Kane: Sunny Pleasure Dome, Caves of Ice

Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane

Film Friday

I’m teaching Citizen Kane currently in my American Film class and am struck, once again, by the influence that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” had on the movie. My father and I tried to make this case in an article that we wrote on Citizen Kane a number of years back (described here), and while the editors liked the piece and printed it, they didn’t buy our notion that the poem helped shaped the film. We therefore cut it.

Since I’m the editor of this website, I’ve decided to indulge myself and share the idea with you.

One can’t, of course, dispute that the opening lines of the poem get quoted in the film: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree.” But there’s more of a connection, we think, than just the name that Kane gives to his gigantic mansion and extensive grounds. Kane and Khan travel through similar trajectories.

The poem is about an emperor who tries to put a wall around nature. (You can read it in its entirety here.) Kane too is a control freak who tries to box things in.  (Look at what he does to Susan Alexander.) Also, like Khan, Kane starts off strong but is ultimately is shown to be weak and helpless.

The poem begins with images of fertility and orgasmic potency:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

At the core of both Kane and Kahn, however, there is an unholy hunger, a “woman wailing for her demon lover.”  Once showing immense promise, both men end up sterile, just as the river culminates in a lifeless ocean.  The newsreel of Kane’s life parallels the poem.  We see images of a pouring river of wealth–“the Colorado lode”–but the end result is shrinking rings on a map as his newspaper empire contracts. The bombast of the newsreel–NEWS, ON THE MARCH!–is followed by the sound of the film dribbling out of the projector. Here’s the poem’s version of this diminution:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

About these predictions of war: Kane confidently and smugly predicts (in the newsreel) that there will be no war with Germany. Kane and Khan may believe they’ve mastered their worlds, but the reality is far different.

And what about the “caves of ice” that underlie the sunny pleasure dome?

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

Kane may seem to be shimmering in the limelight. But as we are taken into his life, we see one cold cave after another, beginning with the room where he dies, moving on to the library where his guardian Thatcher’s memoirs are kept, and culminating in Xanadu, with its immense but cold spaces. (There’s no fire in the fireplace, unlike in the final scene where there’s a fiery furnace that he has buried so deep that no one can see it.) In fact, other than the scene where young Kane is sledding and a couple of brief city scenes, the entire film is shot indoors. The ceilinged sets, unheard of in the Hollywood of the time, press down on him.

Maybe the main influence of the poem, however, is on Welles’ conception of himself as artist. In the 1930’s, “Kubla Khan” was seen as the quintessential Romantic poem, and I think that Welles fancied himself as the wild prophet, with “flashing eyes and floating hair.”  Playing this role to the hilt, he self-destructively thumbed his nose at Hollywood and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, to the ultimate detriment of his career. Citizen Kane is his “Kubla Khan,” a virtuoso work that struts its brilliance but is very, very cold:

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Bad boy Welles danced a dangerous dance, creating a masterpiece (actually two or three) before being destroyed by this same dance. The mazy meandering film is not only about Charles Foster Kane. It also forecasts the demise of Orson Welles, who lived a long but, after an early spurt, fruitless life–just as Coleridge’s mazy meandering poem forecast his own future creative impotence.

Close your eyes in holy dread indeed.

Addendum – My father reminds me of one of our ideas that I left out.  In the haunting opening scene where Kane dies, we see the “shadow of the dome of pleasure float[ing] midway on the waves.”  In a brilliant sequence of dissolves, we see the light of the room in which Kane lies dying, then the same lighted room reflected in a pool on the estate, and then back to the room itself.  We are moving into the realm of the subconscious here, which then gets buried by the loud boisterous language of he newsreel.

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