More Like Citizen Lame

Spoiler Alert? I guess it’s technically true that I’ll be revealing the end of the movie, though I find it hard to believe you won’t already know it from umpteen-bajillion pop culture references. You’ve been forewarned!

Before I go on to tell you why I think a film which many consider the greatest or most important movie ever made is overrated, let me summarize the plot:

Super-rich guy dies. Rumor is, his last word was Rosebud. A reporter is sent to interview folks who knew the super-rich dude to find out what he meant by Rosebud.

The general answer tends to go something like this:

“I don’t know anything about Rosebud but let me tell you a story about that Kane guy that’ll make him look like a real asshole.”

-Everyone who was asked about Rosebud in Citizen Kane...

The entire film goes about making the case for why this old rich dude was such an asshole.

At the end, it is revealed to the audience that Rosebud was a beloved sled, a touchstone to a childhood lost.

Welles leaves it to us to decide whether Kane was an asshole because of his lost childhood or if he was just lamenting being such an asshole as he faces his final moments.

Now that the synopsis is out of the way, I’ll also say that I completely understand why this film has been given such accolades.

Orson Welles made a film that challenged cinematic conventions and pioneered many filmmaking techniques which inspired a lot of future storytellers.

He also trolled the Hell out of William Randolph Hearst, who was the subject alluded to in the fictional story and who was, by many accounts, a real-life asshole.

But once you get past the technical achievements and the ingenious parody of Hearst, Citizen Kane is a dull film.

Maybe some of what made it so exciting back in the day was the gossip element, but nowadays no one is shocked to learn rich guys can be assholes.

It surprises people more nowadays to learn that famous people are decent human beings.

(On that note, a heartfelt R.I.P. to Sam Neill. Hope you’re up there in Heaven with Betty White, talkin’ shop. Say hi to my folks!)

I’ve revisited other classic films and come away impressed and wanting to see them again, as with The Third Man, which also featured Welles, and which has one of the coolest soundtracks I’ve ever heard, minimalist though it is.

I can rewatch Lon Chaney endlessly in The Phantom of the Opera or Max Schreck as Murnau’s Nosferatu, though I will not hear a thing, as these are silent films.

I can still feel my heart swell just thinking of Judy Garland belting out Over the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz. Though I saw it at least once a year during my childhood, I never tired of it.

I cannot stay awake when watching Citizen Kane.

Ultimately, I find the history of the film’s making and the events surrounding it more interesting than the film itself.

I can still get behind Welles’ expert needling of Hearst for the latter’s extravagance, arrogance, and yellow journalism.

Some might say that Hearst’s methods made the news more accessible to a wider audience, but if what the audience is accessing are bald-faced lies and sensationalism for its own sake, I must conclude that all he did was help pave the way for our current short attention span theater, outrage culture, behavioral sink of a fourth estate.

A film can be a culturally relevant technical masterpiece but just not engage the viewer, especially where it is too much a product of its time and we aren’t living in it.

But it should not be forgotten on that account.

As the old saying goes:

“Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.”

-Everyone who's ever studied history...

If you’re going to sit down with Citizen Kane, have a pot of coffee at the ready and sit in an uncomfortable chair.

Maybe I take a lot of the cinematic and storytelling elements that Welles pioneered for granted, having grown up with them.

I’m also sure the ending must have been more interesting before it was parodied by everyone from the Looney Tunes to the Simpsons, thereby making it seem redundant.

Then again, I rewatched The Sixth Sense a while back with my youngest daughter, and though I knew the twist, I still enjoyed the film as much as the first time. Tears spilled down my cheeks at the haunting beauty (or was it a beautiful haunting?)

Citizen Kane is a film I can appreciate but which I have never really enjoyed, and on that basis, I say it is overrated.

Nevertheless, everyone should watch it at least once and try to grasp the historical significance of its theme, which still resonates.

We might call it The Corruption of the American Dream, or we might call it the Corruption of a Man, but either way it amounts to the same, for a Rosebud by any other name is still a Rosebud…

***** * *****

For a philosophical deep dive into a classic film that didn't bore me:

P.S. Sam Neill is hiding an easter egg. Click on him!