Wednesday
Continuing with yesterday’s reflection on Donald Trump’s favorite movie, I want to explore exactly why Trump likes Citizen Kane. Is it because it’s about another narcissist and he revels in the fact that cinema’s most famous movie is about someone like himself? Or is it because he recognizes within Kane his own rosebud longing? Does he recognize in another his own poetic soul, buried deep beneath psychic wounds.
Having just read Jane Mayer’s remarkable New Yorker interview with Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of Trump’s Art of the Deal, I suspect that the first answer is closer to the truth. I don’t detect any poetry within Trump, perhaps because it was beaten out of him. Fred Trump demanded that he be tough, and Trump appears to have an Oedipal relationship with his father, building towers and financial empires to prove that he is the bigger man.
In the film, it is Kane’s mother, not his father, who insists that he become bigger than life. She all but sells him to the banker Thatcher, modeled on J. P. Morgan, so that one day he’ll be famous. Kane takes his anger out against the deal, and specifically Thatcher, through perpetual rebellion. Later in life, when Thatcher bails him out of bankruptcy (as Fred at one point bailed out Donald), he tells Thatcher that his dream in life was to become “everything you hate.” Maybe Donald responds to that conflict in the film.
Or maybe Trump sees a kindred entertainer in the film. Kane, as a yellow journalist, values entertainment over the facts. To sell newspapers, he works to involve the United States in an unjust war (the Spanish American War), and his dictum that the size of the headline trumps facts pretty much sums up Trump. Kane is a flamboyant personality, and the film contrasts him with the faceless reporters who are meant to stand in for Henry Luce’s Time-Life Magazine Empire. Luce’s journalism, especially Time, had no by-lines so that the stories would appear more factual. That’s why the reporter in the film and the figures previewing the newsreel are all in shadow.
To cast the contrast in modern day terms, it’s as though Kane is editing The New York Post or The National Inquirer whereas the News on the March newsreel that lays out his life is The New York Times. Welles may be nostalgic for an earlier personality-driven journalism over the faceless media empire that appears to be replacing it, but Time-Life had higher truth standards than William Randolph Hearst’s Sun newspapers.
Once entertainment trumps truth, however, Kane is king, and the dynamism of Welles’s character helps us understand why today’s media is riveted by Trump. Politicians who major goal is to be effective public servants—let’s start with Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton—appear low energy in contrast. They may know that substantive change occurs through slow, steady, and unglamorous work, but try getting people to tune in to that story..
In the end Welles, even while he dismembers Kane, is nostalgic for his glamour, and that glamour, in the end, is probably what draws Trump to the film. The people I want running my country, however, are those who will do thankless work in the trenches. They are the ones who will make government serve us. They are the ones we must vote for in November.
Further thought: Following Hillary’s acceptance speech, a number of people noted the contrast between her use of the word “we” with Trump’s use of the word “I.” William Saletan of Slate, for instance, noted,
This contrast—Trump’s “I” against Clinton’s “we”—is the fundamental choice in the 2016 election. Until Clinton spoke, I had dismissed her convention theme, “Stronger Together,” as a cliché. I don’t anymore. It fits the candidates and the moment. Trump wants the election to be a contest between two people. He’s the charismatic figure, the entertainer, the brash CEO. Clinton rejects that framework. She’s not running against him for the same job. She’s challenging his view of what the job is. Her vision of the job—humbler, less autocratic, more collaborative—is better. It’s more effective. It’s more American.
Kane’s friend Jed Leland observes a false note after Kane takes over a newspaper with the intent of becoming a crusading journalist. Kane’s “Declaration of Principles,” to be printed on the front page of the first issue, captures their early idealism. However, it also contains a touch of Trumpian self-absorption that will ultimately lead Kane to violate these principles and blow up the friendship:
Kane (quoting from his Declaration): “I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them–“
Leland: That’s the second sentence you’ve started with “I”–
Kane: People are going to know who’s responsible. And they’re going to get the news–the true news–quickly and simply and entertainingly. And no special interests will be allowed to interfere with the truth of that news. [Writing and reading again] “I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings–Signed–Charles Foster Kane.”
And one other thought: Kane, like Trump and narcissists generally, believes he can remake reality. The fact that Susan Alexander is not a good singer, relayed to him by Susan’s music teacher, don’t sway Kane, and he builds an opera house to showcase her “talent.” It’s a good symbol of those current politicians–most famously Karl Rove–who refuse to acknowledge a “reality based community” (say, scientific evidence of climate change). Here’s from The New York Times interview with Rove by Ron Susskind:
The aide [Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
With a President Trump, we can expect more of the same.