The Magic World of Orson Welles (14 page)

On the summit of a bluff and as though growing out of it in a kind of stony efflorescence, stood a castle. But what a castle! The donjon was like a skyscraper, the bastions plunged headlong with effortless swoop of concrete dams. The thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic with a Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century. . . . It was mediaeval, not out of vulgar historical necessity, like Coucy, say, or Alnwick, but out of pure fun and wantonness, platonically, one might say. It was mediaeval as only a witty and irresponsible modern architect would wish to be mediaeval, as only the most competent modern engineers are technically equipped to be.

Our approach to this bizarre domain is as voyeuristic as anything in Hitchcock. The camera is drawn like a moth to the lighted window, where its journey is frustrated; the light immediately clicks out. Notice that the same forward movement of the camera, usually accompanied by dissolves, is used throughout the film, until it becomes a stylistic motif. One thinks, for example, of the way the camera twice crawls up the walls of the El Rancho
nightclub and moves toward a broken skylight; a dissolve takes us through the broken glass, enabling us to peer at Susan Alexander. There are a number of less obvious instances of the same technique, and some of them are worth listing here:

1. When Thompson (William Alland) enters the vaults of the Thatcher Memorial Library, the camera starts moving forward toward him, only to have a great iron door close in its face; a dissolve takes us beyond the door, the camera peering over Thompson's shoulder at the pages of Thatcher's diary.

2. When the flustered editor Herbert Carter (Erskine Sanford) leaves the offices of the
Inquirer
, sent by Kane to drum up sensational news, the camera stands looking at an artist's rendering of the building; a slow forward movement begins, a dissolve taking us closer to a window where Kane is writing his declaration of principles; another dissolve takes us through the window and inside the room.

3. When Kane first meets Susan and goes up to her apartment, the camera stands quietly in the hallway looking through an open door; Kane shuts the door and the camera rushes forward impetuously, almost anxiously, stopping only when Susan opens it again.

4. Near the end of the film, Kane walks out of Susan's bedroom at Xanadu, going past a mirrored hallway that casts reflections of his aging body off into infinity; after he passes, the camera moves slightly forward toward the darkness of the empty glass.

5. In the climactic moments, the camera glides forward over Kane's possessions, a collection that looks like an aerial view of a metropolis. A dissolve takes us closer, the camera moving past the flotsam of Kane's life: a symbolic toy-box, a set of old newspapers bound in twine, a photo of Kane circa his first marriage, an iron bedstead from an earlier scene, another photo of Kane as a boy with his mother, and finally the snow sled. Just as the camera draws near this final object, and before we can read the inscription, a workman enters and carries the sled away; another dissolve takes us to the furnaces, where the camera continues moving forward directly into the flames, at last coming to rest on the burning “Rosebud.”

The constant forward movement of the camera through windows and doors and into dark corners is of course perfectly in keeping with the film's attempt to probe Kane's psychology, and it creates an appropriately eerie effect. Moreover, the ultimate revelation of the burning sled produces a vivid feeling of entropy—as if the camera had pushed as far as possible and the
source of Kane's mystery were being consumed at the very moment when it is being discovered. There is still another sense, however, in which the technique of the opening segment becomes a part of the film's structure and meaning. It establishes the camera as a restless, ghostly observer, more silent and discreet than the journalists who poke about among Kane's belongings, but linked to them in certain ways. Like Kane's own newspapers, the camera has become an “inquirer,” its search implicating the audience in a desire to find Kane's private rather than his public meaning.

The periodic frustrations the camera encounters—a door closing, a light clicking out—are like affronts to the audience's curiosity. They also create a sense of mystery and subtle anxiety that is enhanced by other elements in the opening of the film; consider, for example, the fascinating but confusing imagery we encounter inside Xanadu. When the camera reaches Kane's window only to have the light turned out, we dissolve to an equivalent reverse angle inside the bedroom. All we see, however, is a deeply shadowed figure lying as if in state. Throughout this sequence Kane is photographed in expressionist shadow, or else the camera is placed so near his figure that we can barely read the image. A gigantic close-up of the dying man's lips is the largest single shot, but until the lips move and whisper the crucial word, we have no idea what we are looking at. Even when they do move, they create a slightly ludicrous impression: a big mustachioed mouth seen from so close it looks like the mountains of a strange planet.

