Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection in "Citizen Kane" and
"Nixon"
Author(s): Marc Singer
Source: Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 177-197
Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory
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Making History: Cinematic Time and the
Powers of Retrospection in
Citizen Kane and Nixon
By M arc Singer
Like its predecessor JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon owes an obvious debt to
Orson Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane. The intertextual references and
homages are manifold: a film-within-the-film initiates the narrative and a
mock newsreel eulogizes the title character; Nixon's White House becomes a Xanadu-like fortress, isolated behind its imposing fence; a scene
of marital difficulty unfolds across a long dinner table, a la Kane's famed
breakfast montage; and more generally, Stone characterizes Nixon as a
man who subsumes his private self to his public persona, who strives for
greatness and throws it away because of his desperate need to be loved.1
Most significantly, however, both Citizen Kane and Nixon are structured
around sequences of flashbacks that disorder and reassemble the films'
timelines, forgoing linear chronology to chronicle the lives of their characters. Neither film treats these temporal dislocations as mere stylistic devices; instead, Welles and Stone fracture their cinematic timelines to de-
pict the twentieth century as a period of tremendous changes in the
experience and social organization of time, and to reveal some of the con-
flicting political, economic, and cultural forces that motivated those
changes. They also illustrate the subjective nature of historical narrative,
showing how the same forces that affect the experience of time govern its
subsequent representation. Together, these films advertise the ability of
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 38.2 (Summer 2008): 177-197. Copyright © 2008 by
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.
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narrative, especially cinematic narrative, to reorder time and reshape
history.
Nevertheless, despite their similar narrative structures, Citizen Kane
and Nixon posit radically different models of time and history. The charac-
ters of Citizen Kane, most notably Kane himself, attempt to manipulate
time for a variety of purposes, some of them quite contradictory: they seek
to commodify it through purchases, accelerate its consumption through
business practices, arrest its passage through fetish objects, or even reverse its direction - at least in memory - through nostalgia and through
the postmortem inquiry that structures the film. Yet the time of Citizen
Kane remains defiantly chronological, thwarting all attempts at recovering
the past. Nixon, on the other hand, for all its considerable stylistic and thematic debts to its predecessor, is guided by the free-associative transitions
of memory, not the framing narrative of an investigation; its cascading
flashbacks imply that time and memory cannot always be made to conform to a chronological organizing narrative. Nixon dismantles the ostensibly inviolable scale of chronology as it argues that history is a manipulable human construct, a retrospective narrative rather than an objective
record. While both films call attention to the power of narrative to shape
history, it is ironically Nixon, the film that represents actual historical figures, that pushes the bounds of credulity the farthest, reminding viewers
that it too is simply another work of historical fabrication. Unlike Citizen
Kane, which subjects its characters to an absolute and inescapable
chronology, Nixon suggests that, if we cannot reverse or revisit the past,
we nevertheless have the power to reshape it retroactively through memory and narrative.
Citizen Kane: Time Commodified and Time Lost
Citizen Kane's examination of the material forces that influence our
experience of time has long been overshadowed by its dramatic structural
rearrangement of its own timeline. When Peter Wollen asserts "it is not the
theme of time - youth, memory, age - that is of any interest, but the de-
vices used to organize time within the film" (262), he underestimates both
the significance and the scope of the film's engagement with time (although he certainly does not overestimate the importance of its formal
play). Gilles Deleuze has called Kane "the first great film of a cinema of
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Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 179
time" (Deleuze 99) not simply because of its stylistic ornamentation but
because, he argues, it represents all of the conflicting, paradoxical states of
experiencing time - not only past and present, but physical and mental or
objective and subjective time as well (Rodowick 93).
But the temporal tensions and paradoxes of Citizen Kane extend far be-
yond its suspension of objectivity and subjectivity. The film also reconciles contrasting modes of experiencing historical time, addressing mater-
ial concerns as well as phenomenological ones. The film's narrative
mission to decipher the meaning of "Rosebud" and chronicle Kane's life
depends entirely upon its movement backwards in time through flashbacks, yet Thompson's investigation reveals that the time of the world of
Citizen Kane resists any such backwards movement. Charles Foster Kane
has altered the pace and use of time in modern America, creating a temporal breach between Thompson and the life he tries to reassemble that no
investigation can bridge; ironically, these transformations also thwart
Kane's own attempts to recapture his past, distancing him from his idealized childhood. Each discovery Thompson and the audience make across
time also yields a host of contradictory or self-defeating discoveries about
time in the modernist era. Kane, Thompson and the rest may struggle
mightily to reorder, reverse, or master time, but in the end, a resolutely
chronological time holds agency over them.
Time is a precious commodity in the life of Charles Foster Kane, and
Kane's transformation of time into a commodity is hotly contested by
some of his contemporaries. The priggish editor Carter, for example, objects to Kane's plans to expand the New York Inquirer's operations on the
grounds that the newspaper is "practically closed for twelve hours a day."
