(1985). Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 8:17-34
“Citizen Kane” and Psychoanalysis*: Film and
psychoanalysis (III)
Mikael Enckell
Citizen Kane's Starting-Point in the Past
The experience of understanding, in the highest sense of the word,
another human being or a human expression, for instance a work of art,
always presupposes that we also have been deeply emotionally moved
by this contact. As our emotional life functions according to original and
fundamental conceptual forms, it recognizes and acknowledges only
separate and individual phenomena but does not see abstract common
and general overall perspectives. This means that when faced with the
task of trying to understand another human being or his work, we can
orient ourselves in a scientific way in accordance with general laws and
tendencies only in relation to the most general issues in the field in
question. Most of the time we have to recourse to the individual and
temporarily unique starting points which, due to the variety of personal
nuances, gives the working method the character of handicraft or artistic
performance rather than that of scientific work in the traditional sense.
In a basic essay on the methods of psychoanalysis, “Zur Einleitung
der Behandlung” (1913), Freud compares psychoanalysis with a game of
chess and points out that in both these activities, one can only give
general advice about certain opening and concluding goals and features;
what takes place in between these relatively short events is too
multifarious to fit in within the framework of some general directives.
Since the writing of the essay, psychoanalysis has developed in a way
which hardly challenges the validity of Freud's parallel, rather the
contrary. The length of the individual analysis has multiplied, the interest
in
—————————————
Paper read at the Danish Psychoanalytic Society, December 1984.
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therapy has, relatively speaking, been pushed more into the background,
and the mental models and vocabulary have on the theoretical level
become so manifold and varied that–while simultaneously covering
more individual variations in the various phases of the process–they still
confirm the impression of rich variations.
The phenomenon which Freud described as “overdetermination” and
Waelder (1930) as “multiple function” in a psychical phenomenon also
indicates a trait in psychoanalytical thinking which is strange to ordinary
scientific thinking. While in general it is believed that the discovery of a
new background factor in relation to a series of events, annuls, or at least
considerably restricts, the importance of other observed causes,
psychoanalysis claims that this by no means needs to be the case in its
domain. The analyst seems to be calmly observing how the chains of
notions as well as the hypotheses increase in number and follow one
after another, without him feeling obliged–at least immediately–to make
a choice between these mutually different conceptual contents. This
acclaimed orthodoxy proves to be disturbingly heterodox.
The impression of an expanding quilt, composed of various bits and
pieces, e.g., language, concepts and models, is further strengthened by
the fact that most of the objections which through the years have been
raised against psychoanalysis later have been adopted and fully accepted
in psychoanalysis. This has happened for instance with some of Adler's
ideas, as also with the trauma of birth, introduced by Otto Rank, which
as a result of Mahler's presentations of the central rôle of the
individuation and separation process for the evolution of the individual,
has been reintroduced, even if in a modified form.
In psychoanalysis, the Archimedic place “that can move the earth”
(“give me a place to stand and I will move earth”) is the imperturbable
fundamental hypothesis about the unconscious and of its decisive
importance to the life and work of the human being, a hypothesis to
which psychoanalysis, in theory as well as in practice, constantly returns
to in order to use as a starting-point again, and which gives a certain
stability in the waving ocean of changing phenomena, views and
theories. The unconscious includes first of all repressed mental material,
e.g., thoughts, memories and notions, which at some time have been
conscious, but which later have been repressed due to the anxiety they
have caused, and, in the second place, primitive unconscious material
which has never been conscious because the mental apparatus has not
been able to mould it into conscious forms, for instance due to reduced
functional faculty in the individual's
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early life. This unconscious, which is completely free from notions and
unrestricted, works like a kind of “black hole” in the universe of the soul
and in its borderlands; in the transfer zone to the conscious, it constantly
generates impulses and notions with connections to archaic models and
primitive structures. Most often they are suppressed and remain
conscious only for a short time.
In the clinical situation, we take a passive stance for a long time and
only register the notions and fantasies that the patient and we ourselves
produce. By and by, certain themes and motives are crystallized and
recur which we note, and may comment on, and eventually a form of
cooperation is established, in which both patient and analyst account for
their own part of a common pattern which, due to the analyst's restraint,
chiefly illustrates important aspects of the patient's present and past inner
reality, even if the inner world of the analyst will also be reflected in
this common network of notions. In other words, there is a strikingly
strong subjective element in the analyst's work, a fact which the patient
(opposite side) does not fail to use and which is just as vain as shortsighted to deny. There is however a certain corrective element in the
constantly deliberative activity of the patient as it is he who decides
about the content and form within the framework of the sessions.
