Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows

Film Friday

I owe my love of film to my father, who for years ran the “Cinema Guild” at the University of the South/Sewanee. When I wrote two weeks ago about Meet Me in St. Louis, my father talked about seeing the film as a G. I. in Europe.  “We saw the film as directed at us,” he said.  Having heard that, I now see Judy Garland’s “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” especially the words “From now on we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” in a new light.

Speaking of war year film experiences, several years ago my father wrote a recollection of his first encounter with Citizen Kane when he was a freshman at Carleton College.  His account bowled me over and we went on to write an article together about it (published in Cinema Journal, 26 [Winter 1987]).  Here’s his viewing experience:

When I first saw Citizen Kane with my college friends in 1941, it was in an America undergoing the powerful pressures of a coming war, full of populist excitement and revolutionary foreboding. But cynical Depression kids that we were, we had little hope for salvation through armed uprising.  Nor did we believe any longer in America’s self-proclaimed values.  Nevertheless, those values were still part of us, and it was America’s blind self-destruction that we instinctively recognized in the shattering experience of watching a little wooden sled go up in flames.  From the moment the huge lips opened and said “Rosebud,” to the sled’s final immolation in the furnace of our desires, we were both thrilled and terror-stricken.  It was the flaming consummation of sex and politics that we had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives.  We somehow knew that we had experienced our own flaming love-death and that it had taken place in the tragic heart of our country.  Welles and Mankiewicz had revealed, in two short hours of perception, how energetically Miss America had been raped of her dream, of her promise, of her rose; and then how she had dutifully prostituted us, her own bastard children.  We no longer had a place we could call home.  Pessimistically, and yet with the hope of finding some sort of transcendent through great eschatological events, we let ourselves get drafted into the army.

I will talk in a future post about our collaborative piece, which we titled, “Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud’s Impact upon Early Audiences.”