Kane replies, "The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day," suggesting
that the Inquirer must expand its schedule to match. In the next scene,
Carter objects that "we could fill the paper twice over daily" with rumor
and innuendo - failing to recognize that Kane hopes to do exactly that,
filling the old twelve-hour Inquirer twice daily by turning it into a twentyfour-hour monitor (and fabricator) of the news. Kane's first step in con-
verting the Inquirer into a modern newspaper like its competitor the
Chronicle is to change the way the paper manages time. He does so above
the objections of Carter, the genteel, powerless, and visibly aged representative of the old journalistic practices that the young Kane challenges at
every turn. As James Naremore writes, "The newsroom becomes a focal
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point of social history, where we see the country moving through various
stages of democratization, each attempt at progress generating new conflicts and new evils" (150-51); we also see the country move through various stages of modernization as Kane both responds to and helps implement the "rapid phase of time-space compression" and the acceleration of
production time that marked the modernist period (Harvey 265-66).
Hints of similar temporal conflicts surface even in the lighter moments
of Citizen Kane. When Kane jokingly tells Bernstein that Europe has
"been making statues for five thousand years, and I've only been buying
for five," he alludes to a disparity in the pace and scope of history between
ancient, storied Europe and a new but wealthy and acquisitive America.
Later scenes in which the Inquirer offices and Xanadu have been filled
with statuary imply that Kane actually tries to balance the scales, to purchase all five thousand years of European art and history in a spate of nou-
veau riche American consumption. These gags suggest that Kane is attempting to effect a new, American scale of temporality, not by buying
himself an old-world pedigree, but by demonstrating that a few years of
fast-paced American capitalism can yield a fortune capable of purchasing
all of the sculpture, all of the history that Europe has produced.
Kane's attempts to institute this accelerated modernist temporality also
disrupt his marriage to his first wife, Emily. The celebrated montage of
Kane and Emily at the breakfast table illustrates how his relentless consumption of time alienates him from his wife. In the first scene, as the
newlywed couple sits down for breakfast after spending all night at a series of parties, Emily persuades Kane not to leave immediately for work.
Although Kane asks her to tell him what time it is, he accepts her reply of
"I don't know," not only placing Emily above his work, but also allowing
himself the luxury of timelessness. However, Kane's assurance that staying up until morning and fitting six parties into one night is "a matter of
habit" suggests that this temporary marital bliss only results from Emily's
initial conformity with Kane's hectic schedule. Once she falls out of that
schedule, the fissures in their marriage begin to show. In the second scene,
Emily asks Kane, "Do you know how long you kept me waiting last night
while you went to the newspaper for ten minutes?" The question not only
demonstrates Kane's greater devotion to the Inquirer, it implies that a
mere ten minutes of Kane's evening equals an indefinitely longer stretch
of Emily's. Once again, Kane accelerates time to extract more value from
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Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 181
it; those closest to him must do the same or be left behind, whether they
are his editor or his wife. After Emily intimates that "It isn't just the time"
that drives them apart but also Kane's sensationalist journalism and re-
formist politics, the discussion of time gradually disappears from the
breakfast table. Nevertheless, time remains an underlying point of conflict
throughout the montage, as Kane's push for a modernized American temporality, one that consumes and is consumed at an ever-increasing pace,
alienates him from his stately, languorous wife. The literal, spatial division
that grows between the couple by the montage's end is the result not only
of time's passage, but of their conflicting prioritizations and scales of time.
This first marriage will not be Kane's last sacrifice; his unflagging
drive to accelerate the pace of business also counteracts his lifelong goal
of recapturing his childhood. Kane seeks out traces of his past throughout
the film, from his dying cry for Rosebud to his fascination with Susan's
snowglobe, which evokes memories of his boyhood home in Colorado.
David Bordwell argues that Susan herself is simply an object of transfer-
ence for Kane's childlike love for his absent mother (97) - he meets
Susan, after all, while he is "in search of [his] youth," en route to a warehouse that contains his mother's belongings (and, presumably, the elusive
Rosebud). Laura Mulvey elaborates on this psychoanalytic reading with
her argument that Susan, Rosebud, and all of Kane's material acquisitions
are fetish objects that he symbolically substitutes for his mother and there-
fore his youth. Kane accumulates these objects in order to recall his
mother and his life before their separation: "Fetishism," Mulvey writes,
"holds time in check" (295).
At this point my argument may appear to have reached a contradiction,
for Mulvey claims that Kane's acquisitions fetishistically preserve time
while I maintain that they accelerate it. But this contradiction lies at the
heart of Charles Foster Kane's tragedy: his own modernization of time ultimately works against his desire to reverse it. His attempts to recover or
symbolically replace his childhood through the acquisition of commodities, wives, and other fetish objects all contribute - through the pace of his
purchases and the regimented newspaper schedule that finances them - to
an accelerated temporality that distances him from his past. Welles hides
this dilemma in plain sight, advertising the temporal paradoxes of Kane's
life just as confidently as he does the meaning of "Rosebud." "Kane
helped to change the world," the narrator of "News on the March" pro-
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claims, "but Kane's world now is history. And the great yellow journalist
himself lived to be history - outlived his power to make it." One of the
title cards makes this equation between Kane and history even more apparent: "1895 to 1941: All these years he covered, many of these he was."
