movie review – Movies Up Close

Citizen Kane (1941), directed by and starring Orson Welles, is often regarded as the greatest American film ever made. It is ranked as #1 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years 100 Movies list, and has topped the Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll almost every time it has been eligible.

But more casual movie fans often question the movie’s premier standing. Perhaps it’s because, unlike with more recent classics like The Godfather (1972), there’s little drama to Citizen Kane‘s plot, because it’s mostly told in retrospect. It may also be due to a perceived lack of style, a flaw which no one could accuse Pulp Fiction (1994) or Schindler’s List (1993) of having. Whatever the reason, Citizen Kane eludes some contemporary movie fans.

My goal, then, is to explore the themes of the movie, especially concerning the meaning of its famous ending, in an attempt to make Kane easier to appreciate for skeptics.

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The structure of Citizen Kane, for those in need of refreshing, and so that I can reference it in my analysis, consists roughly of six segments:

Charles Foster Kane dies, and journalists subsequently compose a newsreel outlining the major events of his life. Dissatisfied, the editor sends a reporter, Jerry Thompson, to uncover the meaning of Kane’s last word.
Thompson reads the diary of Walter Parks Thatcher, a banker who, at Mrs. Kane’s behest, took a young Charles away from his Colorado home to be educated.
Thompson interviews Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s former manager. Bernstein describes Kane’s success in increasing circulation of the Inquirer.
Thompson interviews Jedidiah Leyland, Kane’s former friend. Leyland describes Kane’s personal life, and how it affected his political and journalistic career.
Thompson interviews Susan Alexander, Kane’s second wife. Alexander details Kane’s bizarre attempts to turn her into an opera star and describes how she later left him.
Thompson leaves Xanadu, and a slow tracking camera shot reveals the secret of “Rosebud.”

Consider the elegance of the storytelling. The four main interviewees (#2-5) tell, in conjunction, a coherent story of Kane’s life. First, Thatcher’s diary describes Kane’s financial story. Then Bernstein, in perfect segue, tells of how Kane’s operation of his major financial venture—the Inquirer—was influenced by Kane’s own personal qualities, notably charisma and determination. Leyland then reveals how those same qualities eventually led to Kane’s political and marital ruin and a decline in the Inquirer’s journalistic standards. Alexander completes the portrait by expanding on Kane’s dark side, especially regarding his inflexible, controlling nature, and his perceived attempts to be loved without offering love of his own.

As I said: an elegant, enjoyable construction. But other movies have elegant constructions, maybe even equally elegant, and they don’t receive the same accolades. The intricate portrayal of Kane’s positive and negative qualities deserves high recognition as well, but, again, lesser known movies also feature complex character portrayals.

Citizen Kane only truly separates itself in its last sequence, beginning with Thompson being asked, “What did you find out about him, Jerry?” and he responding, “Not much, really.”

This might seem like a strange response, given the four well-told stories he’s heard. But he has a point: despite the elegant storytelling, what have we really learned about Kane? The interviews illustrate various chronicles that were covered in the newsreel that the journalists had already put together: the rise and fall of Kane’s finances, the rise and fall of the Inquirer, and the rise and fall of Kane’s two marriages and political career. About the most interesting thing we see through the interviews is the recurring theme, emphasized by Leyland and Alexander, of Kane wanting love without giving any in return. As Thompson summarizes, however, that doesn’t amount to much.

Plus, every one of the living interviewees ends their contribution by passing Thompson on to another person, insisting that this new interviewee is instead the best candidate to shed light on Kane’s life. Even Alexander, who was married to Kane for years, believes that Raymond the butler, who subsequently offers essentially no information, can give more insight than she. The interviewees know that they could never gain access to Kane’s deepest self.

Tragically, this also means that no one, with the possible exception of Kane’s deceased mother, ever really knew him, since the four interviewees (five, counting Raymond) were supposedly those closest to him in life. Since Thompson can’t answer his boss’s question “Who was he?” even with all five stories put together, it seems that no one ever will.