This is not the case when we approach a work of art with the
intention of learning to understand something from the meeting between
the work and the spectator–the only certain, objectively existing and at
the same time covered by an enigmatic veil–half enclosed in the work
and during the observation united with its other half generating from the
spectator's soul. Here we find ourselves in a domain where, to a far
greater extent, we are left at the mercy of the dominance of the subjective
element. The fact that different interpretative attempts have nevertheless
common features, even if they are presented as diametrical opposites,
indicates that there is an objective core in the experience.
Many useful compositions have been made of principally different
ways to psychoanalytically approach and examine the individual work;
the hitherto perhaps best one has been made by Meredith Ann Skura
(1981) in “The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytical Process”. In my
earlier essays on film and psychoanalysis (Enckell 1982, 1984) I have
indicated two approaches for the analysis of individual films using the
obvious parallel between film and dream as a prerequisite and
guideline. We can look for the latent core which moves us from behind
the manifest content of the film; the obvious primary starting point is our
own experience. In addition to
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this, there are two other possible and complementary starting points
outside ourselves: by using our biographical insight about the director's
life situation and about connections between the present situation and
constellations in his childhood, out of which a more-or-less general
human fantasy has crystallized, or by following the mood in the film, we
can orient ourselves towards the fundamental problem of which the film
represents an attemptive recast.
There is, however, no universally employable method of analysis. As
in the clinical situation, it seems wiser here to leave–without desperate
intellectual formulas and biased opinions–the initiative to the other part–
the work of art–and allow the meeting in our soul to form its own shape
with as few restrictions as possible. Only in this way can we give
maximum operative freedom to the forces which are significant to
psychoanalysis, and make it possible for these forces to lead us in the
direction of the central in our work and in our own life.
Referring inter alia to Flaubert's famous outcry: “Madame Bovary
that is me!”, it has been claimed that every work of art is partly or
wholly an autobiography. The creative processes are however different.
There are artists whose works are direct, from the beginning intentional
reflections of their own personalities–or even more often of the myths
and ideals of themselves which they confess to–and there are those who
begin far away from themselves and from their conscious personality,
consciously humble and self-effacing due to a committing notion of the
Ideal and the Work to which the own self is only an insignificant
appendix. Representatives of the latter humble school of thought also end
up making a self portrait, even if it happens via a long detour which for
friends of fast and uncomplicated thinking, may appear superfluous.
Nevertheless the same paradox which Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust
mentioned in their criticism of realistic art and the decay it implies, also
applies here: mayby the truth can be reached only through long flanking
movements, sometimes passing the area of lies.
Orson Welles undeniably belongs to the group of artists who in their
work depart from an idealized fantasy of their own person, and the
product is quite clearly a monument of its most extraordinary author. One
could say that Welles primarily devotes himself with the greatest of
pleasure to telling traveller's tales of himself and of his own peculiarity,
and only secondarily penetrates into the mythomanic activity and its
relationship to art. In “F for Fake” we are asked if the fake and the actual
work of art are not in fact identical, in the same way as in the Chinese
tradition the
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perfect copy is considered superior to the original but deficient piece.
Concerns of priority and copyright have ceased to apply. It is also
characteristic that Orson Welles' career started in the spring of 1939
with a work faking reality in such a realistic way that tens of thousands
of citizens left their homes in panic after hearing the dramatization of–
note the similarity of terms–Welles' “War of the Worlds”. One could say
that while an artist like Marcel Proust idealizes art and humbly serves
the work he bears inside, an artist like Orson Welles works in a
completely opposite manner: he builds up an illusion of himself, a
monument, in order to–only as of secondary importance–create a
significant work. The process and its two ends, at the beginning and at
the end, are the same, but the directions are completely opposite.
Orson Welles is first and foremost a myth creator with himself as the
subject. Two antithetic processes are present throughout Citizen Kane:
the construction and the dissolution of the myth. We can see before us
Pauline Kael's famous outcry of accusations against Welles for having
taken the honour in the film for other people's merits, as a result of the
self-deification Welles as a director reflects, despite all possible
concious attempts to be modest, and the anger this may bring out in other
people. Something similar to the famous fable of the turtle and the ox,
e.g., a confirmation of the strength of the innermost message in the film
disguised in a polemical argument.