Rather than recover his past, Kane has merely become the past to a subsequent age.
Kane frustrates his nostalgic desires through more than just his business practices, however; Welles demonstrates that the desires are inherently unattainable and self-defeating. Much as Thompson will find it impossible to reduce Kane's life to a single, totemic word, however charged
with meaning and longing that word might be, Kane's attempts to preserve
or recover his past through a series of fetish objects are equally doomed to
failure. If Thompson's ultimate inability to divine the meaning of "Rosebud" suggests that we can never fully comprehend another person's inner
life, then Kane's failure to recapture the traces of his youth constitutes an
even more potent argument that nostalgia is both delusional and counterproductive.
Kane cherishes his boyhood home as a frontier Eden, maintaining this
rosy memory through mnemonic objects such as Susan's snowglobe,
which recreates the Colorado environment without admitting the passage
of time. But in the film's only glimpse of the young Charlie Kane, seen
through the less sentimental testimony of Walter Parks Thatcher, Welles
presents a violent father and a calculating, emotionally distant mother.
Even if Kane could recapture this lost moment, he might discover that the
loving childhood he sustains in memory never truly existed. Welles and
Herman Mankiewicz extend this grim irony to the rest of the nation when
the first lines of dialogue in the Colorado scene intertwine Charlie's biography with public and national history, as they will be intertwined for the
rest of his life. Charlie, pretending to be a Civil War soldier, issues a cry of
"The Union forever!" even as his mother finalizes the dissolution of his fa-
milial union. If the scene appears nostalgic for the rustic vigor of the frontier or the moral imperatives of the Civil War, the impending maternal betrayal frustrates such idealizations.
Charlie's dialogue also reminds us that nostalgia is an endless and unwinnable game. Kane will spend the rest of his life attempting to recapture
the feeling of 1871, yet in that year his cry of "The Union forever" looks
back to the more recent but equally evanescent past of the Civil War. Nos-
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Making History-. Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 183
talgia never reaches a stopping point, never finds that ideal moment that
cannot look back to some prior and more idealized era. As Fredric Jameson writes, "the strange afterimage of 'primal unity' always seems to be
projected after the fact onto whatever present the historical eye fixes as its
'inevitable' past, which vanishes without a trace when frontal vision is displaced onto it in turn" (337); nostalgia must always recede farther and farther back into the past. Moreover, by severing the present from the past,
nostalgia confirms or even institutes the sensibility of modernity: young
Charlie Kane is already reminiscing about the nineteenth century in 1871,
even as Thatcher and his mother negotiate the contract that will shepherd
him towards the twentieth. Far from preserving his idealized past, Kane's
nostalgia distances him from it and accelerates the encroachments of
modernity. The film's central dilemma is therefore not simply one of unearthing the private life of a public figure, but recovering the past in an era
that permits no such recovery. The act of recollection itself places the past
farther out of reach.
Broken by his temporal as well as marital and political failures, Kane
withdraws into Xanadu, a timeless monument of his own creation. The
"News on the March" narrator proclaims Xanadu "the costliest monument
a man has built to himself," but the estate differs from the other self-aggrandizing markers that Kane collects. Unlike the ice-sculptures and the
Tin Pan Alley song at the Inquirer banquet or the colossal portrait that
dominates Kane's gubernatorial campaign speech, Xanadu is built to isolate Kane from time and society rather than advertise his importance to
them. In one of Susan Alexander's memories of the estate, she not only
asks Kane what time it is, she assumes that Xanadu's time must be differ-
ent from New York's. Xanadu, unlike William Randolph Hearst's San
Simeon, stands in Florida and thus most likely shares the Eastern time
zone with New York City - but Susan can hardly be blamed for this mistake, because Kane has built Xanadu to inhabit a state of timelessness.2
The "News on the March" profile, always shrewder than it first seems,
highlights the estate's indeterminate temporality. The newsreel glowingly
compares Kane and Xanadu not only to Kubla Khan and his legendary
palace, but to the pharaohs and their pyramids, even to Noah and his Ark.
These analogies conflate different time periods and confuse history with
legend, but they all present Xanadu as a relic more suited to the past. The
newsreel also describes Xanadu as both "never finished" and "already de-
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caying," suspended between its creation and destruction, denied any stable
temporality. Citizen Kane's first images reinforce this quality of indetermi-
nate antiquity, portraying Kane's manor as a gaudy pastiche of settings
and architectural styles where gondolas and moss-covered arches jostle
against golf courses. Moments later, the "News on the March" narrator
crows that Xanadu contains "paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of
many another palace - a collection of everything." A cultural and historical palimpsest, the palace contains the relics of so many eras that it belongs to none of them. Xanadu is not only the costliest monument a man
has built to himself, but a retreat from time itself.
