perception of reality in order to paint something in a good or bad light in order to manipulate reputation. So instead of just being interested in Susie as she is and loving her and all the rest, he has to embark on this project of using his power to make her into something which is not what she wants. And I don't even think he's particularly invested in what it is that he's trying to make her into. I just think he's invested in the process of using the power that he has with newspapers to. To turn her into something that is his own product. 14:08 Erin: Yeah. What you say about her voice, I mean, I think her voice is sweet and obviously he likes it. And in a healthy relationship, which this is already not starting out as a healthy relationship. Right. But if it were and he liked it, it could be part of his private enjoyment in a good way. Not in this way that we're pointing to, is embedded within this very first scene in which he's staring at her kind of. I mean, how would we describe that kind of covetously or I think. I think creepy is a good word for it. Right. But if he weren't staring at her in this way and if they didn't have such a destructive relationship and he liked her voice, which he's entitled to like, and I do think that she has a. She has a sweet voice, then this could be part of their shared enjoyment. Their. Yeah, they're. Again, a kind of private enjoyment in the home where she could sing for him and he would like that, and it could be something positive in the relationship. But a voice for opera, a voice of that size is a relatively rare thing. You either have it or you don't. You can. If you have it, you can improve it. You can train it, you can learn to control it. But you can't take a small voice or a thin voice and make it big and full. And so he's fundamentally asking her to contort herself into something that she's not. And I think maybe it relates to this idea of this private versus public divide. Right. If she was just singing for him in private, I don't mean like behind a closed door, but, you know, like entertaining friends, something like that, not having to be a public figure, a public opera singer, then that would be one thing. The operatic voice, the largeness, the pure size of that instrument. It, you know, it's something that is designed to fill a theater without amplification. It's a big voice. It's something public. And so I think that his desire to turn her to that indicates that he has no privateness, that there's no there, there. You know, and this maybe relates back to this idea that I was interested in of Leland, describing his private greatness that he, you know, kept to himself, if there was any. And so it seems like he has no interiority, in other words, and he has to take anything interior and project it outside of himself, make it bigger than himself, make it public. And so this. I mean, later, he. You can argue he becomes private because he becomes a recluse, but that's. That. That's a kind of emptiness, too. So he has to take anything that's private, like dirty laundry, and air it and make it big and make it flashy. And he has to take it, take news, a small headline and make it a big headline. Right. I think because he has no ability to relate to anything on an intimate level, on a private level. There's a glimmer of it in this scene with Susie, but it doesn't last. And so he doesn't know how to relate to something personally. And I think that taking this thing, this woman that has this small voice and amplifying it is part of this desire or this. Not even a desire, but a need. Right. To keep things at a kind of remove from himself and keep things external rather than internal. 17:19 Wes: Right. That makes sense. He's accused by Susie of and others. She'll say at one point, you only give me what you care about. You want me to love you. And then in the final scene where she's leaving him, he says, please don't go. You can't do this to me. And she'll say, you think this is being done to you. You don't care about what it means to me, and says, I can't do this to you. Yes, I can. So there's something about his interest in other people, always in a narcissistic way, reflects back on himself. And the desire to be loved by others becomes far more predominant. It outweighs his ability to love. So, again, I think the trajectory here is. It's this seeming concern, and I think it starts out as real concern, but real concern in the beginning for doing something with his newspaper that is loving, that is for the sake of the public good, but has this odd component to it, which is that it involves a manipulation of the way reality is perceived, reputations are perceived, and including the ability to manage his own public image. So love and concern for others quickly becomes concerned for oneself. The. Those two things, I think, are the things that he has trouble disentangling. And in his relationship with Susie, you just kind of see it gradually degrade to the point where when they're in Xanadu together, the prevailing feeling is this spaciousness and hollowness, echoiness and boredom where Susie's trying to put together that puzzle. And there's that great scene where he's so really, really far across the room talking to her and telling her they're gonna go on the picnic. 