Citizen Kane's irremovable position at the top of motion picture
history corresponds well to the arrogance in the film, but also to the
arrogance which was characteristic not only to the heroic period in
movie history, with all its ambitions to be the “Gesamtkunstwerk” of our
time after the decline of opera at the turn of the century, but also to its
first great masters: Griffith, Eisenstein and Pabst. As is known,
Eisenstein proclaimed that art, through cinema, would finally reconquer
the place in cultural life which was naturally its own during the
Renaissance. It is also evident that some of the film technical devices
which have contributed to the fame of Citizen Kane derive from the same
sphere of fantasies of megalomania: the all-seing and bewitching divine
Eye, which penetrates wherever it wants, sees everything, communicates
all.
On the other hand, as clearly as Citizen Kane represents a monument
over a semi-supernatural Mightiness, equally irresistably, it is attracted
by the diametrical counterpole of the monument, by littleness and
complete helplessness. The absurd dilemma in this constant tension
between the two counterpoles is already introduced when little Charles
Kane is
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adopted by a bank. Here we have the same fundamental contrasts as in
Kafka's The Trial and in Orson Welles' film version of the book. The
counterpoles are represented by Josef K. and the Court, Josef K. and the
Lawyer (played by Welles himself) or by the man from the country who
tries to gain access to Law and the terrible mightiness of Law. Due to his
helplessness before the Law and the massive majesty of its Guardian, the
man is content to anxiously wait, growing older and finally dying without
ever having dared to enter the gate which had been meant only for him.
It is not difficult to speculate about the experiences and fantasies
which lie behind Charles Foster Kane's tragedy or about their connection
with Orson Welles' own life story and the early loss of his parents. It
appears obvious that the essence of the film is linked with attempts to
mould intense and powerful experiences of depression and helpnessness,
loneliness and abandonment by reaching for ideas of greatness, power
hunger and neglect or perhaps our blindness to see our fellow men as
human beings with feelings, needs and ideals of their own. It is not far to
see the “Rosebud-symbolism” as a metaphor of the sensual satisfaction
which Charles Kane was deprived of and that Charles Foster Kane
deprived himself of in his adult life only to recreate, at his death
moment, after a lifelong walk in the desert, the lost object, the mother's
breast, and be reunited with it.
However incontrovertible and close at hand such an interpretation
may seem, in some respect it leaves us in a jam, half emptihanded, as
intellectual reconstructions of significant contexts often can do. They
seem both true and in a rational sense convincing, or at least probable,
but they tell us peculiarly little because life seems to have somehow
escaped from the formulations. In this respect, the psychological and
intellectual fundamental structure reminds us of some Hitchcock movies,
for instance “Marnie” which, however, in its intellectually distancing
renouncement of its own content operates with considerably rougher
methods. Here we are reminded of the story about the Polish Jew who
meets an aquaintance on a train and asks: “Where are you going?”, “To
Lublin” is the reply, “Why are you lying?” replies the first Jew upset.
“When you say that you are going to Lublin I am supposed to believe that
you are going to Krakau. But now I happen to know that you really are
going to Lublin. So: Why are you lying?”
The intellectual truth is not always psychologically true, at least it
does not represent–despite its probablity–the whole psychological truth,
but some relevant part is missing, which would make it alive inside us.
In Citizen Kane, the feelings of loneliness and despair, which the film
deals
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with in a distant and alienated way, represent the suppressed part of the
truth, the part which is disguised by the simple intellectual pattern.
This does not need to and should not be understood as criticism of the
film. Rather the contrary. The director's approach is a consistent
expression of the entire mood in the film: the incapacity to confront the
profound American tragedy which in a way is buried in Orson Welles'
first motion picture, a tragedy which he tells and conceals at the same
time. This “halfness” is thus also an indication of how deeply Orson
Welles was personally involved by the theme of the film. One can say
that Citizen Kane represents an attempt to overcome a gap or a cliff, an
attempt which fails in life but succeeds in death. By stressing the heroic
silence, the silence which does not become eloquent until in its extension
in the life hereafter, the film represents something central in traditional
American behavior.
Death is present in many ways in this film. Firstly as a prelude and in
the story's function as a biography of a great man. But it is also clear that
the foremost adversary of the myth creator is death and his most
important aim is, at least to some extent, to win over this eventually
invincible Adversary, to create a Monument which defies Time and
restricts the perishability of everything human; in other words an
ambition related to that which made Kane build his Xanadu. The latter
project is an American equivalent to the, in the romantic sense, more
attractive, and equally lonely monuments which Ludwig II had built:
Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee and Neuschwanstein. Psychologically, all
these constructions became some kind of necropoles where silence
almost echoed of the signs of life, which their building masters tragically
enough were incapable of filling them with.