But wait.

There is in fact one more interviewee. It isn’t a person, or any character at all. The final interviewee is Welles’ camera, which, unlike the characters in the film, solves for us the mystery of “Rosebud.”

Right before this dramatic reveal, Thompson contemplates what it would have meant to solve the mystery. He is dismissive:

Thompson: “Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything… I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a… piece in a jigsaw puzzle… a missing piece.”

The tension between this quotation and the subsequent “Rosebud” reveal is the heart of the movie. Clearly, Welles’ sly camera thinks it’s found the key to Kane’s lock, a key that Thompson doesn’t believe exists. Does it? Can a word explain a man’s life?

Each time I watch Citizen Kane, I feel differently. Sometimes I side with Thompson: a man’s life is indeed so complex, I decide, that “Rosebud” by necessity leaves so much untouched.

But other times, incredibly, I believe the camera. And it is in these instances when I see clearly the case for Citizen Kane‘s eminence. “Rosebud” comes at us not as a trick, as with other surprising movie endings, but with an aesthetic majesty, a confidence—shared by all great works of art—that its image touches all of life, that it has somehow packaged the incomprehensible into something that its audience can experience.

In this case, the incomprehensible is the loneliness felt by a boy who was jarringly taken from home and was never able to form a true relationship again. He was not “a man who got everything he wanted and lost it,” as Thompson offers, but a man who never had anything, at least not in the way of proper companionship, since his childhood, and who spent an unsuccessful adult life trying to figure out how to get it. Faced with impending death, he can only turn to the happiness he felt before money and fame.

The themes of loneliness and the search for companionship, however, are important to more than just the character of Charles Foster Kane. He may be the most extremely isolated character in the film, but he isn’t the only one who struggles with interpersonal connection. In fact, all of the characters are unimpressive in this regard. Thatcher has his items stodgily stored in a depressing, impersonal library. Bernstein is amiable, but there’s also a sadness to him, as if he wants nothing more than to have someone to chat with, and now that he does, he’s already resigned to the impending end of the conversation. Leyland is clearly a loner at the nursing home, unable even to connect with the nurses. And Alexander appears isolated to the point of clinical depression.

Forming human connections is perhaps the most difficult challenge of life. There are so many obstacles to it—pride and fear prominent among them—and for some, like Charles Foster Kane, those obstacles prove too great. But Welles isn’t deterred by this. The genius of Citizen Kane is to convincingly assert that despite the often-insurmountable difficulties of loving and knowing each other, there is for each of us an emotional, human story.

How many films, even well-made films, are ultimately only Kane before the Rosebud reveal—only empty character portraits, maybe interesting and coherent but still lacking life? How many of our own relationships in real life are Kane pre-Rosebud? Most of them? All of them?

Recall the fence sign that opens and closes the movie: “NO TRESPASSING”. This is an easy metaphor for Kane’s demeanor: he lets no one too close, shutting out those who would have been friends and lovers. But have we, by witnessing the secret of “Rosebud,” done the seemingly impossible—have we trespassed on Kane? Depending on your opinion, the second and final shot of the sign is either frustrated and defeated, like Thompson leaving for the train, or ironic: the victorious camera mocking the naysayers.

Everyone has different reactions to great pieces of art, but after a well-timed viewing of Citizen Kane, I personally feel tremendous optimism, as if loneliness, although still very real, had been demonstrated to be unimportant. Charles Foster Kane couldn’t share his story or his self with anyone—but he tried, didn’t he? And that, Welles illustrates with the authority of a master, may be the most human thing that one can do.

–Jim Andersen

David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), a surrealist film involving an amnesiac, a Hollywood conspiracy, and a blossoming lesbian relationship, is one of the strangest and best movies I’ve ever seen. If you’ve seen it too, you may be looking for an explanation, which I will provide. After doing so, I will go on to admire a few of the movie’s best scenes.