Nearly everything in Kane's bedroom is presented in this dreamlike, subjective, slightly confusing way. The inexplicable close-up of a cottage (a still photo superimposed with moving snow) turns out to be a paperweight, and when the camera pulls back to reveal this fact, some confusion lingers, because everything—Kane's hand, the paperweight, and the background—is covered with snowflakes. From this shot we cut to another view of the hand, this time shown on the opposite side of the screen—a deliberately chaotic and “bad” editing style that does not allow the audience to orient itself inside the room. When the paperweight rolls down the steps and crashes (another piece of trickery created by several images spliced together), we cut to the most confusing shot of all: a reflection in a convex piece of broken glass, creating an elaborate fish-eye effect that is virtually a parody of the lens Toland uses to photograph the movie. We can barely make out a nurse opening a strange ornamental doorway and entering; another cut, to a low angle near the head of Kane's bed, shows the nurse placing a sheet over a body.

These fragmentary glimpses of Kane's world have been so fantastic, so enshrouded with darkness and mystery, that they hide more than they reveal. They tantalize the audience, only to cap the effect suddenly, without warning,
by introducing the “News on the March” title card. The newsreel, once it gets under way, allows viewers to settle momentarily into a new, more logical narrative mode, grounded in presumably objective, documentary facts. It illustrates the dramatic curve of Kane's public life, explaining the origins of the strange castle we have just seen and providing a general map for the various local instances that will be developed later in the film. Thus, as David Bordwell has pointed out, the two opening segments are like
hommages
to the fountainheads of cinematic “perception”—the fantasy of Georges Méliès and the documentary realism of the brothers Lumière. Nevertheless, these two modes do not achieve a synthesis. The newsreel, as much as the opening scenes, tends to remind the audience of the voyeurism inherent in the medium and leaves Kane as much an enigma as ever. If the private Kane was seen too subjectively, too close up, the public Kane is seen too objectively and usually from too far away.

“News on the March” is a wonderfully funny parody of the hyped-up journalism that Hearst and Luce had helped to create; in fact Welles and about a fourth of the Mercury players had previously worked in the radio version of
The March of Time
and had borrowed freely some of its famous catchphrases, such as “this week, as it must to all men, death came to . . .” But for all of its self-important tone, the newsreel offers mainly a compilation of Kane's public appearances, usually filled with scratches and photographed from awkward vantage points. Repeatedly Kane is shown alongside politicians, allying himself first with the progressives and then with the fascists; in his early career he is shown waving and smiling at the public in awkward gaiety, but in later pictures he becomes somber and camera-shy. We are told that “few private lives were more public,” but actually we have only disturbing glimpses into Kane's domestic habits: a doctored photo of one of his Xanadu parties; a shot of him sitting beside an empty swimming pool, swathed in towels and going over a manuscript; a peep through a latticed gate, as a handheld camera with a telephoto lens tries to show the old man being pushed in a wheelchair. The newsreel gives the impression that Kane was always being interviewed, investigated, or eavesdropped upon, but it leaves little sense of what the man was like and only a superficial notion of his influence on public affairs. Even “1941's biggest, strangest funeral” is shown only as a brief shot outside a pseudo-gothic pile; the image is grainy (Toland's imitation of newsreel stock is always perfectly accurate) and the sky is a giant diffuser of light, so we can see only a few rich mourners from a distance, over the massed heads of reporters.