Kane is hardly alone in this respect, however. Most of the characters in
Citizen Kane have settled into one form of memorialization or another as a
means of arresting time or removing themselves from it. The most drastic
escape and most literal memorialization are found in the deceased Walter
Parks Thatcher, who survives only as a statue at the Thatcher Memorial
Library, where zealous acolytes enshrine his words and image. Other, still
living characters have chosen to define themselves only through memory,
effectively ending their agency within time. The decrepit Jed Leland is ensconced at the Huntington Memorial Hospital, whose telling name indicates that Leland is well on his way to joining Kane and Thatcher as a figure who survives only in memory. Leland's comments to Thompson reveal
an obsession with memory, most notably in his bitter pronouncement that
he remembers "absolutely everything" and that memory is "one of the
greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race." Leland seems eager to
become a memory rather than possess them, for despite his old age and
hospitalization, he is mentally vital (his one instance of memory loss, failing to remember Xanadu's name, is feigned) and his fading health seems
oddly self-motivated. In his rush to leave the painful grip of time and
memory Leland gently courts death, asking for Thompson for cigars and
scoffing at the young doctor who's "got an idea he wants to keep [him]
alive."3
Bernstein, who also lectures Thompson on the power of memory, looks
back on his past with more fondness than Leland, but his comments nevertheless illustrate how memory can dissociate the memorialist from the
present. Even when he is not reminiscing about his youth, Bernstein likes
to mark endings: a devoted employee, he says he still follows Kane "now,
after the end," and he summarizes Kane's marriages to Emily and Susan
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Making History : Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 185
simply by saying "It ended" and "That ended too." When he tells Thompson that he has "nothing but time," he effectively identifies himself as an
epigone of the deceased Kane, living in a posterior, retrospective temporality oriented towards nostalgia. Like Leland, Bernstein demonstrates that
arresting or absenting oneself from time doesn't always require the literal
memorialization of Xanadu - memory can become its own detemporalizing fetish. Yet while Bernstein and Leland demonstrate the power of mem-
ory, their waning energies and resigned natures, like those of the elder
Kane, also exemplify the perils of living solely through nostalgia.
Citizen Kane is not wholly negative about the uses of retrospection,
however, as Welles distinguishes between nostalgia and the more critical
mode of reconsideration that he prompts in his viewers. By the final scene,
the film's chain of retrospection has expanded beyond the characters to incorporate the audience; Welles directs viewers to retroactively reevaluate
both narratives, Kane's biography and Thompson's investigation, after discovering the true meaning of "Rosebud." For Laura Mulvey, this retrospective mode of spectatorship carries major implications for the construction and criticism of historical narratives. She writes,
Citizen Kane has, built into its structure, the need to think
back and reflect on what has taken place in the main body
of the film as soon as it finishes. And when the camera
tracks into the furnace and supplies the "missing piece of
the jigsaw puzzle," it throws everything that has led up to
that moment into a new relief. [. . .] The film's "active
spectator" is forced to look back at and reexamine events
as though the film were suggesting that history itself should
be constantly subjected to reexamination. Not only should
history never be accepted at face, or story, value, but also,
from a political perspective, it should be detached from
personality and point of view and be rediscovered, as it
were, in its materiality and through the decoding of its
symptoms. (286-87)
Mulvey elegantly links Citizen Kane's retrospective narrative structure to
its historical subtexts, but although the film does indeed reexamine American history from the Civil War to World War Two, perhaps Mulvey overstates the degree to which its reevaluation of its own narrative carries over
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to a more general reevaluation of historical narrative. Welles presents sev-
eral conflicting versions of Charles Foster Kane's life, from Thatcher's
patent disgust to Bernstein's hero worship to the valet Raymond's mercenary cynicism, but their divergent perspectives result more from their per-
sonal relationships with Kane than from any variant readings of material
history. Naremore notes that after Kane's gubernatorial bid fails the film
"shifts almost completely" (153) into an account of his personal life, bypassing a more historicized critique of William Randolph Hearst's activities and displacing its treatment of class relations onto Kane's relationship
with Susan (154). The Rosebud revelation shifts the film even more
squarely into the personal, threatening to override the film's historical critique and reduce the story to, in Welles's memorable phrase, "dollar-book
Freud" (McBride 46). While Citizen Kane fashions its viewers into active
spectators through narrative retrospection and revision, it only intermittently applies these techniques to the reading of history itself.
Nixon: History as Narrative
Although Nixon is just as preoccupied with the personal life of its title
character, it applies the retrospective narrative structure of Citizen Kane
towards the type of active reexamination with history Mulvey describes.
