The Shadow Knows

The opening sequence of Citizen Kane invites us to trespass into an occluded space, as completely drenched in shadow as it is with meaning, which we will later learn is the estate of media mogul Charles Kane. We are to understand that within the film’s narrative this is a real place, though the way we first experience it is entirely surreal. As soon as we pass through the gate marked with a “NO TRESPASSING” sign we are allowed to survey the grounds, though not as one might if shown the landscape through one continuous long-shot. Rather, director Orson Welles continually fades from one image to the next as we move from the exterior of the estate toward the mansion itself, creating for us a pastiche of a real-life landscape in place of a a plain view of Kane’s home. The music is ominous. The figures are dark and otherworldly. Among the many contorted images we notice caged animals, gargoyles, and the inverted image of Kane’s castle in the water. We might almost consider the scene to be purgatorial, especially once we note that this is a place completely void of human forms save for one corpse—Kane himself—and one wall-eyed image of a nurse seen only through her distorted reflection on a glass sphere. The culminating effect is defamiliarizing, as we are invited, not only to enter, but to reconstruct the life of the deceased Kane being communicated to us only through remnants—there are no present survivors except for one employee and a literal mountain of possessions. Aside from setting the tone of Kane’s life, the broad message, perhaps, is that a biography must always be reconstructed in a similar fashion. In this way, the opening of the film makes us into intruders (all along we have been trespassing, after all) and thus we might surmise that to define the life of another is always to trespass in a sense, since a life cannot be directly known except by the one who lives it; but then we still have the rest of the film to see as of yet, and so we move on.

Of all the elements that we witness in this sequence the most telling is the presence of shadow. Shadows appear throughout the rest of the film, enveloping people and places, encroaching and receding, and giving significance to the life of our protagonist almost as if darkness itself were a character in the film (perhaps the ghost of Kane himself). Indeed, it can be argued that shadow is Kane in two important respects: shadows consistently represent both Kane’s power, and the mystery that remains in the lives of those who knew (or attempted to know) the man.

On the subject of mystery: When taken as an interrogation of a life, the film becomes a commentary on the project of the film itself. In the scene that immediately follows the one described above we are shown a newsreel about Kane’s life. And this scene is followed by one in which a room full of newsmen are discussing the reel we have just seen and that they have created. They begin to question its authenticity and resolve to dig a little deeper. They want to know the real Kane; all the while they are, of course, cast in shadow. For the remainder of the film we follow one of these reporters, Jerry Thompson, as he seeks to uncover the mystery behind the man—the true story about his subject. And from one sequence to the next we see him entering shadows, addressing shaded persons in murky settings, moving, much like the viewer of the opening sequence, eventually toward the heart of Kane’s estate. As he stalks Kane’s ghost toward Xanadu we are led to ask the question, “What is so impenetrable, so unknowable, about the solitary life of this man?” He was a highly sociable and public figure after all. The answer is ultimately given through the same means as the mystery; again Welles uses darkness as a symbol.

Kane isolates himself, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because he knows no other way, through his own desire for and struggle with power and wealth. He is both obsessed with the accumulation of material wealth and uncomfortable with the material means he was born into. In this way Kane is like a Brahmin—born to a station far above the majority of his fellows. And while he is well meaning, attempting to level himself with his peers through the charitable mission of his newspaper, in the end Kane cannot cleanse himself of the sin of all Brahmin (if one can call it that) which is participating in and thus benefiting so fully from an oppressive system of caste. True deliverance, it appears, cannot be achieved through good will alone. At one point in the film Kane is told by his friend that “one day the common man will decide he wants his rights and not just your gifts.” While some commentary on capitalism is unavoidable in this film, I argue that for the most part the film is the discussion of a life, and insofar as it speaks on what it means for Kane to be an American capitalist, these terms are predominantly addressed in a personal, biographical sense, rather than through an indictment of the upper class. It has been reported that Welles changed the original title of the film from The American to the name which we all now know, Citizen Kane. The difference here is a subtle but telling change in focus. Our attention is directed toward a man, an existential, personal study, rather than toward a commentary on the economy of our country at large. The film is much more prescient as a result; Kane’s discomfiture with his wealth is not about the struggle of the “common man” but of the “Everyman,” and its implications thus bear more directly upon the soul of an individual than on the soul of a nation.

What is to become of Kane’s soul? Let it be enough to say there is no Disney ending to this picture. I have mentioned that Kane’s legacy is represented in shadows. These shadows literally descend upon the film’s speakers as they reminisce about Kane and even interact with him during flashback sequences. One especially stark image is that of Kane approaching his second wife Susan—covering her with his shadow—in a scene in which he will not let her leave the career he has chosen for her. (The following morning we learn she has attempted suicide.) If it is Kane’s affair with the power he inherited in his youth that blocks his entrance into deeper, more meaningful human relationships, then it is the malignant effect of the affair manifested through shadow that we observe steadily consuming both Kane and his companions throughout the film. Again we turn to Susan: In her last scene she experiences a kind of catharsis by recollecting her decision to leave Kane. Then, through a hole in the roof, a light shines down upon her and she makes the relieved comment that "It is morning at last." And so it is for many of the friends and lovers that disengage from the oppressive side of Kane’s personality.

The symbolic themes of power and mystery are neatly resolved at the end of the film when we finish the journey that starts with the opening sequence—when we finally reach Xanadu, though this time in the light of day. The film closes after the reporter we have been following leads us at last into Kane's home. At this stage, many past characters have now made their peace with the past, the investigative journey has come to an end, and we pan through one high long-shot as we are shown a real, rather than surreal, survey of the estate. All the accumulated mystery and opulence, all of it, is finally bathed in light; it is at last revealed, and we are shown that it is no more or less than it has always been—it is but a life.