CHARLES FOSTER KANE
'Citizen Kane,' 1941
Sunday, November 5, 2006; Page N04
Known for: Sense of entitlement.
The usual villain in Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" is held to be Jim Gettys (Ray Collins), the corrupt Boss Tweed-style politician who defeats reformer Charles Foster Kane in a race for governor by entrapping him in a "love nest" romantic sting, which was sexually innocent to begin with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. But really the Boss's evil is banal, probably inescapable, completely bargain-basement stuff.
  Orson Welles as the publishing tycoon whose sense of superiority fuels his candidacy. (Turner Classic Movies) |
It's really Kane himself who represents something rotten in politics, something that has too long dogged our shores and tainted our institutions. That is the sense of entitlement and moral superiority that the rich have, the sense that they are vouchsafed entry into the higher levels of the ruling profession based on nothing more than a shrewd selection of extremely wealthy people as parents.
Why do such people assume a natural right to rule? To the great Orson Welles's credit, that was exactly the point of the movie and on this particular issue, he didn't preach that Kane's defeat was a tragedy for the republic. In fact, he mordantly pointed out the Yellow Press Lord's own delusional vanity by closing in on two headlines prepared for the ballot results: KANE ELECTED and FRAUD AT POLLS. And he never makes the point that the state of New York would have been better off under a Kane administration, for the process of the movie is to document how everything Kane does somehow comes unraveled and to suggest that behind his purported populist zeal there existed a kind of hollow, desperate need to project the self, to become somebody, to find a Rosebud.