As has been surmised by others, Mulholland Dr. is actually the story of the descent into depression and suicide of Diane Selwyn, a failed young actress. Selwyn is one of two characters in the movie played by Naomi Watts; the other is the perky Betty Elms, who has much more screen time. Selwyn, the movie’s true protagonist, only appears without explanation about three quarters of the way through the movie, waking up in a house where Betty and the amnesiac Rita had previously found only a rotting corpse. Adding to the strangeness is that Diane is shown to somehow know Rita, but instead calls her Camilla Rhodes, the name of a different character who appeared earlier.

The missing piece to this wacky puzzle, and to the many others that will leave viewers howling after the final “Silencio,” is that the first three quarters of the movie—the portion featuring Betty and Rita—is dreamt, likely drug-assisted, by Diane. Rita’s car crash and the subsequent detective work, Adam Kesher’s series of misfortunes, the love between Rita and Betty, and the various tangential subplots that go essentially nowhere are all part of this dream, and they can all be traced back to major events that occur in Diane’s real life, which are revealed in a series of flashbacks during the last quarter of the movie.

If you re-watch the film with this structure in mind, it will be fairly easy to follow. The opening scene after the jitterbug dance sequence, for example, consists of a first person viewpoint shot in which an unseen character, breathing heavily, falls on a pillow.

The film’s real, non-dream narrative, told quickly in the movie’s final act, is as follows: Diane Selwyn (played by Naomi Watts), winner of a recent jitterbug competition in Deep River, Ontario, moves to Hollywood as an aspiring actress. She meets Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Herring) on the movie set of The Sylvia North Story and the two become lovers. Camilla, however, soon enters a relationship with director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), and her career continues to ascend while Diane’s flounders. Camilla ends their relationship, but attempts to remain friends and invites Diane to a party at Adam’s house, where Adam appears ready to propose to Camilla. Furious and depressed, Diane then seeks out a hitman (Mark Pelligrino) to kill Camilla, which he succeeds in doing, as indicated by the agreed-upon placement of a blue key in Diane’s apartment. Diane is haunted by guilt and loss, and when detectives knock on her door, presumably to question her about Camilla, she commits suicide.

But how to explain the events and characters of the earlier scenes that constitute Diane’s dream? This is the real interest of the movie. Firstly, Betty Elms (also Watts) is Diane’s projection of her idealized self before moving to Hollywood: optimistic, gutsy, and determined. “Rita” is simply a new name for Camilla, but instead of having been killed in the arranged hit, this new Camilla is miraculously saved by a freak car accident, left with no memory, and found by Betty, on whom she becomes wholly dependent—a 180 degree reversal of their real relationship, in which Camilla is the dominant one.

A separate plot unfolds in which Adam Kesher is forced to cast in his upcoming movie the mysterious “Camilla Rhodes.” In a stroke of genius on Lynch’s part, the “Camilla Rhodes” who benefits from the powerbrokers’ influence in the dream is not the real Camilla Rhodes—it can’t be, since the real Camilla has already been recast in the dream as “Rita”—but rather an unknown girl that kissed Camilla at Adam’s party. This plot involving Adam allows Diane to imagine that she, not Camilla, deserved movie stardom. In her dream, Diane (“Betty”) impresses at her audition, and it is heavily implied that Adam, upon seeing Betty at casting, wanted her and not “Camilla” for his big role, and that had he not been forced to do otherwise, he would have cast her.

The convolution of inventing a new “Camilla” allows Diane while dreaming to simultaneously bask in her romance with the real Camilla—now “Rita”—while still delegitimizing Camilla’s Hollywood success. Diane creates her dream to untangle her mixed feelings for Camilla: her jealousy and bitterness over Camilla’s career ascendancy is tackled in the Adam Kesher storyline, in which Camilla’s success is revealed as a fraud; while her lust (love?) for Camilla is captured in the “detective” storyline, in which Betty becomes indispensable and impressive to Rita.

