Mulvey Laura - Citizen Kane

At home in Xanadu

Contents

When I wrote the BFI Film Classic Citizen Kane, I was interested in giving greater visibility to the politics of the immediate pre-war period in the United States in order to throw light on some of the allegorical aspects of the film. Returning to Citizen Kane to write this foreword, I have also returned to these questions of visibility and invisibility. Although the spectre of William Randolph Hearst loomed over the films release in 1941 and had continued to figure in popular awareness, his actual significance for Citizen Kane had become less visible. I argued that it was Hearsts right-wing political position in the 1930s (hostile to the New Deal and American intervention in the war in Europe) that provided the rationale for Welless satirical portrait of a newspaper tycoon. As happens so often with allegory and satire, once a frame of reference is lost, the surface text floats away from its historical context. As time passed, there would be no reason for Citizen Kanes spectators (particularly those outside the US) to relate the film to the polarised politics of the 1930s, especially when watching a film of such aesthetic coherence and cinematic sophistication.

But returning to the film now, its politics seem to have gained in visibility. This has become clear to me as I contrast the changes in popular consciousness about the power of the newspaper tycoon over the last twenty years. Purely by coincidence, I wrote Citizen Kane in 1991, the fiftieth anniversary year of its release in 1941. Purely by another coincidence, I am writing this foreword in 2011, in its seventieth anniversary year. Although fundamentally arbitrary, these dates highlight a relationship between then (1941, 1991) and now (2011). In 1991, the time of Citizen Kane and Welless political preoccupations seemed remote. In 2011, due to the recent public focus on Rupert Murdoch and his empire, the film has gained in topicality, while, at the same time, the economic crisis has revived debates current in the 1930s. Furthermore, Welless 1941 statement to the press (denying that Hearst was the model for the fictional Charles Foster Kane), has also acquired contemporary relevance.

Mark Twain remarked: History doesnt repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Broadly speaking, the recent developments I mentioned above have brought the historical context of Citizen Kane into a rhyming relationship with 2011. In his statement to the press, Welles hammers home two important points about the political dangers posed by his newspaper tycoon. First, the kind of general and catholic power with which I wished to invest my particular character could only be achieved, in a democracy, by the control of newspapers; secondly, he would wish to use his money for the exercise of power and be a man interested in imposing his will on the will of his fellow countrymen. This indictment of the power of the press not only goes beyond the specificity of the portrait, but it also generalises its relevance. In 1991, a connection from my time of writing back to the US press barons of that earlier period was not in the forefront of my mind. But in 2011, the rhymes between Hearsts opposition to the New Deal and the recent upsurge in conservative politics supported by Rupert Murdochs Fox News in the US and News Corporation in many other parts of the world are more apparent. This context also gives greater visibility to a further rhyme between Murdoch and Hearst: their shared hostility to trade unions. In 1991, I overlooked Hearsts long-standing animosity to the union movement in general (and in particular his opposition to Roosevelts pro-union legislation in the 1930s) that might have resonated with Murdochs victory over the print unions as he moved production of his newspapers from Fleet Street to Wapping in 1986.

As the economic policies of the Obama presidency have given the terminology and aspirations of Keynesianism contemporary currency, so the rhyme returns in relations between politics and the press. Obamas early attempts to evoke the rhetoric and, in part, the politics of the New Deal were met with ferocious hostility by Fox News, which initiated and participated in personal attacks against him and more generally his policies. Launched in 1996, Fox News had become a major force in the formation of public opinion during the Iraq War. The Spanish-American War over Cuba in 1898 fuelled the 1890s rise of the yellow press, supported by the historical Hearst and the fictional Kane: Kane (echoing Hearst to Remington) telegraphs: Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose poems, Ill provide the war. This attitude, jingoistic as it was known at the time, resonates vividly across more than a century to Fox News present attempts to whip up an American attack on Iran, pressuring the candidates in the coming Republican primaries, and no doubt the candidates in the coming presidential election, to take a stand on the Iran/Al Qaeda connection. Commenting on Hearsts complete indifference to truth, Gore Vidal pointed out, History is what you say it is in the popular press, and Fox News faithfully continues this maxim.

Kane triumphantly converts the New York Inquirer into a scandal-driven, as well as muck-racking, newspaper, something that rhymes once again with recent revelations about widespread phone hacking by News of the World