But this aspect of the presence of death in Citizen Kane is hardly
significant as an approach to the essence of the film, as neither is its
explicit, almost overexplicit, intellectualizing psychological background
structure. We know little of death: Epicuros' statement is still valid:
“where we are, is not death and where death is, are not we”. All images
about death derive from what we fear in life, or what we long for. There
we find the horror of loneliness and abandonment, fear of being excluded
as incompetent and inferior, of being tortured and beaten, but also hopes
of meeting again the object of our childhood.
In Citizen Kane, we meet first and foremost the “living dead”, the
result of a petrification and mumification process present throughout the
film which leads to total immobility and which may remind us of
Hölderlin's poem “An der Hoffnung”:
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“Wo bist Du, wenig lebt ich, doch atmet kalt
Mein Abend schon, Und stille, den Schatten gleich,
Bin ich schon hier; und schon gesanglos
schlummert das schaudernde Herz im Busen.”
The film is a portrait, filled with love as well as hate, of a man who
is both great and unfit to live. It is a portrait and a self portrait at the
same time. A fundamental process in the centre of Welles' work is the
split, painful, but also triumphant identification with a father who died
prematurely and therefore was missed in a way difficult to articulate.
There is something undefiniably heavy in identifying oneself with a giant
unfit to life and being concious of having outlived him at the same time.
Orson Welles' appeal to these sad and tragic giants, Kane, Quinlan, and
Arkadin for instance, is balanced by his victory over them. There is a
constant double perspective, a kind of “bluff” which may have a
connection with this unresolved conflict: we never get a definite answer
to where we in fact stand in relation to these massive and deficient
giants. Neither in Welles' films nor in life.
The Healing and Integrating Function of the Paradox–and of
the Work of Art
In the company of great spirits and talents, we sometimes move as in
the vicinity of desolate emptiness, sometimes it is even as if one were
standing at the edge of a cliff. The absence of any kind of related “horror
vacui”–experience might even be an indication that in the context of the
particular text, series of words or images at hand, we are submitted to
the secure and reassuring influence of lack of intellectual faculty, a
situation often preferred to more adventurous excursions into more
disquieting and innovative perspectives.
The reactions before the primarily unknown are however far from
explicitly negative or rejective. It is–as it was perhaps for Columbus'
and Magellans' sailors–with terror as well as with pleasure that we
approach the brink of the hitherto known and familiar world. The
element of pleasure becomes particularly striking in the unexpected and
relatively sudden encounters with the unknown which take place when
we are confronted with an–often funny–paradox, which like a prism both
concentrates and disperses central aesthetic problems.
The paradox apparently represents a special kind of joke; one could
say that it is a joke with the ambition to communicate an–at least
relative–truth in an absurd form. In the classification of jokes made by
Freud in
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“Jokes and Their Relations with the Unconscious” (1904), the paradox
would more rightly have belonged to the tendentious jokes than to the
non-tendentious ones which make us laugh through a primitive pun
mechanism. As to the birth of the paradox, the same formula could be
applied which Freud outlined in his book about jokes: an aggressive or
sexually preconscious impulse, which in its original form is not suitable
to be expressed, is pushed aside and into the unconscious. There it is
moulded and transformed according to the processes characteristic to the
unconscious: condensation and shifting of different elements of ideas,
transformation to the opposite, symbolization, etc., and then it reemerges into consciousness, externally changed, and as if from the
outside, this time like a fancy loaded with many meanings some of which
can be understood against the background of the impulse originally
rejected as unsuitable.
The paradox–like the metaphor of a poem–bears clear traces of the
regions it has passed through, of mental layers which are not subjected to
the tyranny of concrete reality and the demand for rationality. Like sense
of humour, the paradox allows us the feeling that we can to some extent
liberate ourselves from the yoke of reality and that there is something in
us which is associated with the divine, all-embracing and superior
elements in life.
In his memoires, Saint Simon tells of a reconciliation audience
arranged before King Louis XIV for the great Condé who once had
fought his distant relation, the French king. The old gout-stricken general
walked with difficulty–and slowly–up the stairs to the King to whom he
apologized for the delay and upon which the young monarch replied:
“When one like you, dear cousin, has been covered with laurels, one can
but move slowly!”.