(Interestingly, setting the dream up this way leaves Adam in an ambiguous role from Diane’s perspective. She is imagining, remember, that Adam was forced by outside parties to cast Camilla; therefore, he should be absolved of blame, a sympathetic character. But Adam was also responsible in the real world for stealing away Diane’s lover, and Diane’s dream has no fantastical plot to absolve him of that—the dream simply leaves out that storyline. Most of Adam’s scenes are therefore characterized by a vacillating effect, casting him first as sympathetic, then unsavory, then back to sympathetic. For example, he finds his wife cheating on him, then gains the upper hand by punishing her, then is knocked bloody by his wife’s lover for his actions; later, both wife and lover are knocked unconscious by an anonymous, menacing man.)

Despite the ingenuity of its setup, however, the dream is plagued by sinister elements. For example, immediately after the car crash and Rita’s escape, we see a nightmarish scene, one of the movie’s best, involving a character named Dan who converses with Herb, the manager of Winkie’s, about a dream he has had.

This is the same Winkie’s, remember, where Diane ordered the hit on Camilla (seen late in the movie), and thus the central location of Diane’s guilt. Dan is Diane’s surrogate in this scene (the name similarity is no accident), so that she can confront this guilt indirectly through Dan’s discussion of his recurring nightmare. Lynch’s character shuffling, with Dan recast in the role of Diane, is similar to the “Camilla Rhodes” gyration just analyzed: just as the dream world “Camilla” was only a passing character who happened to kiss the real Camilla at Adam’s party, “Dan” was standing at the Winkie’s counter while Diane was ordering the hit in real life. Continuing the shuffling effect, Dan glances to the counter in the dream scene, just as Diane glanced there in real life and saw Dan; but since Dan cannot see himself, Herb fills Dan’s slot and becomes the new “man at the counter.”

The content of Dan’s nightmare, as told to Herb, is that there is a man “in back of this place,” and that this man is “the one who’s doing it.” Herb, with an unlikely agreeableness, accompanies Dan to the back of the restaurant to see whether this man is in fact there. He is, and ugly and scary to boot. Dan passes out (dies?), and the scene is over. Neither Dan nor Herb is revisited in the dream, although Winkie’s returns multiple times.

Evidently, the previously discussed fantasies in Diane’s dream coexist uncomfortably with the presence of her guilt, represented by the ugly man behind Winkie’s, where she ordered the hit. The camera in the Winkie’s scene is wobbly and sometimes seems on the verge of leaving its characters completely, creating a nightmarish feel and reflecting Diane’s unwillingness to explore this particular area of her subconscious. The camera even meanders at one point to focus specifically on the “Winkie’s” sign on the building, emphasizing again the place of the crucial encounter with the hitman. (The next scene portrays the hitman as bumbling and incapable of covering his tracks, surely representing Diane’s worst fears.) And the numerous returns to Winkie’s demonstrate that Diane can’t free herself of the guilt associated with this location (Dan emphasizes to Herb: “This Winkie’s”).

Also present to oppress Diane’s fantasies with guilt is the hitman’s blue key, modified in the dream world to look veritably space-agey and fantastical. The key has no impact in the dream, though, until Rita brings Betty to the climactic “Club Silencio,” where a scary man and some assorted musicians demonstrate that sound and source are not fused as they should be—cause and effect do not work in harmony here. Betty is sent into convulsions at this revelation; the dream has been exposed (“It is all… an illusion!”). At this point, appropriately, the blue box appears in Rita’s purse, which, when opened by the hitman’s key, ends the dream. The key, a reminder of Diane’s guilt, thus grimly serves as the ruby slippers that bring her out of fantasy and back to reality.

So guilt and truth win over fantasy in Mulholland Dr., as Diane is unable to create a universe that reflects her desires while withstanding the tremendous weight of her guilty conscience. Arguably, the moment in which her fantasies ultimately fail is when Rita does not reciprocate Betty’s “I love you” pronouncement in bed. The whole dream has been working toward this moment, characterizing Betty as Rita’s savior and Rita as Betty’s appreciative, awestruck companion, but Rita’s silence in this moment demonstrates that Diane has failed to convincingly reinvent Camilla as her loyal lover. There are simply too many machinations, too many suspensions of belief, too much guilt weighing down the fantasy. Despite Diane’s best efforts, Rita’s love for Betty can’t be arranged plausibly.