Throughout this “documentary” there is a comic disparity between the awesomeness of Kane's possessions and the stilted old codger we actually see,
as if the newsreel were trying to establish him both as a mythical character like Noah or Kubla Khan and as something of a joke. Kane consistently supports the wrong politicians; he marries a president's daughter and then gets caught in a sex scandal with Susan Alexander; he drops wet concrete over his Edwardian coat at a public ceremony; he vouches for the peaceful intentions of Hitler. He is so bumbling and foolish that little remains of him but his wealth, and even that is treated as a believe-it-or-not curiosity. But if we are awed at Kane's money and contemptuous of his behavior, we also begin to dislike the reporters who poke microphones in his face. This feeling is reinforced when Welles detaches us from the newsreel, suddenly breaking the illusion by cutting to a side view of the screen and the projection lights, then making an aural joke: the projector clicks off and the pompous musical fanfare groans to a stop, as if somebody were giving “News on the March” a raspberry.

The ensuing conversation among reporters is derived from a colorful presentation of a scene inside a movie theater in the 1937 Theatre Guild production of Sidney Kingsley's
Ten Million Ghosts
; it is also one of the most self-reflexive moments in the film—shot in an actual RKO screening room that has been made to look more like a region of the underworld. The air is smoky and the reporters are sinister shadows; indeed they remain shadows throughout, even in the closing scenes, when a group of them tour the bric-a-brac of Kane's estate. The corners of forties-style suits are outlined against a blank white movie screen, and the editor Mr. Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt) is shown from a radically low angle, gesturing against a Nuremberg light beaming down from the projection booth. Rawlston and his yes-men correctly perceive the emptiness and inconclusiveness of the newsreel, but their solution is to find an “angle.” “It isn't enough to tell us what a man did,” Rawlston says, “you've got to tell us who he was.” The solution to this problem is the dying word “Rosebud,” a gimmick worthy of Hearst himself, a device that will unify the story and give the newsreel viewers a sentimental insight into Kane's character.

Rawlston gives Thompson a tap on the shoulder and a shark's smile, ordering him to go out and get “Rosebud” “dead or alive.” Notice, however, that the audience is not allowed to feel comfortably superior to this scene. We already have been made curious about “Rosebud,” which, after all, has exactly the same function for Welles and Mankiewicz as it does for Rawlston. Welles indirectly admitted this fact in one of his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, where he talked about his discomfort with the sled idea: “Rosebud remained, because it was the only way we could get off, as they say in vaudeville.” In
other words, without “Rosebud” the movie would lack a neatly rounded plot and a nicely punctuated ending, in much the same way as Rawlston's newsreel lacks the proper impact until some oversimplified “key” has been concocted to explain Kane's life.

The projection room segment therefore serves to criticize the script and the whole process of filling a blank movie screen; it becomes ironically appropriate to have Herman Mankiewicz, Joseph Cotten, and Erskine Sanford barely visible in the shadows of the room, playing the roles of reporters who scoff at Kane's dying words. Everybody, the audience included, has been involved in a dubious pursuit; Welles has stimulated our curiosity only to make us feel cautious. The three opening sections of the film have helped initiate the search for “Rosebud,” but they are filled with so many ironies and opacities that they threaten to undermine the search before it has started.

The story now becomes a series of reminiscences by the witnesses to Kane's life, who create a “rounded” picture of the man. And here it is important to note that the script is fundamentally different from a movie like
Rashomon
: it does not becloud events by presenting separate versions of an unknowable reality, but instead gives different facets of a single personality—a method similar to the one Herman Mankiewicz's brother, Joseph, would later use successfully in such pictures as
All About Eve
and
The Barefoot Contessa
. Kane's life is depicted more or less chronologically, through the memories of five characters who knew him at progressively later stages in his life. We never have the feeling that these characters are distorting the truth (even though Cotten's character, Jedediah Leland, recounts domestic events he could not possibly have seen), and if we discount the opening and closing moments of the film, and the details of Thompson's search, the private life of Kane is shown in nearly as straightforward a fashion as the public facts of the newsreel. For all of its juggling of time, therefore,
Kane
has a logical, rational structure; it is a film about complexity, not about relativity.