Even in such an amiable duel where common courtesy–a polite “by
all means!”–has become a gesture of deep respect from youth before
admirable old age, we feel a light breeze of eternity, e.g., we notice the
marks of unconscious rephrasing. Louis XIV's manner of expression
shows that it was born in a surrounding where the weight of honour is
understood quite concretely, and in this expression for his entire
personality, the king gratefully returns the great Condé the concession to
kneel before the throne and before his sovereign. And in the bouquet
with which the Majesty returns the gesture, it is the flower that springs
from the unconscious, that stands out the brightest; it is the one which
shows–despite all reasons of State–the strong personal commitment, thus
increasing the value of the amiable gesture.
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In other words, we also find here–as in the paradox–a vast expression
which contains a gap, the gap between the conscious, rational layer and
the unconscious, irrational layer in the human mind. As the vault defies
the law of gravity and succeeds to join separate elements, thus having a
deep affect on the still impressionable spectator, we bow with
admiration when hearing words which bear signs of psychic depth. It is
in itself a paradox that the admirable, the “divine” element, springs from
the original and archaic in our soul.
The requisites of the paradox are in fact tragic. The paradox is
primarily based on capitulation before man's incapacity to grasp reality
and to reach the truth along any kind of “direct” ways. Like the citizens
in countries characterized by oppression and censorship (Hungary 1956,
Czechoslovakia 1968) or like population groups living in depressing and
insecure external conditions (the Jews in Eastern Europe) have
developed the joke into a means to promote survival, the paradox is a
means of expression for the individual who despairs of his possibilities
to ever reach and keep to the truth in this reality. In this sense, the
paradox is the child of defeat and capitulation.
But not uniquely, or even primarily. The paradox is also the
consequence of a rebellion against this defeat. It is as if the creator of the
paradox said: “It is not allowed for me to reach the truth in the way I had
hoped to, and along the ways I have been taught. Well, let me with my
absurdities defy the unrighteous conditions in which I am forced to live,
and in the form of lies throw fragments of the truth in the face of the
stupid and ruling representatives of the majority!” The paradox is in
other words a challenge succeeding a tragedy.
And finally it is also a craved triumph and victory as it sets itself
above the laws of reality and rationality, and returns to the principles of
the archaic and infantile mind's games with sounds, words, contrasts and
frivolities, ruled by basic pleasure needs. It is along these very paths of
irrationality and childishness long since abandoned by the adult man, that
the paradox quite by surprise discovers the truth to which the mature
mind has been blind.
It is not difficult to discern all these factors: melancholy and
renouncement before the discouraging insufficiency of our intellectual
faculty, followed by defiance and rebellion against various limitations in
our possibilities, as well as the triumph of–at least partly–turning defeat
into victory, like for instance in Tertullian's famous historic paradox
“Credo quia absurdum”. The marks of these three phases in the
immediate background
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of the paradox are clear and undeniable, also in the life-story of the best
known creator of paradoxes, Oscar Wilde. His need to constantly defy
the impossible finally led to the definitive and daring case against the
Marquis of Queensberry.
The provocative aesthetic thesis which Oscar Wilde in his need to
cross, at least western European, literary traditions, presented in “The
Decay of Lying” (1891) in the form of paradoxes, had, however, far
more significant consequences than the tragic end of his life story.
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would
cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you
are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the
Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If
you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese
people are the deliberate selfconscious creation of certain individual
artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great
native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see
that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual
people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English
people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing
curious or extraordinary about them.
In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such
country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters
recently went to the Land of the chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of
seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were
a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the
inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Dowdeswells Gallery showed
only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have
said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you
desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go
to Tokyo. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the
work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the
spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you
will go some afternoon and sit in the Park of stroll down Piccadilly and
if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it
anywhere.”
The paradox represents here–as elsewhere–an attempt to admit a
defect in reality and in ourselves in a supposedly easy and concentrated
form, an arrow shot in the direction of a central and mutual defect in this
unsatisfactory, unclear and problematic relationship. And it deals with a
relevant aspect of the function of art which is to help us with the aid of
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illusion–the essence of our inner reality is undeniably illusionary–to
keep existence together and concise despite the fact that reality has for us
irrevocably double roots. This function–to hold before us a piece of
objective reality subjectively reformed, and thus to reinforce the double
origin of our association to reality–is a function which realistic art
denies and as far as it is capable of following its own programme,
leaves unsolved, consequently abandoning both its performer and
audience. In other words, it offers stones instead of bread. In this
respect, there is an element of philosophically motivated and
aesthetically consistent criticism in the unsophisticated superficial
audience preference of “soap-operas” like “Dallas” or “Dynasty” over
dramatizations of grey reality.
