Episode 13: Citizen Kane/Mank
Justin:
Citizen Kane is considered by many to be the greatest movie that’s ever been made. And I’m not talking about when you walk out of the theater after seeing Fast Five for the first time and you exclaim “I don’t care, that was the greatest movie ever!” Because… everyone else did that too, right? Right.
No, I want you to really think about that for a second. The. Single. Greatest. Movie. Ever. That’s quite the statement! And when so many cinephiles over so many years have (purportedly) thrown subjectivity out the window, evaluated the entirety of the cinematic world, and resolved that this very first film of Mr. Orson Welles is the numero uno, last man standing, greatest fucking movie of all-time, well, you kinda have to pay attention, right? Right.
The word that I’m left with when considering the Kane of it all, which now includes David Fincher’s MANK, a fun but flawed and probably unnecessary ode to possible/probable screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, is “legacy.” It immediately came to mind when Welles pushed the camera into the furnace, showing a child’s sled being burnt to ashes, ROSEBUD emblazoned on its surface. How is a person remembered, regardless of wealth and influence? I mean, billionaires and bums both enjoy the wind in their hair as they race down a snowy hill, I imagine. So it’s deeper than that.
Roger Ebert wrote an essay about Kane in his book, THE GREAT MOVIES, and wrapped it up by highlighting the famous scene we discussed earlier where Kane walks away from the camera and towards a wall with a window on it, his stature shifting from imposing to dwarfed and back again after he reapproaches, a magic trick by Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland. Ebert describes that moment (arguably much better than I just did) and then writes “A man always seems the same size to himself, because he does not stand where we stand when we look at him.” To me, that’s Citizen Kane in a nutshell. For all of Kane’s accomplishments and riches, his legacy was left to be discussed by those who knew him, if even superficially. And what good could they really say, if honestly pressed? It almost doesn’t matter what he had convinced himself about… himself, over the X amount of years he roamed the Earth, and even more specifically, the grounds of Xanadu, his fortress that even God supposedly couldn’t afford. When we all take our last breath, say our respective “Rosebud”s, and our hands let loose of whatever proverbial snow globe is in our grasp, it’s irrelevant what’s in our bank accounts or how many pairs of wild animals we own. Our legacies are just as easily lost to the flames.
So what I think that Welles (and by extension, to be fair, Mankiewicz) wants us to realize is closer to this: a legacy is crafted and maintained by those left around to tell it. I don’t think the movie is as cynical as some suggest, and instead choose to see a slightly more cautionary tale, one that presupposes the idea that money can buy neither happiness nor the ability to have love in your life. We all know this idea already, but to see it in this context and even presented in this manner, maybe for the first time ever, Citizen Kane finds its way to true, lasting greatness. It’s just too bad no one was around in 1940 to suggest to Welles to have Kane drag a gigantic safe through the streets of Rio. At that point, there’d be no question it was the single greatest movie ever made, no doubt about it.