19:14 Erin: Yeah. I think the relationship between Kane and Susan, I think because of the snow globe that she has with the cabin inside it, that looks similar to his childhood home. Right. I think there's this ambition. Ambition is the wrong word for it because it suggests something large in public. But, you know, there's this desire that he has maybe to become reconnected to that, as we already suggested, he's on his way to take a sentimental journey into his past when he meets her. And I think that Emily, his first wife, because she's the niece of the current president, is someone who he's obviously become connected with. I mean, she's an attractive woman, and he claims that he loves her, but I think that really the motivation behind that marriage is something to satisfy political career, a way of shoring up his pedigree in order to be a better political contender. The relationship with Susie is really different. I think he obviously really both loves her and doesn't know how to love her. I think that his distance from her in those scenes that you're pointing to at the end is like the. She becomes a little object in a huge empty room in the same way that the snow globe is like this little object in a big empty room or a room filled with other stuff. And he. To the extent that Xanadu maybe is like the externalization of Kane himself or representative of his whole mind, like the inside of his head or his psyche or something, the vastness and the smallness of Susie in that space is like she's there kind of in the back of his mind, but he can't access her in the same way that he can't access those that return to childhood that he wishes. It's maybe still kind of rolling around there in his brain, but he can't. He can't find it. He can't sift through everything. There's too much stuff in the way, or there's too much space in the way of him and maybe that original ambition that you're pointing to, to actually do something good. And I think that this, like, desire to love Susie, but his inability to do so is maybe related to this fact that he has no. This public, private divide that I'm kind of interested in. It's like the trustee taking care of him, taking over his childhood, sort of puncturing this. This womb, if you will, of the house in Colorado and the privacy of the family and making everything into, like, a kind of a matter of public record where a trustee is going to come in and handle you. You're going to be famous because you're so wealthy. You know, the money has, like, externalized Kane so that whatever is buried in his psyche of his childhood and of that relationship to his innocent self is very deep and can't really be accessed because everything's been ext. Rather than being reared in a home, in a private space with a family, he's going to be sent to boarding school, where he's going to be. You know, everything is. Nothing is private. Everything is, like, external. And. And so I think that, like, this desire for Susie, obviously, is a desire for a return to this privacy, this innocence this pre moneyed state where he can just be, you know, a boy and a girl with her and. And yet he sabotages that. Sorry, I'm trying to connect this up to the. Back to the fact that this is, this very desire is the thing that sabotages the political career but it's also self sabotaging like it also is not sustainable in and of itself and I mean. But to backtrack fully, do you agree that he really does love her and can we maybe connect this to your idea that like he does have these positive ambitions at the beginning? 23:00 Wes: Well, yeah, I think in a way his love for her and the idea that he loves the common man are associated. In fact, I think Jed says that Kane always called her a cross section of the American public. Something like that. 23:16 Erin: It's awful. 23:18 Wes: Yeah, right. She's a commoner and that's right. I think that's right before his flashback to the scene where they meet is where he says that. So yes, do I think he loves her and wants to do good for the general public? I think so. I don't think those are, you know, he's not just cynical or misrepresenting himself. He really does believe that that's what he wants. But they get wrapped up in. They get wrapped up in his narcissism, that's the easy word. But I think it's a bit complicated because the mediating instrument here is the press and his control over the press. It's the means that he's going to use to affect what's good or to show his love that becomes corrupting. Instead of being corrupted by money, which is what he could have become if he didn't try to escape that by getting into the newspaper business. He gets corrupted by the newspaper business from the very beginning. He's idealistic in a way, but he has a means justifies the end attitude. Yes, we are going to be doing gossip. Yes, we are