So there it is, the story of Mulholland Dr. But before ending this piece, I’ll pick apart two more exceptional scenes worthy of revisits.

The first is the very brief scene involving “Mr. Roque,” the odd-looking man to whom the Castigliani brothers apparently report. In this scene, another man, Robert Smith, enters to speak with Mr. Roque following the unsuccessful attempt by the Castigliani brothers to convince Adam to cast “Camilla Rhodes” in his upcoming film. It may be the most accurately dreamlike scene I’ve ever viewed, with its eerie lighting, the bizarre visual of Mr. Roque, the absurd spacing of the character in the middle of a large room, the anonymous attendant in the background, and of course, the gorgeous conversation—here it is, word for word:

Smith: Good afternoon, Mr. Roque. Her name is Camilla Rhodes. The director doesn’t want her. Do you want him replaced? I know they said…

Mr. Roque: Then…

Smith: Then? That means we should…

Mr. Roque: Yes?

Smith: Shut everything down… Is that something that… You want us to shut everything down? Then we’ll…shut everything down.

Absolutely nothing of substance is said by Mr. Roque in answer to Smith’s inquiry; the dialogue proceeds as if by its own volition, without influence by its participants. One might say that the insidious visuals of the scene foreshadow the insidious conclusion (shutting down the film), but that wouldn’t be going far enough. The conclusion of the dialogue only catches up the characters to the conclusion already reached by the visuals. As in a dream, the mood is the conclusion; the actions and words are extraneous and expendable, their purposes predetermined by the atmosphere in which they operate. Lynch, with his visuals and sound editing, has successfully created an aura so palpable that he is comfortable placing his characters in service to it, rather than the other way around. He thus exemplifies in this scene his legendary knack for achieving the feel of a nightmare.

The other scene I’ll revisit is the scene in which Betty and Rita visit the condo of “Diane Selwyn,” a name that Rita has remembered from before her car accident. Of course, the introduction of Diane’s name into the dream world is an inauspicious sign of its stability. Diane is not supposed to be in this dream—it appears her subconscious is starting to falter.

Before finding Diane’s apartment, the two amateur sleuths unexpectedly encounter a woman, Diane’s neighbor, who informs them that she has switched apartments with Diane. This neighbor expresses interest in accompanying them to Diane’s new apartment in the hope of recovering some of her things. As we see later after Diane wakes up, this neighbor is a real person, and her frustration over Diane’s unreliability is real too.

Once the three women set out for Diane’s condo, things get interesting, as they must. Diane must not be found in the dream, because Diane and Betty are the same person. They cannot coexist in the same world. Furthermore, Diane’s neighbor cannot enter Diane’s condo, because she alone in the dream demonstrates familiarity with Diane, and her knowledgeable presence might be too enlightening for Betty and Rita’s misguided quest. Therefore, just as the three of them begin walking, an intervention occurs: the neighbor’s phone rings, and she doubles back. Betty and Rita then enter the condo, and enter Diane’s bedroom, only to find … a rotting, disfigured corpse. Without the neighbor present, their charade can continue, and they recoil in horror at Diane’s apparent demise. As they are doing so, the neighbor returns, but finding the door locked, heads back to her own condo.

The tension and drama in this scene are excellent. It retains its tension even in repeat viewings, since we can feel the alarm in Diane’s subconscious as she works out a way to exclude her real self from her dream. Even though she succeeds—keeping the neighbor at bay while avoiding any revelation about the true Diane Selwyn—guilt looms large: she represents herself as a hideous rotting monster. No wonder, then, that the solution doesn’t maintain the dream structure for long: the two sleuths pay a visit to Club Silencio soon thereafter.