Oscar Wilde's sophisticated paradoxes about the function of art and
of the artist in “The Decay of Lying” illustrate both as to their form and
content the twofold dilemma of man and the artist: placed on the narrow
strip between two realities–the outer one, which we with certainly know
very little of, and the inner one, which changes with even less
predictability–we have to try keep these two realities together and apart
at the same time in our consciousness for fear that we loose our
orientation and foothold in the world. Art helps us to keep them together:
in the artistic experience, they appear together and we share the
experience–at least in our imagination–with someone from the outer
reality: with the artist or the art consumer.
The artistic experience joins the inner world with the outer one, thus
making us more complete, and it joins us with someone else, thus making
us less alone. Schopenhauer shows how the word and the monument also
in a larger context work as pieces of a giant integrating process:
“Death continuously interrupts and splits the consciousness of
mankind, but literature reconstructs it to such an entity that a thought
awakened in an ancestor can eventually be continued by a great
grandchild; the art of writing prevents the dissolution of mankind and its
consciousness into innumerable ephemeral individuals. Literature defies
the unrelentingly hurrying time which goes hand in hand with the mind
that begins to forget. Like the written monuments, monuments of stone,
which may be even older than the written ones, can be regarded as
attempts in the same direction. For who could believe that the rulers,
who during years and years at unmeasureble costs made men build
pyramides, monoliths, cliff graves, obelisks, temples and palaces which
stand unchanged for thousands of years, had only themselves in mind,
their short time on earth, they who could not even witness the completion
of the work, or would
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have given consideration to the ruthless ambition required by the
brutality of quantity?–Their true aim was apparently to speak to their
successors, to get in contact with them and thus to re-establish a kind of
unity in the consciousness of mankind.”
The Starting Points in the Future of Welles' Citizen Kane and
Visconti's the Gattopardo
With his attraction to the extravagant and with his marked preference
to reach out for the truth via long flanking movements among the
mystifying and reality-distorting creations of story-telling, the artist in
Orson Welles possesses many of the qualities that Oscar Wilde in “The
Decay of Lying” looked for in the artists who he hoped would reinstall
art after its realistic decay period of alleged reality-depiction in the
1880s. It is in complete consistence with this rôle that Orson Welles has
made himself known as the spokesman of formally brilliant, in essence
profoundly tragic, paradoxes. We need only think of Harry Lime's cue
(N.B. the line has been written by Welles himself) in the Third Man
about how Renaissance Italy with all its brutalities, murders and wars
produced a Michelangelo and a Leonardo, while modern Switzerland
with all its peace, democracy and respect for the individual has created,
what?–Yes, the cuckoo clock. Or like Mr. Arkadins' anecdote in
“Confidential Report” (1955):
“A scorpion wanted to cross a river and asked for help from a frog.
‘No thank you’ said the frog ‘if I take you on my back you can sting me
and a scorpion's sting means death.’ ‘What is the logic in that?’ asked the
scorpion. ‘No scorpion can be regarded as illogical. If I sting you, you
will die and I will drown.’ The frog was convinced and took the
scorpion on his back but in the middle of the river he felt an intense pain
and he understood that he had after-all been stung by the scorpion.
‘Logical’, cried the dying frog as he was drowning dragging the scorpion
with him to the depths. ‘There is no logic in this!’ ‘No, I know’ replied
the scorpion ‘but I can't help it–it is in my character’. Let's drink a toast
to character!”
The truth about man, that is about ourselves is, according to Orson
Welles, in itself so painful that in order to endure it at all, it must be
expressed as a paradox or in a colossal form. The tragedy at the bottom
of our hearts is connected with our incapacity to open ourselves and see
the surrounding world–a reflection of previously experienced
disappointments. But in the case of Welles, this fundamental and
desolate pain can be expressed only in massive quantities as stylisations
or caricatures. Like
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the palace in Citizen Kane's Xanadu, the majestic blocks of fantasies rise
higher and higher, thus simultaneously exposing ever more ruthlessly the
destitution that they originally were ment to ban and conceal.