Oliver Stone may indulge in some of his own "dollar-book Freud" by attributing Richard Nixon's desperate need for popular adoration to his obsession with his dead brothers and his distant, stern mother (Beaver 281),
but he does not delay these revelations to force viewers to revise their
opinions of Nixon retroactively; the film advertises this psychologistic interpretation from its earliest scenes. The flashbacks and the retrospective
structure of Nixon instead point to revisionist readings, not only of
Nixon's public history, but of historical narrative in general. Stone proposes that history is not simply an objective record of events, but a narrative construct that may be disputed, rewritten, or occluded, even by its
own actors. While Citizen Kane represents the experience of time in the
modernist era chiefly through nostalgia, with characters who chase after a
cherished past they can never hope to recapture, Nixon experiments with
cinematic time to deliver a postmodernist argument about the narrative
features of history, through its depiction of characters who struggle to con-
trol, reshape, or repress a dangerous past that cannot be contained.
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Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 187
Stone naturalizes this model of a mutable, potentially fabricated or
suppressed history by grounding Nixon in an unstable temporality quite
different from the implacable chronology of Citizen Kane. Kane organizes
its flashbacks within a coherent timeline, presenting them in roughly
chronological order and unifying them through the "chronological, Aristotelian drama" (McBride 43) of Thompson's investigation; as Rodowick
observes, "in Citizen Kane, a point in the present determined the launching pad for a leap to a layer of the past" (100). Jim Garrison's investigation in JFK provides a similar temporal "launching pad" for that film's
many flashbacks and speculations, and a convenient excuse to connect and
assemble those excursions into a coherent narrative. Nixon, however, although not as radically discontinuous as the Alain Resnais films to which
Rodowick compares Kane ( L'annee derniere a Marienbad [1961] and Je
t'aime, je t'aime [1968]), destabilizes the Wellesian flashback technique
by denying viewers any constant narrative present or absolute chronologi-
cal launching point against which its flashbacks can be measured.
The prolonged chain of flashbacks that opens Nixon clarifies this lack
of an absolute narrative present. Nixon begins in 1972, immediately prior
to the Watergate break-in. The film provides a quick montage of post-
break-in mug shots before jumping ahead to late 1973 with a scene of
Nixon listening to his tapes in the Lincoln Sitting Room as his administra-
tion crumbles around him. A conversation on those tapes leads Nixon's
memories, and the film, back to a 1972 White House meeting and a conversation with H. R. Haldeman; when Stone returns from that scene to
1973, he appears to have established the declining Nixon and his tapes as
the narrative present, the frame from which the flashbacks will be initiated.
Almost as soon as Stone creates this temporal frame, however, he
abandons it for a more free-associative temporality that wanders backwards and forwards through time without recourse to the tapes' framing
powers. The first such transition begins with Nixon in 1973, listening to
the recording of his 1972 comments about Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs.
This recording does not steer the film into another flashback to the 1972
conversation, but rather, by raising the spectre of Kennedy, to a scene depicting the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate.4 This transition begins a fugue of
flashbacks and flashforwards that carry the film along two parallel but
asynchronous tracks, one recapitulating Nixon's life and career before
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1960, the other tracing his fall from and subsequent return to political
power between 1960 and 1968. While these transtemporal cuts are sometimes motivated by Nixon's memories - thoughts of his father lead to a
flashback to his boyhood, for example - others lack even that rudimentary
framing. Some transitions have no apparent motivation, or they are man-
aged through extranarrative devices like the fake "March of Time" newsreel.
Conjoined through this combination of internal reverie and external
narration, the long flashback sequence terminates when Stone cuts from a
1968 meeting between Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to a portion of the 1972
Haldeman conversation in which Nixon reminisces about the Hoover
meeting. The cut implies that the entire flashback sequence has been nar-
rated by the 1972 Nixon all along - yet 1972 was not Stone's original
point of departure. While he inserts a brief shot of Nixon listening to the
recorded 1972 conversation in 1973, as if to remind viewers of the original
temporal starting point, the narrative proceeds from the 1972 scene. Stone
refuses to guide the narrative through a consistent temporal frame, sabotaging the putative framing function of the tapes. Rather than the orderly
chronological march of Citizen Kane, time in Nixon appears to lack any
central organization, unfolding instead in a cascade in which memories
spawn more antecedent memories and the narrative may skip forwards or
backwards at any time.
Nixon also inverts the investigative framework of JFK and Citizen
Kane. Nixon and his aides seek to repress the past, not recover it; much of
the film's historical exploration thus emerges in spite of the characters'
narrative desires, not because of them. Stone begins the film, and instills
an overarching narrative purpose for Nixon's repression of the past, with
the President's attempts to suppress his connection to E. Howard Hunt.
Hunt must be hidden and silenced because, in Nixon's words, of "what he
tracks back to" - not only the White House's administrative structure, but
a litany of Nixon's past misdeeds, including the raid on Daniel Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office, the establishment of 'Track 2" programs with the
Mafia to oust Castro, and "the whole Bay of Pigs thing." However, Nixon
instinctively represses his past long before the Watergate scandal. Whether
he is attempting to conceal his association with mobster Johnny Roselli or
simply pained by the memories of his parents and brothers, any resurgence
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Making History-. Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 189
of the past always traumatizes Nixon and he attempts to stifle it accordingly.
Nixon's tortured connection with his past reaches its ultimate narrativization in his ambivalent relationship with his secret White House tapes.
