Ok peeps, let’s dive into the Greatest American Movies of All Time according to the American Film Institute. I honestly don’t remember if I’ve seen Citizen Kane before, but I watched it the night before the election.
Charles Foster Kane inherited a fortune, and as a result,
was ripped away from his mother as a young boy. He got everything he ever
wanted: fame, riches, power, women; and he’s miserable and incomplete because
what he REALLY wanted was public adoration and anything less than that felt
like failure.
This movie has gotten a lot of attention and analysis in 2020 because of Kane’s similarity to Trump. James Owen wrote a column about it, declaring it the best movie of 2020 because of its relevance to our time. As Owen notes, stop reading this and google “Trump and Citizen Kane”. It’s unsettling.
Here are a few tidbits that had me saying WTF.
- Early in the film, Kane is hanging out with Hitler and other dictators and reassuring Americans that there will never be a war.
- Kane blew through his massive inheritance with lavish spending and bad investments.
- When Kane, who owned a major newspaper, lost his election to the Senate, he instructed his paper to print that there was fraud at the polls.
- Eventually Kane loses everything and flees to his Florida estate, a lavish compound called Xanadu, that is filled with expensive useless crap and echoing loneliness after all his friends have deserted him because he no longer has power or because he stabbed them in the back.
A little too on the nose, wouldn’t you say?
When the movie came out, there was a shit-ton of controversy
because radio and TV mogul William Randolph Hearst thought it was about him
(and he was part of the real-life composite of white dudes that made up Kane). Hearst
tried to prevent the movie’s release, threatening the livelihoods of a bunch of
immigrants and refugees that worked for the studios. You know, all those folks
that had just fled fascism as its marching across the world while we try to
decide if we should care? Those folks.
God, assholes are the WORST.
I have a hard time with plot lines that are, here is an
asshole, he sucked most of his life, he learned nothing, let’s learn about him
(always a him). Why the fuck would I want to learn about him? I am really
hoping that 2021 will put this bullshit “assholes are cool and we should listen
to them” trend behind us. How about a new era that puts regular folks first,
where material wealth and power are no longer worshipped so exclusively. This immorality
started in the 1980s so that means we have been heading here for forty damn
years. Time for a pendulum swing for goodness sake. Help me push it with all
your might, OK?
Don’t get me wrong, the movie is totally a masterpiece, it
broke all kinds of new ground, innovations in cinematography and editing and
all kinds of crap. It’s worth the watch. Maybe at some point when you don’t feel
surrounded by assholes already.
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