The name Xanadu from Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan also points to
this in giant formations fixed and frozen, unsurmountable and at the same
time denied despair:
“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”
The impression of having to deal with supernatural things in Welles'
films–or to quote Coleridge “demon-lovers”–also suggests to us that they
are some kind of outcasts, “fallen” angles or dethroned half-gods. These
demonic attributes are more a measure of the depth of the fall than mere
dependence on their imposing majesty.
There is a touch of exile in Orson Welles' giants, not least in Charles
Foster Kane, despite his proclaimed, and, at the same time, emphasized
Americanness. But these characters are no “princes in exile” and the first
of them, Kane himself, is anything but a tradition-bound aristocrat, more
likely the archetype of the traditionless barbarian. In this respect, he also
reminds us of Genghis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan, of whom the
encyclopedia says: “Mongolian ruler, founder of the Mongol dynasty in
China, born 1216, died 1294, conquered the Chinese Empire in 1279.”
The Khan-character in the poem as well as in Welles' film (Kane),
emphasizes the tragically lonely, and–not withstanding the emphatically
stressed America identity, or is this element not more a core, an identitycreating hollowness in this nation of immigrants?–the fatherlandless and
homeless trait: without association to anything permanent outside the
own personality.
Orson Welles' giants, starting from Citizen Kane, are bringers of
misfortune in their desperate attempt to silence, by taking control of ever
more, the child in themselves that is yearning for warmth and care but
unable to love. Kane's two wives could with reason refer to Coleridge's
lines about Kublai Khan's constructions:
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“A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”
But they are unhappy and misfortunate not only in their impotent
hunger for people and for human warmth which they more-or-less are
unable to return. In the search for reference points and in the constantly
recurring experience of being left outside, they can direct their greedy
need of being included also towards art, but then also as relatively
feelingless barbarians.
The same way as the portrait of Kane has partly been depicted with
the newspaper king Hearst as a model, Hearst's San Simeon in
California was an obvious model for Kane's Xanadu in Welles' film.
George Bernard Shaw's characterisation of Hearst's residence “This is
probably what God would have done, had he had the money” tells us
something of what feelings this collection of buildings and of art brings
out in the visitor.
Orson Welles' description of how Kane's attempts to break into a
cultural context leads to nothing but deeper solitude, is based on the
understanding that he is uncapable of devoting himself to anything but
himself. Unwilling to allow himself be absorbed relatively
unconditionally by the individual work, he gathers around himself statues
and monuments in hundreds; like an unsatiable Moloch he consumes
everything, thus leaving himself with nothing. The picture of Kane
searching for art works in Europe reminds us of Cicero's description in
the Senate of the Roman magistrate Gaius Verres in Sicily. Caught by the
desire to have all the art treasures which surrounded him on the
predominantly Greek island, he shunned no means–neither theft, extortion
nor murder–to appropriate these mostly religious artworks, whose
spiritual and traditional dimensions he denied by his actions. One could
say that the more eagerly the barbarians Gaius Verres and Charles Foster
Kane, who are perishing for the holy, reach for this element in existence,
the more do they distance themselves from it, and this because of their
tragic incapacity to give in to and enter a context larger than themselves.
Towards the end of the film, Kane becomes constantly increasing
mummified, becoming more and more “a living corpse”. As the butterfly
larva forms a cocoon and becomes a pupae after an active and mobile
stage in its development, Kane is entering a passive and introvert stage
in his life, where all greedy attempts to fill the inner defect have ended
in failure. And in this almost quasicataleptic situation, which is
reminiscent of death,
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but also of the infant's way of being, the fragmentary enlightenment
before death and the death moment itself are prepared. Towards the end
of his life, Kane finally abandons his almost vampire-like passion to
recapture the lost experience of life by exploiting other people's vitality.
Thus we can regard the portrait of Charles Foster Kane as a series of
fantasies of a missed and feared father, dead and lost, but at the same
time preserved as a macabre identification object. “Citizen Kane” is the
story of almost complete loneliness, of such immense abandonment that it
excludes Kane from everything which gives an experience of profounder
association with existence. He belongs to the brotherhood of the
definitely excluded: like the barbarians and vampires, he dwells with
envy in the borderlands of the abodes of the more fortunate, brooding on
plans to conquer a position of equality. Here we are touching very
closely upon the content of the vampire fantasies where the furious and
predatory vampire–dead but still alive–chiefly reflects the conflicts
between guilt and devotion, relief and regret, which the living and the
abandoned struggle with before the memory of the beloved deceased.