Pat Nixon knows that her husband cannot simply burn them because they
comprise a record of his achievements; like Charles Foster Kane, he has
defined himself solely by public approval and by his impact on public his-
tory. Destroying the tapes would mean destroying a part of himself because, as Pat succinctly tells him, " They are you." Yet Nixon knows that
parts of this covert record are too dangerous to be released to the public either dangerous to his image, like the expletives he furiously deletes from
the transcripts, or dangerous to his career and possibly his life, like the
material on the infamous eighteen-and-a-half minute gap, which Stone
suggests contained more detailed information on Nixon's involvement in
the Bay of Pigs invasion and his knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.
To rationalize this act of self-erasure, Nixon imagines he is rewinding time
itself; Stone helpfully reverses film footage to show bombs flying back up
into bombers, the Ellsberg raid undone, National Guard troops being re-
called rather than deployed, Kennedy's motorcade speeding back away
from his assassination, and finally the resurrection of Nixon's brothers.
Nixon does not erase the tape to stifle one injudicious conversation, but to
undo all the history he has suffered and all the suffering he has caused.
While Stone's cinematic reversal momentarily realizes Nixon's desire
to unwrite history, that desire remains mere fantasy. The act of erasure is
doomed to failure, not only because the past always returns to haunt
Nixon - his attempts to suppress it produce the "smoking gun" that forces
his resignation - but because his own attitudes towards the preservation
and repression of history are deeply conflicted, as seen in the hefty physical and psychological toll inflicted by his erasure of the tapes. This act of
self-destruction prompts several flashbacks and visions of the past, beginning with the Gothic apparition of his mother in the White House: more
dollar-book Freud, but also one resurgent fragment of Nixon's past warning him not to destroy another. When he erases the tapes anyway, the destruction of his past causes an equivalent degeneration in his physical constitution; in the next scene, he awakens in his bed to discover he is
coughing up blood, suffering from viral pneumonia. Torn between his impulses to preserve and erase his past, he nearly destroys himself.
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190
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If Nixon views himself as little more than a conglomeration of his historical record, Nixon also argues that history itself is a subjective and often
hotly contested narrative construct. Nixon performs some of this construc-
tion on his own record as he constantly narrates his place in history, forever proclaiming or worrying how the press and the history books will regard "Nixon" and his actions. His habit of referring to himself in the third
person not only symptomatizes his drastic dissociation of identity, it
demonstrates his unflagging awareness that history is a narrative that can
be controlled and shaped. Nixon, however, is not the only voice in the film
that flagrantly narrativizes history. The "March of Time" newsreel that eu-
logizes Nixon's career after his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial
election shapes the facts of his life into a psychological narrative - the
same narrative Stone tells throughout Nixon - with language so loaded
that it stretches the bounds of journalistic credibility, even for a parody.
The newsreel proclaims that Nixon was "Driven by demons more personal
than political" and concludes by pronouncing that "We never knew who
Richard Nixon was, and now that he is gone, we never will." If these judgments seem too stark even for the "March of Time" newsreels, they never-
theless remind viewers that the historical record is comprised of such
judgments and narratives - and the obvious hubris of the premature eulogy serves as a warning that those narratives may often be wrong.
By foregrounding the construction of history as narrative, Nixon both
affirms and exceeds the model of historical narrative articulated by Hayden White in "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." White argues that
all historians emplot their accounts according to personal interpretations,
ideological preconceptions, and archetypal plot structures, resulting in histories that "make sense of the real world by imposing upon it the formal
coherency that we customarily associate with the products of writers of
fiction" (99). These various perspectives and plot structures may "yield alternative, mutually exclusive, and yet, equally plausible interpretations"
(White 93) of past events even among honest, intellectually responsible
historians - to say nothing of Nixon, Henry Kissinger, J. Edgar Hoover,
the "March of Time" newsreel, and the various other characters and institutions jostling to impose their own self-serving stories upon events in
Nixon. Stone himself cites an oversimplified version of White's arguments
to defend his own use of dramatic license, claiming,
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Making History-. Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 191
Hayden White made the point in "Tropics of Discourse"
that the narrative interpretation provided by historians is
also definitely subjective, insofar as research brings out too
many facts to include in any historical work. He concludes
that facts have to be deleted in order to present an interpre-
tation. ("Stone on Stone's Image" 55; his emphasis)
Stone moves well beyond this version of White's arguments, let alone
White's actual arguments, when he implies that real events can be fabricated just as easily as the historical narratives written about them. Immediately before Nixon's 1968 meeting with Hoover at the Santa Anita race-
track, mobster Johnny Roselli fixes a race for Hoover by arranging a
violent collision. As Hoover escorts Nixon around the paddock, the FBI
director indicates a willingness to interfere in the upcoming presidential
election, possibly intimating some foreknowledge of Robert F. Kennedy's
impending assassination. Hoover pontificates that "the system" can only
tolerate so much reform before it readjusts itself in "savage outbursts" he mentions the recently assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. - while his
companion Clyde Tolson says of Kennedy, in a moment of uncharacteris-
tic candor, "Somebody should shoot the son of a bitch." The sequence
hints none too subtly that assassinations and elections can be rigged just
like crooked horse races - that history is sometimes not just narrativized,
but plotted.5
An earlier, highly self-aware sequence makes an even more theatrical
claim that American history has been staged as thoroughly as one of
Stone's own films. This sequence begins with a black screen and a title
that reads "1963, Dallas." As the lights rise an announcer bellows, "Ladies
and gentlemen, it's showtime." While this comment nominally refers to an
auto show, the juxtaposition implies that Kennedy's impending assassination (in a motorcade) will also be an elaborately staged spectacle; in fact,
the announcer reappears later at the "Jack Jones" ranch as one of the conspirators who claim they can prevent Kennedy from running for president
in 1964. The implication that Kennedy's assassination is a surreal spectacle, a construct of shadowy architects, is enhanced by the heavy intertextuality of the Dallas/Kennedy scenes and of Nixon in general. In his final
portent of the assassination, Stone cites JFK, playing that film's funereal
drumbeats over stock footage of Kennedy's Dallas motorcade. The cita-
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192
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tion reminds viewers of Stone's earlier thesis about the conspiracy behind
the Kennedy assassination - the construction of the historical event - and
of Nixon's status as another Oliver Stone political movie - the spectacle of
the film.
