Citizen Kane is one of those films you're sure to have heard of at some stage, growing up in a period of modernity that still reserves the right to fold backwards to the classics of cinema. I don't agree that this film is one of the greatest ever made, simply because it would be unnatural for me to do so; the quality of its imagery, sound and cultural intent contrasts so much with the expectations I have of films, which are fulfilled depending on how 'clean' the presentation is. Although I wouldn't class myself as a blockbusterholic - CGI is often so fake it's unrealistic - I have a propensity to settle for the improved standards of 80s films onwards, leaving behind many groundbreaking but, in my mind, inferior films like Citizen Kane or Psycho.Nevertheless, I will put aside my naked ignorance for black and white classics to say that Citizen Kane, directed by and starring Orson Welles (I'd only heard brief cultural references to his name before), is a superlative piece of 1940s film. The plot of the film inherits character development that was inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, a famous publisher and head of one of the world's biggest ever media empires. Stylistically the film is classed as a 'roman à clef', which means it is a production portraying a real person/life through a fictional façade. The similarities with Hearst's career it embodies are deliberately exaggerated for theatrical favour, but the bare bones beneath detailing the rise and fall of Hearst's newspaper empire are consistent throughout.
Citizen Kane utilises a typical linear pattern for storytelling that is interspersed with flashbacks to help explain the development of Welles' character Charles Foster Kane, whose last word "rosebud" encourages a generic team of reporters, namely one single journalist, to discover the meaning behind it to boost sales of their paper. The story that is subsequently spun from the weaving of the past and present together is not so much about the concepts and components of the journalism industry as it is the egocentric megalomania that is brewing within Kane from when he first decides to split from his guardian's hereditary business to become a newspaper tycoon.
Kane is a man clearly bothered by something, a loss of joy, which he is constantly trying to replace or possibly even replicate through the advancing change of priorities in his career as America's richest man. During the film he appears to be monopolising on the newspaper industry, eyeing up the news team of his most successful rival The Chronicle and eventually pulling them over to his side. The independence of his empire continues to soar as he purchases yet more alternative businesses, indulging in diversification as his wealth permits. You are subtly led to believe he is being consumed by his own imperial greed, much like a sovereign state that feeds off of the poor citizens until it can no longer internally subsist.
Perhaps intentionally Kane comes to represent the American dream, but the ugly side of it. As opposed to being a contented rancher or prospector - practitioner of the 'manifest destiny' of old North America - Kane is insatiable and rampant like an isolated king, devoid of reason that he once sought in the cause of socialism and now remaining as an immutable totem for interminable control. The comparisons between Kane and real magnates like Hearst and Rupert Murdoch are all too tempting to make, but we must be careful not to place them in the same category, as Kane was certainly powerless to his own power. In this day and age we like to assume we can maintain control over our business interests, which I'm sure is how a man like Murdoch thinks. It is not greed so much as it is a cyclical response to property; an obese person, for instance, will continue to eat if there is food available, and like the instincts of the obese person the media tycoon continues to absorb more property to his empire, even though it grows to excess - this they call profit.
On top of political corruption - the redundant blackmail of Kane by Jim Gettys - and the mythic relationship of a proprietor and his subordinates (editors, sub-editors, reporters etc) - Kane breaks apart from his old associates to become a toxic recluse - the main moral behind Citizen Kane is the notion of emptiness that comes after excess. What happens to Kane is that he overreaches his goals, becoming bored and alone. Ultimately he is left with nothing but a lone memory of the last time he could ever recall being truly happy: as a boy when he played in the snow with his sled. The pure innocence of this memory is pronounced in his last word 'rosebud', which was the name of the absent sled. In actuality the item he so sorely missed was among the clutter of artefacts and useless trinkets he had collected; he never realises and it is tossed into the furnace like a piece of junk.
The greatest irony of Citizen Kane is that, after all the hoarding of assets and financial gain, Kane is left bitterly alone and without anything to love except a hazy blip from his past - this is an allusion to an anti-materialist perspective no doubt. Citizen Kane also speaks out against capitalism, although it isn't completely denouncing the system, but more specifically those within it who run the risk of being consumed by it. Kane, in effect, is a controller of the consumer who becomes consumed by his own mammoth objective. When he is asked by his ex-guardian, Mr Thatcher, what he would've liked to have been, he replies: "everything you hate". This is probably the most ambiguous sentence in the whole film; either he is implying that he would've rather been poor and without material obsession, or he was simply giving a null answer by stating that he could never be anything less than a crazed media mogul.
Regardless of the inner meaning, Citizen Kane is a spectacular film, but not because of its aesthetic value and filming techniques which were modern for the time they were used in; it is the dramatic portrayal of the protagonist that gives it the tip for the win. There was never a point in the film where I wished Kane was any different - to see a man prosper and then be crushed under the weight of his own ego is compelling stuff. In fact, it stands for everything a tabloid newspaper relishes: greed, sex, power and rejection - the mortal fascination with love and hate! If there were a genre of film called 'Red Top', Citizen Kane would be the headliner.
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