David Lynch also had major artistic success earlier in his career with Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986), but Mulholland Dr. tops them both as his masterpiece. While popular movies like Inception (2010) rely on coy nods to pseudoscientific characteristics of dreams, Mulholland Dr. is the genuine article, diving into the themes of real dreams—love, lust, guilt, paranoia, family—with the touch of a master.

More thoughts:

The elderly couple that accompanies Betty early in the movie and was present for Diane’s jitterbug victory clearly had a major role in encouraging Diane to pursue a career as an actress. Diane is now bitter about their support, as evidenced by the scene in her dream in which the two cackle to each other in a limo after leaving Diane at the airport—presumably relishing the doom they have laid out for her. It seems that they are associated in Diane’s mind with the crushing mistake of moving to Hollywood. Appropriately, then, they constitute Diane’s final hallucination, driving her to suicide.
Luigi Castigliani, a powerbroker in the dream who hilariously spits out “one of the finest espressos in the world,” is based on a man seen by Diane at Adam’s party drinking coffee; hence his maniacal choosiness regarding the beverage.
A burly man, seen only from behind, appears early in the film and makes two phone calls. In the first, he tells his listener only that “The girl is still missing,” and in the next, he merely says, “The same,” as if the second listener knows what he said to the first—a logic characteristic only of a dream.
The negative reaction of director Bob Brenner to Betty’s audition in the dream was likely his reaction to Diane’s real life audition for The Sylvia North Story (Diane: “He didn’t think so much of me”). In the fantasy world of the dream, though, the other characters in the room think him a fool, rolling their eyes at his every comment.
“The Cowboy” (another random man Diane saw at Adam’s party) appears twice in succession while Diane is waking up, indicating that she “did bad,” yet another indicator of her guilty conscience that destroys the dream world.
The mantra “This is the girl” is the phrase Diane uses when speaking to the hitman. Its abundant use in the dream demonstrates the importance of that moment to Diane’s subconscious.
Diane takes the name “Betty” from the nametag of the waitress who serves her at Winkie’s during her crucial encounter with the hitman. Even the invention of the naïve Betty, therefore, is rooted in Diane’s guilty conscience.
The predetermined nature of some dream scenes can be inferred during repeat viewings; for example, during the Castigliani brothers scene Adam inexplicably has a golf club on the table in front of him, which he soon uses to smash the brothers’ limo after the meeting goes awry.
Sexual tension between Betty and Rita is present in their relationship from the beginning, as Betty first finds Rita naked in the shower.
Seemingly the only element of the dream world that resists collapse is Diane’s dead Aunt Ruth, who enters Betty’s bedroom after both Betty and Rita have disappeared. I interpret this as a touching indication of Diane’s loving relationship with her aunt: as her absurd fantasies evaporate, the good and true Aunt Ruth remains, even though she is no longer among the living. Perhaps a dream is an appropriate place for the dead, a realm where they can live on.
Does Diane love Camilla, or does she only love herself? By the end of the dream, Rita’s identity is almost subsumed into Betty’s, the result of an unnecessary makeover. And when Rita wakes up intoning “Silencio,” the camera angle presents Rita and Betty as two halves of the same face. Diane seems to be struggling with loving Camilla while tolerating her as a separate individual.
After Diane commits suicide, we are presented with a series of images that convey Lynch’s rendition of the “dying moment” cliché. First, we see the scary man behind Winkie’s, a nod to Diane’s overwhelming guilt as she passes away. But this image quickly fades and we see Diane’s dream world fantasy: her bright-eyed “Betty” persona smiling and laughing with the blonde iteration of Rita/Camilla. Perhaps the dream does triumph in the end, engulfing her as she dies.
I have not unintentionally used the words “cast” and “recast” to describe the process in which Diane places people from her real life into her dream. Perhaps Lynch wants to demonstrate that films are made in the same way that dreams are dreamt—each attempts and ultimately fails at pure invention, relying instead on real-world experiences—and that the best film is therefore the most dreamlike. This angle is what opens the film up for me, allowing for endless rewatchings, each as enjoyable as the last.

—Jim Andersen