Stone further indicates the narrative fabrication of history through the
intertextual and self-reflexive practice of casting star actors in cameo
roles. This application of casting is a dramatic reversal from films like
JFK, in which Stone casts stars to increase the film's claim to authenticity
rather than question it. Several critics have noted that JFK uses well-respected celebrity actors to "lend credibility to Stone's scandalous challenge to history" (Dowell 9), or that the casting "is clearly meant to enhance the film's authority with the presentation of recognizable stars"
(Mitchell 410). W. J. T. Mitchell, however, finds that this star casting has
"a curiously equivocal effect" (410), undermining the film's credibility by
reminding viewers that they are watching Hollywood celebrities rather
than historical personalities. Mitchell assumes this implicit self-reflexivity
is "a slippage between intentional design and actual effect" (411), overlooking the possibility that Stone has cast these actors to provoke precisely this reaction. Even if JFK does not intend this alienating effect of
celebrity, Nixon positively trades on it, particularly in the Dallas scenes.
Stone and his casting directors outdo themselves in assigning the part of
"Jack Jones," a sinister Texas oil baron, to actor Larry Hagman, best
known for his role as J. R. Ewing on the prime-time soap opera Dallas.
Hagman possesses instant recognizability as a scheming oilman, yet he
elicits an equally powerful recognition of the stereotypical dimensions of
the Jack Jones character. The same is true of the unnamed Cuban co-
conspirator who, in the time between his two scenes, somehow acquires a
wheelchair and a spinal problem evocative of nothing less than Dr.
Strangelove. These transparently fictional characters call attention to the
fictitiousness of Stone's film; even more fittingly, the characters who attempt the most brazen revisions of America's political history are those
who most obviously belong to a work of fiction. Stone withholds that narrative/historical power from his more realistic characters, who are history's subjects rather than its planners.
Through these self-reflexive devices, Nixon extends its claims for the
narrative construction of history to its own narrative. The film foregrounds
the artificiality of its historical recreations, often with a sense of playful-
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Making History-. Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 193
ness that few critics have acknowledged. The insertion of actor Anthony
Hopkins into photographs and footage of Nixon both perpetuates and de-
flates the illusion that Hopkins has become Nixon; the more the film
strives for verisimilitude, the more it advertises that an actor, not the real
Richard Nixon, is debating Kennedy or Khrushchev. The incorporation of
authentic historical figures and images only alerts viewers that the rest of
Nixon is a simulacrum. Similarly, the narrative prominence Stone places
on certain infamous quotations - Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech,
for example, or John Dean's proclamation that there is "a cancer on the
Presidency" - indicates that he recreates those moments precisely, perhaps
only, because they are so famous. Stone does not depict the events of the
Nixon presidency so much as the story of the Nixon presidency, the parts
that have passed on into cultural legend. Frank Beaver writes, " Nixon
electrifies with its historical facsimiles [. . .] One listens to the dialogue of
Nixon and has the same feeling that it too or something very much like it
was once spoken by the historical figures being impersonated on the
screen" (283). But this facsimile quality also serves as an alienating reminder of the film's artificiality, especially when Stone incorporates dialogue from incidents that are not even part of Nixon's history; when Nixon
is hospitalized for viral pneumonia, Alexander Haig blusters "I am in
charge here," a mocking reference to Haig's presumptive claim of command after Ronald Reagan's near-assassination in 1981. Whether they are
anachronistic or historically accurate, these quotations advertise Nixon's
status as a pastiche, a narrative composed entirely of other historical narratives.