Our knowledge of death is in the real sense non-existent. Epicuros'
saying is still valid, that “so long as we exist, death is not with us, but
when death comes, then we do not exist”. In the conceptual sphere of
psychoanalysis, fear of death and images of death have always been
related to earlier, more-or-less traumatically linked fears: abandonment,
physical injuries or, positive fantasies of reunion with painfully lost
objects. In this, far from complete, list we can include the rôle of living
dead which “Citizen Kane” portrays and where Orson Welles'
identification with a dead, long-missed and feared father image is the
expression of the problematic combination of undelivered sorrow, anger
and grief. Considering our inclination to ascribe the incomprehensible
and formless to earlier experiences, it is not hard to understand that this
reaction in someone who has been hit by a traumatic loss, results in a
condition of increasing rigor mortis, and becomes one of the metaphors
with the aid of which the traumatized individual, and we ourselves, make
the terrifying and totally unknown in death easier to deal with.
The rigor mortis process, which is a very central theme in “Citizen
Kane”, is characteristic to primitive reactions to traumatic events,
whether they are marked by feelings of terror or abandonment and it is
also, in a transformed sense, typical of the total egocentricity and the
reduced mental mobility of traumatized individuals. This rigor mortis of
the soul is first and foremost an attempt to exclude new overwhelming
and
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powerful impressions by reducing the horizon of experiences as much as
possible. The action may be temporary and transitional but it may also
be a permanent innate incapability to subordinate external impressions,
inter alia, artistic or religious experiences, as well as other experiences
which would presuppose devotion, admiration and momentary selfeffacement.
The rigid feature which is deaf to history as well as to the future, and
which Orson Welles portrays with fascination and repulsion in Citizen
Kane and where the only outlet is the question “Rosebud?” which
remains unanswered to the very death moment, could be compared with
a diametrically opposite life and death strategy exemplified by another
of the Giants of movie history, namely Visconti's the Leopard. If Kane is
a novice in history, a man without true respect for the past and equipped
with a novice's often unruly reliance on his own capacity to place
himself above the limits of existance and his own personality, Count
Salina's roots are deep in an old feudal pattern, and he has learned the
need to give in before the inevitable–even at the top of his riches and
privileges–and–like the noble beast of prey that he identifies himself and
his family with–he has learned the envigorating in adapting to the climate
and time presently at hand. Contrary to what we in progressive delirium
may imagine, tradition does not mean stiffness and unadaptability, but it
gives us in fact guidelines, patterns and alternative formation
possibilities. The importance that the traditional ways of thinking
attribute to the past and to ideas, liberates the individual from the
unlimited captivity in himself and in his own perspective, and thus
tradition stimulates increased mobility. The same way that the paradox
reveals an otherwise too fugitive truth, a faithfully preserved leitmotiv
enables an infinite number of variations.
When looking at Visconti's, Lampedusa's and Lancaster's Leopard, it
appears obvious that the task of serving as a–soon passed–bridge, which
gets its value from what it has been able to save from the past to
posterity, is not enough to relieve us from the pain of giving up. This is
illustrated in the scene where Salinas is inspecting his face in the mirror
as night is turning to morning and the ball is coming to an end. With the
unemptied chamber pots in the bathroom in the background we see his
eyes being filled with tears as he prepares to return home alone. The
descent has began and can be accepted with sorrow as he knows that
there are loved successors as well as admired predecessors. This
insight, which invites humility, also gives us the capacity to perceive
without unsurpassable bitterness the limits of our own existence and
faculties.
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References
Enckell, M. (1982). Film and Psychoanalysis Scand. Psychoanal. Rev.
5:149-163 [→]
Enckell, M. (1984). A Study in Scarlet Scand. Psychoanal. Rev. 7:71-89
[→]
Freud, S. (1913). On beginning the treatment. Standard Edition 12. [→]
Freud, S. (1904). Jokes and their relations with the unconscious.
Standard Edition 8. [→]
Schopenhauer, A. (1859). Världsreflexer. Stockholm: Björck et
Börjesson, 1923.
Skura, M.A. (1981). The literary use of the psychoanalytic process.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. [→]
Waelder, R. (1930). Psychoanalysis: observation, theory, applications.
New York: International Universities Press, 1976.
Wilde, O. (1891). Intentions. London: Methuen, 1913.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Enckell, M. (1985). “Citizen Kane” and Psychoanalysis*. Scand.
Psychoanal. Rev., 8:17-34
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