I love Citizen Kane. I know it may sound elitist to praise what many critics and scholars consider the Greatest Film Ever Made, but it truly is a terrific piece of filmmaking and great entertainment. [Spoilers ahead for the three or four people who haven’t seen it.]
The film chronicles the life of a fictional media magnate and political figure named Charles Foster Kane, loosely based (purportedly) on William Randolph Hearst, who essentially spends his entire adult life searching for something he lost in childhood and could never get back. The story is framed by a reporter’s search for the meaning of Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” a secret that is revealed only to the audience at the very end of the film. The reporter calls Kane “a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe ‘Rosebud’ was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway...I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.”
Kane is an impossibly-wealthy man with an insatiable appetite for the acquisition of things, the promotion of his own brand, and the adoration of others, but the one thing he truly wants in life is the one thing he can never, ever have. Everything else — the Inquirer newspapers, the objets d’art, the first marriage to a president’s niece, the run for governor, the second marriage to a pretty young trophy wife, the Opera House, the estate and castle at Xanadu — is a substitute, and an ultimately inadequate one, for all that “Rosebud” symbolizes.
If this is starting to sound familiar, well, there’s a reason for that, as if the title of this diary didn’t give it away already. And, of course, there’s more.
Kane is taken away from his family at a very young age and brought up in the custody of a banker named Walter Thatcher, who was charged with managing the considerable fortune that Kane’s mother came into unexpectedly until Kane’s 21st birthday. Although not quite the same as spending the bulk of one’s formative years at a military academy, the experience deprived young Charles of any meaningful familial bonds, as he grew up surrounded not by loved ones but by bankers and businessmen. (It is implied, but never stated, that Kane attended several boarding schools as well.)
When he reaches adulthood, Kane takes over the day-to-day operation of a “little newspaper” called the New York Inquirer. “There’s something I’ve got to get into this paper besides pictures and print,” he tells his colleagues. “I’ve got to make [it] as important to New York as the gas in that light.” [N.B.: The scene takes place around 1890, when many New York buildings were still lit by gas rather than electricity.] So he invents a new kind of journalism driven by scandal and innuendo rather than facts or newsworthiness. “If the headline is big enough,” he tells a frustrated (and much older and more experienced) underling, “it makes the news big enough.”
Before long, the Inquirer is the best-selling paper in New York. When that occurs, Kane throws a lavish party at the Inquirer offices in honor of … himself, complete with ice sculptures of him and a giant “K,” dancing girls, and a song paying tribute to his singular greatness:
There is a man
A certain man
And for the poor you may be sure that he’ll do all he can!
Who is this one?
This favorite son?
Just by his action has the traction magnates on the run!
Who loves to smoke?
Enjoys a joke?
And wouldn’t get a bit upset if he were really broke?
With wealth and fame
He’s still the same
I’ll bet you five you’re not alive if you don’t know his name!
What is his name?
It’s Charlie Kane!
He doesn’t like the Mister, he likes good old Charlie Kane!
Kane had always fancied himself a “man of the people,” a “friend of the working man.” He once told Thatcher that his job as publisher of the Inquirer was “to see to it that the decent, hard-working people of this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates.” His closest friends always knew he’d go into politics eventually, and the sky was the limit. When he became engaged to Emily Norton, the niece of the President of the United States, his business manager Mr. Bernstein told colleagues that “by the time he’s through, she’ll be a president’s wife.”
The putative road to the White House thus began with an independent run for governor in 1916, against an establishment candidate named Jim W. Geddes, whom Kane characterized as the head of a corrupt, crooked, dishonest, “downright villain[ous] … political machine.” Kane, master of contemporary mass media that he was, used his newspapers to promote his own campaign and attack his opponent, going so far as to publish images of Geddes in a prison uniform, and since he owned the paper his wild, scandalous accusations could go unchallenged. At a massive campaign rally, before an enormous portrait of himself with the name “KANE” in giant bold letters, he promised his supporters to thunderous applause that immediately upon taking office, he would “arrange for the indictment, prosecution and conviction” of his opponent.
Unfortunately for Kane, just before the election he found himself caught up in a scandal of his own. A splash of mud from a passing carriage had led him to the apartment of a pretty young music-store clerk named Susan Alexander, with whom he soon began what appeared to be a minor love affair. Somehow Geddes found out about this, told Kane’s wife and threatened to go public with it if Kane refused to concede the election. Kane, ever prideful, refuses to back down; “There’s only one person in the world to decide what I’m going to do, and that’s me.” Geddes suggests that the consequences might serve as a lesson to Kane, but for a man like him one lesson won’t suffice — and won’t be the last. “Don’t worry about me!” Kane bellows as Geddes leaves the building, “I’m CHARLES FOSTER KANE!!!” As if that alone were enough.
The scandal breaks, Kane loses the election, and his Inquirer is forced to run the headline: “KANE DEFEATED: FRAUD AT POLLS!” His wife divorces him (and later dies, offscreen, “in a motor accident with their son,” the film’s only major plot hole), he marries Susan Alexander, tries to turn her into an opera singer (with ear-splitting results) and builds a multi-million-dollar opera house in Chicago just to provide a venue for her to perform. Then he proceeds to build Xanadu, a vast palatial estate the size of a rural county, filled with everything from a zoo to an aquarium to a golf course to a beach resort to a seemingly endless collection of objets d’art from all over the world. At its center, on top of this man-made mountain, is a castle so big and ostentatious that it dwarfs Versailles. Xanadu, as the opening newsreel describes it, is “the costliest monument a man has built to himself.”
Throughout all of this, Kane’s conscience is represented by his old friend Jedidiah Leland, who seems to be the only person in Kane’s orbit who can ever tell the man what he really thinks of him. Leland, drunk and exhausted, lays into Kane the night of the election after his defeat has become inevitable:
You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back, only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules.
When the reporter interviewed Leland after Kane’s death, Leland had this to say, about Kane and Xanadu:
All he really wanted out of life was love. That’s Charlie’s story, how he lost it. You see, he just didn’t have any to give. He loved Charlie Kane, of course, very dearly ... He was always trying to prove something. ... He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own, an absolute monarchy.
For all his flaws, Kane was never violent or abusive. But he did lose his temper once, when his wife Susan, like his old friend Leland, did the one thing he could not abide, viz., tell him exactly who and what he was, to his face:
Sure! I’m Charles Foster Kane! Anything you want, just name it, and it’s yours! But you’ve got to love me!
Remind you of anyone you know?
Obviously there are differences between Kane and Trump, and Trump’s story has not been fully written yet. His rise has yet to reach its apex, as Kane’s did when he promised to put his opponent in prison if he won the election. It’s unlikely that Trump’s candidacy and political career will be derailed by scandal as Kane’s was. And Kane had no adult children; Trump will almost certainly not die alone, nor be left to do nothing but contemplate the loss of his own Rosebud, whatever that might be.
What will Trump do if he loses in November? Will he construct a new venue for Melania’s modeling career? Will he build another Xanadu, another monument to himself, more gargantuan than the ones he’s already built? Will anyone be his Jedidiah Leland?
The movie doesn’t really ask us to consider what kind of person, state or country would vote for someone like Kane, or what the world would be like should he actually achieve high elected office. It may tell us something about Donald Trump, but it doesn’t really tell us what to do about him.