going to be a tabloid. We're going to publish the truth, but we're going to make it entertaining. He doesn't give any thought to or doesn't reflect on the possibility that the need to make things entertaining or the need to spread gossip or to again manipulate public perception of reality or manipulate public perception of reputation. He doesn't see that getting into that kind of habit of thinking or embedding himself in that sort of institution, creating it around himself, can affect the way he relates to others in a deep way such that it's not the reality of things that's all that important to him, including other people. So you only give me what you want. He's not giving any thought to what she wants and then this movement to wanting people to love him because he sees himself as the instrument of their good and he can't do the work of the people, right like get elected to office if his own image is not in good shape and he can use the press to affect that. So it's this weird thing where he has a genuine motivation to help or to love, but the mechanism of doing those things for him, the way in which he seeks to accomplish doing those things, involves turning the arrow backwards on himself and making himself loved. He can't love until he's loved, maybe is the way of putting it. 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The other thing I found is that I could get recipes to come out consistently really well with Hellofresh. It made me feel like a made me feel like a better cook than I had felt like on my own. Some of my favorites include steak and potatoes, mozzarella crusted chicken and lemony shrimp risotto. Go to hellofresh.com subtext free and use code subtext free for free. Breakfast for Life One breakfast item per box while subscription is active. That's free. Breakfast for [email protected] subtext free with code subtext free. That's HelloFresh, America's number one meal kit. 27:49 Erin: Yeah, you're reminding me of the scene, I think it's in the tent at their picnic when Susan really starts becoming at the end of the film, a an incredible truth teller or something. She reminds me actually of Like a Judy Holliday type figure, like, you know, as Judy Holliday was probably just coming up in Greenwich Village at this time, like this. This person who's this sort of canny idiot, you know, like this truth teller who's in the throes of a realization all of a sudden, and then, like, can't stop herself from saying things, and she. She confronts him. Some of this is, I think, is dialogue you've already talked about. But, like, she says, what's the difference between giving me or giving somebody else $100,000 for a statue you're gonna keep crated up and never even look at? It's just money. It doesn't mean anything. You never really give me anything that belongs to you that you care about. And he says, stop this. And then she says, you never gave me anything in your whole life. You just tried to bribe me into giving you something. So, like, this idea of, I guess, giving her something that belongs to him or that he really cares about, it seems like you're saying, like, that thing, whatever it is, doesn't exist. Right. And all he's trying to do is to get people to give him something, which is to give him love, it seems. Right. Like, Susan says, you don't love me. You want me to love you. 29:13 Wes: So I misquoted that. She said, you never give me anything I care about. But now I'm looking at my notes. Yeah, you never give me anything you care about. 29:21 Erin: Oh, right, right, right. 29:22 Wes: Yeah, that's important. You want me to love you, but you don't give me anything that you care about. So it's not just that he's not thinking about her and what she wants. He's not willing to lose anything by loving. He's not willing to give anything away that's important to him. 29:41 Erin: He has to care about something first in order to then be able to give that to somebody. The idea is that you show your love to someone by giving them something that you actually care about, by giving something away that you have. 29:57 Wes: Right. 29:58 Erin: And so I think the idea here. 30:00 Wes: Right. 30:00 Erin: Is that he doesn't have anything to give her. He doesn't. He doesn't love something first. 30:08 Wes: That he accept a reputation. 30:11 Erin: Right. 30:11 Wes: That the thing he tries to give her is a fame for talent that she doesn't have. 30:16 Erin: Right, right. 30:16 Wes: Yeah. So that's interesting. Yeah, that actually is very interesting. That he conceives of. The only thing that he can actually give people is this gift of a false exterior, maybe a reputation or however you want to put it. And it doesn't matter if it reflects some sort of inner underlying reality. 30:35 Erin: And a reputation is public. It has nothing to do with private feelings. I mean, I don't know. I mean, what could we put in that category that she's talking about that would be an acceptable answer? What could he give her? What can anyone give us? I mean, that's true. 30:53 Wes: That's a good point. 