"Citizen Kane and Race" is something I'd like to revisit, and possibly publish, someday, as I really like the ideas in it and I haven't seen anyone else pursue similar ones (which is not to say that someone hasn't, beyond my knowledge, of course).
In this paper, which I wrote and delivered at a conference in 2002, I read Citizen Kane as "part of a body of work by writer/director Welles that is often preoccupied with racial difference and injustice." I have been fascinated by Citizen Kane for some time, and by the ability of 25-year-old Orson Welles to pull it off, but I didn't initially realize he had at that time just attempted two works that wrestle with an "Africanist presence" (Toni Morrison's term) in art: the notorious all-black staging of Macbeth on Broadway (sometimes called the "Voodoo Macbeth"--Simon Callow gives the best account I know of, in his biography of Welles), which was widely regarded as successful, and an attempted filming of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he didn't pull off. When he made Citizen Kane, did Welles still have racial issues on his mind?
Something told me that he did, and I wanted to explore what that "something" was.
First of all, there are several small but conspicuous visual images of non-white people scattered throughout Citizen Kane. For example, in the "News on the March" newsreel near the beginning of the film, we see the aged Kane being pushed by an African American man, presumably a servant, on a wheelchair. (The footage is taken through a fence; we are apparently meant to think of it as illicitly obtained, as Kane was described as a recluse in his last days.)
Later, during Kane's years of triumph, we have the famous scene with the dancing girls and the performance of the song written in Kane's honor ("You buy a bag of peanuts in this town, you get a song written about you!"). Midway through, we get an extreme close-up of an African American man's face. He is wearing a strange sort of tall, feathery headgear, and only the closest of observers will figure out that the man is a member of the marching band that accompanies the dancing girls. (Other band members are visible in the frame, but the image is so fleeting that only the face in the left foreground really registers; it's an image that imprints itself in your mind without anything in the narrative suggesting you should really think about it.)
Similarly, in the last third of the film (the period of Kane's decline), we have the scene in which Kane and his second wife, Susan, argue on the beach. The setup is grim: the black cars taking the Kanes and their guests out onto the sand reminds us, without much subtlety, of a funeral. That night, as the Kanes argue, their words may or may not be drowned out by the musicians they have apparently hired for this elaborate "picnic." The singer sings, again rather ominously, "It can't be love, for there is no true love" (a version of which the White Stripes recorded a few years back in a tribute to Citizen Kane), and once again Welles uses an extreme close-up of an African American man's face.
I have watched Citizen Kane many, many times, and for a long time these images stood out to me, but I didn't have a way to account for my reaction to them. Why are they there? What do they mean? The easiest way to interpret them is to say that they simply don't mean much of anything; that they are just background elements in a context where (1) African Americans' public role was often that of a servant or a performer, (2) Welles was experimenting with the uses of foreground and background, and with striking transitions between scenes, and so there's no particular meaning to these seemingly racialized images--at most, they confirm what we already think we knew about Welles and his era.
I've never been convincined that this is the full story, and becoming aware of Welles's interest in African American life just before making Citizen Kane told me that I was on the right track. Other evidence I discussed in this paper includes: the character of Leland Bernstein, who is played broadly according to stereotypes of Jewishness and who functions variously as a figure of fun and as the pseudo-profound executive who takes over the operations of Kane's company; the un-accounted-for accent (Hispanic?) of Kane's butler, Raymond; and the much-remarked-upon use of black and white throughout the film (which has not, to my knowledge, been connected to the film's commentary on race).
This is getting to be too long, so I'll end with a brief quote from the paper, just to give a taste of where I'm heading here:
Generally speaking, the black hues in this film are introduced to suggest moments of depth, whereas the film’s bright whites—which dominate frames much less frequently—are found at moments of stasis (as in the brightly lit old-folks home where Jed Leland has ended up) or else suggest something unknowable (as in the famous snow globe in Kane’s death scene at the start of the film, which seems to transform from a transparent glass ball to an opaque one at the moment of Kane’s death). Although the film’s colors, spoken of in this sense, may seem only tangentially related to race, Morrison points out that blackness has consistently been a locale for negotiation and change in literature, whereas whiteness is usually a trope for impenetrability. And this symbolism is important: for American whites, asserting impenetrability is a way of maintaining power.
Still, Welles does move beyond such abstract symbolism, and visually represents blackness and whiteness in a more distinctively racialized manner; that is, upon actual faces and bodies. The portrayal of Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, is worth careful consideration. As Kane’s most important possession, Susan’s very light skin and blondness is featured prominently; although Welles tended to dislike close-ups and uses them selectively in this film, Susan’s face is zoomed in upon over and over again, emphasizing her extreme whiteness. In a very real sense, Susan’s whiteness is what Kane wishes to possess; this is suggested also by her association in is mind with his lost childhood, which has been presented to us in the whitest scene in the film, amid a field of Colorado snow.
On-track? Going too far? You be the judge--comment and tell me!
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