This shameless pastiche proves to be a fitting mode for a film about
Nixon, for in Stone's treatment Nixon himself is a patchwork of competing characters. After Nixon's narrow defeat in the 1960 Presidential election, Herb Klein quotes a devastating put-down by John F. Kennedy: "I
feel sorry for Nixon because he does not know who he is. At each stop, he
has to decide which Nixon he is going to be at the moment, which must be
very exhausting." Moments later, Murray Chotiner insists Nixon will return to politics, pointing to a campaign poster and saying, "if he's not this
Nixon, he's nobody." After he retires to the private sector following his
gubernatorial defeat, Nixon tells John Mitchell he misses the "pure acting"
of politics. As his equation of his identity with his secret tapes shows,
Nixon's mutable personality latches onto his political narrative until he be-
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194
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N
T
comes nothing but his own story. Stone's Nixon is a contradictory, multivalent subject, lacking any unitary or unifying identity; appropriately, he
inhabits a world in which time and history follow the same contours.
In "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson, paraphrasing
Jacques Lacan, connects temporal fragmentation to the disintegration of
subjectivity in postmodernist art:
personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal
unification of past and future with one's present [. . .] such
active temporal unification is a function of language, or
better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneu-
tic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the past,
present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly
unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own bi-
ological experience or psychic life. (26-27)
Stone's disarranged chronologies enact a cinematic equivalent to this linguistic breakdown, both enabling Nixon's schizoid personality and unraveling it for us on screen. While Jameson suggests that the schizophrenic
experiences "a series of pure and unrelated presents in time" (27), however, Nixon is more likely to perceive sinister continuities, both real and
imagined, between discontinuous moments in time. His fractured subjectivity springs from an overly emplotted personal narrative and a baroquely
interconnected temporality, both of which contribute to the inevitable
resurgence of an irrepressible past.
This suggests one of the most striking and important differences that
distinguishes Nixon from its narrative template, Citizen Kane. While Kane
gestures towards the potential artificiality and fabrication of the events that
comprise American history - Charles Foster Kane helps provoke the
Spanish-American War just as surely as "Jack Jones" does the Kennedy
assassination - the film's representation of time is fundamentally modernist. Kane's and Thompson's failures to relive or decipher the past reconfirm linear chronology as the only means of experiencing time; Kane is
steeped in "the pain of a properly modernist nostalgia with a past beyond
all but aesthetic retrieval" (Jameson 19). The film's other predominant
temporal impulse, the relentless acceleration that launches fin-de-siecle
America into an industrialized future and dooms Kane's nostalgia to fail-
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Making History-. Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection 195
ure, is equally indicative of the radical discontinuity with the past that both
provokes and is exacerbated by modernism. Both sides of the film's central temporal conflict demonstrate the absolute power of linear chronology.
Nixon confounds this model, inverting Kane's temporal structure even
as it follows its narrative structure. Nixon's desperate, ineffective attempts
to suppress his past imply an alternative model of time in which the past,
far from being an irretrievable object of nostalgia, is too present in the pre-
sent, trapping Nixon in the consequences of his actions. This greater continuity with the past, along with the film's refusal to settle into a stable
chronological narrative frame, establishes a highly postmodern cinematic
time. Therefore, while Nixon follows the Kane model of disordering time
to assemble a biographical narrative from its fragments, it does so far
more radically than its predecessor; Stone's disarranged chronology suggests that history itself is subject to the same kinds of rearrangement by
politicians and power-brokers, who either distort the historical record retrospectively or construct it in the moment through their covert manipulations. To highlight this Active emplotment of history, Stone represents his
cinematic history as a pastiche of famous quotes and walking cliches - an
especially apt choice when his narrative centers on a man as willing to
fabricate his own identity as Richard Nixon. Nixon is another great film in
the cinema of time, not because it emulates Citizen Kane's retrospective
structure, but because it turns Nixon's career into the perfect dramatization
of postmodernism's variable time and its emplotted, potentially mutable
history.
Notes
1. Norman Kagan identifies Nixon as a reworking of Citizen Kane (268), while Frank
Beaver thoroughly outlines the many parallels and homages in his essay "Citizen
Nixon."
2. We might also pardon Susan because, as the 2000 Presidential election reminded us,
Florida does in fact occupy two time zones.
3. Bernstein's revelation that Leland's father committed suicide further implies that Leland is willing his own death. Leland repeats his father's self-destruction, albeit far
more slowly and indirectly.
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4. A number of ominous associations create continuity between the two scenes. Stone
cuts from the Lincoln Room to Kennedy's invocation of Lincoln in the debate; still
more evocatively, he cuts from Nixon muttering "Why don't they just fucking shoot
me?" to a shot of Kennedy quoting Lincoln, the first President to be assassinated. The
cut not only connects two scenes, it implies that the "Bay of Pigs thing" Nixon alludes
to in the 1972 tape is causally related to the Kennedy assassination.
5. The Santa Anita sequence's many images of fallen or riderless horses symbolically reinforce these intimations of assassination conspiracies; they function as retrospective
allusions to John F. Kennedy's funeral, which itself portends his brother's fate.
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