Citizen Kane

Many oldies argue that our generation can be best-described with one word: irony. They're right, and we never stood a chance at avoiding the title. Irony has been hand fed to us by guys like Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, whose Stella Comedy is the only TV show I can think of made entirely of ironic dialog -- every line is a cliche, intentionally. Post-modernism and all things self-aware have been taken to a new level. Every story has been told and retold, every chord progression played and remixed -- all knowingly, and we know this. Lawsuits occur left and right over artists stealing songs but it hardly stops us from listening to said thieves. What choice do we have? Irony may be a passing phase, but it's what we Millennials, as Pepsi likes to call us, currently have to our name, so it came as no surprise that when watching Citizen Kane for the first time, I couldn't get that single word out of my head. IRONY. It pops up in Citizen Kane more than once, which to me suggests that we might have more in common with Orson Welles than most would at first believe. He was unarguably ahead of his time -- who's to say he wasn't in ours?

The most hard to ignore example of Welles saying one thing and doing another came in the form of the film's bookends, as Kim Krenzer called it in class, the "No Trespassing" sign on the fence that we see first and last in our viewing. I couldn't help but chuckle at the abrasively foreboding nature of the opening scene -- the haunted house theme music, the generic house on the hill, the Gothic fence -- all of which say, along with the sign, it's not a good idea to enter this film. But we entered nonetheless. Sure, most will sit through a movie if it means class credit, but I was definitely intrigued regardless. The fact the we left the movie with the reminder, "No Trespassing," seemed to me Welles' way of saying, don't say I didn't warn you. From the blogs I've read, the consensus appears to be that this film poses a lot of questions that do not get answered. We never really know the story of Kane because it is told after his death by untrustworthy sources, and adding to the confusion is that we see the story through camera work that would be impossible for the human eye to capture. As Cardullo's essay gets at, this film stresses construction -- of the film, of our own beliefs -- over the actual story. Leaving this film frustrated seems a natural reaction; as humans, we want questions to be answered, especially when they're thrown at us. Whatever Welles' purpose for sending us home with unanswered questions, it certainly reflects the nature of reality. His ironic delivery -- warning us from the start not to trespass into his constructed reality -- serves, more than anything, to remind us that we're watching a movie, and more specifically, that he's watching us.