30:54 Erin: You know, I mean, in the. 30:57 Wes: Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, yeah. What can he buy for her at a store that doesn't really isn't susceptible to her charge? Right. It's the sentiment, it's the thought that counts, in other words. But yeah, that's the literal level. On the metaphorical level. To give her something of himself would mean to disclose himself. That would be where intimacy comes in. And he's in the business of disclosure of other people's secrets. But self disclosure is not something that he can do. It's not something that he's good at. And this perhaps explains why he wants to put her in the spotlight so he can live vicariously through her and her vitality. You were thinking earlier about why singing like sledding, there's a lot of vitality in it. It's something you could do very free spiritedly as a child. And that's what she is doing in the beginning. She's just doing it in a free spirited way, in the manner of play, in the manner that a child might do it. And he wants her to do it in the manner of winning a reputation, which is specifically what he can give her and then what he can live vicariously through, because it is at least a pantomime of self disclosure. So that's the thing that he can't give. That's the thing that he can't do. I'm thinking out loud here. Let me. Tell me if this makes sense. 32:23 Erin: No, it does, it does. It's also, of course, just the plain manipulation of the voice that it's analogous to his manipulation of the news. So ultimately, I think what we're saying is this is kind of ouroboric. Right. Like he wants someone to love him first. But what Susan is suggesting, and I think what the film is suggesting, is that he has to love something first in order to get love back. Like he has to care about something. It has to be something more than himself and his own reputation, but also their reputation. Right. 32:55 Wes: Their interior as opposed to their exterior. He's fascinated by her singing in the beginning. Sorry, am I helping or hurting? My interruption? 33:03 Erin: Yeah, no, no, no, no, you're helping. Yeah, I Mean, and I think if he had just loved that and just had her sing for him privately. I mean, like, I, you know, if he had just thought of her little voice as just some little thing that didn't have to be amplified, maybe that's what he could have loved in her without trying to then like, like manipulate that or make that. 33:29 Wes: Exactly. 33:29 Erin: Make that reputational. Right, so that could have been the thing. Yeah, right. 33:35 Wes: Yeah. The tiny voice, which is very much like a child's voice. Again, I'm drawing this connection to the sled in childhood as opposed to the adult or accomplished professional voice. So maybe there's a conception of what it means to be an adult here that's been distorted where what it means to be an adult is more about how one is seen or how one can manipulate what others see as opposed to how one is. 34:02 Erin: This is related here, I think, to. I did want to talk about these effigies. The most marked one that stands out to me is Susan's doll of herself, what looks like a doll of her in the bedroom when she's leaving him, which he subsequently destroys. That, first of all, is an extremely childlike room. Um. 34:23 Wes: Right. Good point. 34:25 Erin: She's little animals on the, on the walls and stuff like that. And then. Yeah, this giant doll of hers that looks like life size. You know, it just, it looks like. Yeah, like an effigy. And so there's a shot where she 34:38 Wes: plays with a puzzle and she's doing it on the floor in front of the fireplace like a kid. And the, the. The size of the room, the fact that it's so big, makes them look small in childhood. Like, that's very interesting. 34:49 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Like they're in a giant dollhouse or something. 34:53 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah. 34:55 Erin: And especially because of the replication. Like, even the. Oh, I guess there's the stove, the mother's stove. So it's like their playing house, all the different women, the statues that are littering the area, like dolls or something. And the fact that he has so many of them is like, almost like they're mass produced objects in a dollhouse. But yeah, the jigsaw puzzle thing always, always bothers me because I love jigsaw puzzles. And then I'm just like, am I Susan? Anyway. But the. It always freaks me out. But anyway, what can we say about that? I don't know. 35:32 Wes: I think what we're drawing together here is the. Again he says, I'm in search of a lost childhood or something when he meets her. Is it. He says, again, I forget the exact words. But he's going to the warehouse, another big space. In search of. 35:51 Erin: In search of my youth. 