Kane the manchild

While watching Citizen Kane for the second time now, I realized something significant that had escaped me during the first viewing. The most important line in this movie, for me at least, wasn't the discussion at the very end about Kane's jigsaw collection of treasures, or Kane's manager's story about the girl or the white dress, or even the omnipresent, "Rosebud". For me, the most important line in this film came from the one story of Kane's childhood when his father commented on how his boy was in a need of a good thrashing. This single threat tells us more about who Charles Foster Kane was than any interview or journal account ever could.

Kane was, in short, a manchild. The way he is first presented, however, we are tricked into thinking of him as "the original maverick". When we hear about Kane's expulsion from any number of prestigious schools, it is in a way that suggests he is a lovable trickster rather than an ungrateful bastard. When the news reel tells us of Xanadu, we see Kane as a lonely king rather than a gaudy American who makes up for a lack of taste by thinking big. And when Kane first declares his advocacy of the poor and hungry, he's a philanthropist until it's revealed that he only loves those who bend to his will and love him back unconditionally.

Before I move on, let's go back to the flashback scene of Kane's childhood. In the few second we see of Kane on his own, he sleds down a hill, throws a snowball at his house, works on his snowman, and then runs back up the hill for another ride, babbling incoherently all the while. Though those are certainly the behaviors of any normal child, most kids are content with one activity for more than 10 seconds at a time. Had Kane been raised in the Youtube, video games, and seizure causing TV times today, he would have been pumped full of Ritalin and given medical leave from homework.

The little boy persona of Kane never really died, since without regular beatings from his father and scoldings from his ice queen of a mother, his mind was put into a sort of stasis. From his young adult life to his final death, Kane is prone to temper tantrums and demands the sacrifice of all on his behalf.

Kane's love life is also representative of his eternally prepubescent state. Though his first wife, Emily Monroe Norton, seemed to be slowly making a man out of him with a son and an eventual presidency, Kane's undying inner child got the best of him and brought him Susan Alexander. Finally, Kane was given a woman seemingly half his age who was easily wooed by wiggling ears a eyebrows. Kane doesn't seem too phased by the death of his former wife and child, but he does make sure that such an attachment never happens again.

Kane's sex life is an odd one in that it seems relatively non-existent for someone who was twice married and, according to Mr. Bernstein, had a lot of women in his life. Though he had a son with his first wife after a short amount of time, the decades he spent with Susan Alexander didn't seem to bring forth anything. By the end of their marriage, the two began sleeping in separate rooms, a practice that probably began when Kane realized he had married the world's worst professional singer.

My belief in the man child Charles Kane is only fortified by the only direct parodies that comes to mind - That one episode of Tiny Toons where the billionare evil bastard, Montana Max, runs for school president and pretty much every episode of Pinky and the Brain. The fact that a parentless, unbelievably rich little twat with an oversized head and a megalomaniacal lab rat are the only memorable parodies of Kane says something about his status as a man and an American.

Working on the original title of the movie, American, it's easy to see why Kane acts the way he does. Just like Kane, the United States spat in the face of its rich, prudish foster father for being so rich and prudish, only to grow up to be even more powerful and conservative. Whether or not the makers were really suggesting that the United States is akin to a 9 year old in a middle aged body would take an entire book to argue, but I still think that if Kane had recieved more belt whippings and fewer free rides to college, the film would have ended much differently.