35:52 Wes: Childhood. In search of my youth. Okay. He finds someone who's much younger than him and is childlike in various ways, including her voice. I think we can make a strong association between her and Rosebud in the sense of the. His connection to her is in part an attempt to recover his lost youth. And her sweet childlike interest in her singing, which has nothing to do with a professional ambition she's fine with that is what attracts her to him. But then he has to do this kind of Pygmalion thing where he refashions her into something that is more about the exterior and the way she appears to others. There's never any sense that he's ashamed of her and her status or anything like that. I think it's something to do with how he thinks he can integrate the childhood longing into his adult life. And the way he does that. It's very paradoxical with the newspaper. The integration of that longing, which becomes a longing to be helpful and to do something for the public good, becomes there's a corrupt reputation oriented mechanism at work there. And it's the same thing with her. The same mechanism happens with her. He can't integrate this in a way that doesn't get corrupted. So instead of leaving that childhood vitality and Rosebud as it is, maybe leaving it as a. Well, in the case of the sled, leaving it as a kind of memory of something lost, but not as something that becomes a monument and that has to be preserved and held onto and repeated in one's life. In some sense, I think it's about idealization, self aggrandizement having to do with the idealization of that state. So instead of letting her have a more childlike, which is not to say immature, but a more pure delight in music, he's after that youthfulness, he's after that lack of self consciousness. But he. To fully grasp it and possess it, he has to turn it into the very opposite of that. 38:07 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about the montage of her headlines on his syndicate papers throughout the country. And these pictures of her. Right. Which. Similar to the campaign poster image of him, obviously the huge one behind him during his big speech. But also it's smaller campaign posters we see posted around. And so it's like he's. He's going to inflate her or make copies of her all over. And it's like the desire is to fill the space. Yeah. Amplify her fill. Yeah, make. Make more copies of his own childhood. Make. As she's representative of. Yeah, like, make her. Yeah, make her fill that up. But, you know, like Xanadu, it's like the. It's too cavernous. That can't be done. And all you're gonna do is what, dilute her or something? 38:58 Wes: Yeah, that's great. 38:59 Erin: Yeah. 39:00 Wes: So, yeah, you create this vast, echoey space. Instead of strengthening her voice, the space around the voice expands so much that the voice can't fill it at all. Great. Do you have. So I think we are near the end. Did you have anything. Have we missed any vitally important things that we must talk about before we end? 39:23 Erin: You know, we often get introduced to characters in these various interviews with Thompson. We often get introduced to characters first through an image of them and then through them. And at the end, I think Susie owning this nightclub in Atlantic City is. I mean, obviously, she's a much diminished figure. She's very pathetic. But we see that billboard of her, and then when the camera goes through the skylight twice for the two different interviews, it's the same setup. We see a billboard of her looking very larger than life as billboards. Make one look, and then you go through the skylight and you see her in the space of the. So even in this diminished, sad, seedy little nightclub, she's small, sitting at a table. And then we see her face is lined. And, I mean, the makeup in this film is incredible for 1941. It's unbelievable how convincing I was. 40:11 Wes: I was thinking that especially compared to, like, CGI stuff with, like, the Irishman, is that where he has. Scorsese has an age, and it didn't come across very well. I. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. And then I read on Wikipedia, I read a little bit about the makeup stuff. I mean. Yeah, it's incredible. Completely believable and natural. I think he had to create. The makeup artist went through this really involved process involving creating a plaster cast of people from the face down to the hips. 40:42 Erin: Yeah. 40:43 Wes: Is that again? 40:44 Erin: Yeah. And then he had to invent, I think, a new way of. I mean, like, everyone on this film is just, like, the best possible people in their fields, you know? So I think that over the course of making this film, he invented something more flexible. I should have looked this up prior to this so I could have gotten this. These facts straight. It's a hazy memory for me now, but I think he invented something so that the. As the prosthetics applied to the face would actually Move with you more naturally than any prosthetics had done prior to that. So it used to be that, like, you could age and you could put all this stuff on your face, but then you wouldn't be able to, like, smile or talk or do anything, you know. But he invented something that moved with you, I think is my recollection. 41:28 Wes: Yeah, it was so natural. I mean, I didn't. It took me a while to figure out it was Orson Welles, frankly. 41:34 Erin: Yeah. He's such an incredible actor. 41:36 Wes: Thought in the beginning, the newsreel, I just thought it was a different actor. 41:39 Erin: Yeah, that's the thing. Sorry. No, as much credit as he gets for this film on a certain level, to me, he doesn't get enough credit because the central performance is so amazing that if it was just. If this film was created by lots of other people and it was just Orson Welles in that role, it would be one of the greatest performances ever. But that gets glossed over because he's the wunderkind and the director and this. That. Right. 42:07 Wes: Yeah. I was gonna joke that this is, like, the greatest student film project ever. 42:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 42:12 Wes: Because he had been doing theater and radio and essentially taught himself to make films. Even he had a book that he read and then. 42:20 Erin: And he had to basically get people to help him, too, on the early days. 42:23 Wes: Get people to help. Yeah. 42:25 Erin: Teach him on the fly. 42:26 Wes: And was watching and was imitating other styles. Right. Looking at, especially foreign filmmakers. Yeah. And Ford. And saying, oh, okay, how did they do that? Asking someone, how did they do that? Let me do that. And then with the cinematographer who worked with him said, I was excited to work with someone who didn't know anything, who was coming into this naive because I knew he would ask me to do experimental things. Most people know too much to ask me to do. And so, like, I don't know if anyone else was cutting holes into the floorboard to get these very low shots or using muslin fabric ceilings to, you know, getting all these shots of the ceilings. So, yeah, really very dramatic, incredible shots. And. 43:17 Erin: And he really, I guess, pissed off everybody at RKO because he dug trenches in the studio floors, you know, in order to get those shots. Which gives us incredible impression of everyone being on a stage. Like, we're like. We, the audience, are in the front seat in the orchestra. But, yeah, Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, I think, like, really hits on something really important, which is that the. It is, like, the best student film ever made. It's certainly the best first film ever made. And I think, like, there's I think that's not accidental. And Toland knew that, knew something really essential about the creative process, which is oftentimes you do. You do your best and most impressive work when you don't yet know what the rules are and when you haven't been cowed by the weight of what other people have done. Not just the style, but, like, you have this daring that comes out of pure naivete, that when it's combined with enough talent, can produce something spectacular. I think this is why lots of first things turn out to be the best things that somebody ever does, because then once they do something, they try to replicate it, or they try to. Or they learn in the process of doing it. And then the more they know, the more hobbled they are by their own knowledge and by this discovery of what everybody else has done and the realization that they have to contend with a history that maybe they weren't even aware of in the first place that allowed them the freedom to create the original thing, you know, so Toland. 44:48 Wes: I think they're always trying to get back to their rosebud, but succeeding. 44:53 Erin: Right, right, right. And now they just have. What are those things called? Those things that you race in the snow with the motorbike. Snowmobiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And just have a snowmobile that keeps breaking down. 45:07 Wes: Yeah. But no, I think that actually, even though I made a joke, just making a joke, I think that's a real parallel. People trying to recapture the rosebud innocence, getting back to that original thing that made the first thing they did. Great. But if you try to capture that in a bottle, that never works. 45:25 Erin: That's right. That's right. And so much of this film, so much of Kane is. It's not just Hearst, It's. It's Wells himself. So much of his biography really overlaps with the story to the extent that you could call it, in a way, like an autobiographical project, as so many first novels say are autobiographical. Right. And maybe there's an argument to be made about how that's the freshest kind of material one has, is one's own history, one's own childhood. Of course, this isn't. This idea of the first product being the best is obviously not universally true. I should know as an oldest child in a family, that first priority is not the best. But, you know, and some. Some directors like Kurosawa and some others, arguably, you know, they got. They got even better as they went on. But. Yeah, but I do think there. There is a more general trend toward Sometimes toward. Towards first things being the greatest anyway. Yeah. Yeah. 46:24 Wes: Okay. Well, that was fun. Thank you. 46:27 Erin: Thank you.