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Lately, I’ve been catching up on The Sopranos, in an effort to be better informed for its’ upcoming prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark, and also just because I haven’t seen it before and it’s considered one of the most important of all TV series. And I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. The writing is strong, the characters well-defined, the conflicts intriguing, and the greater themes exciting. It’s clear this is where the modern TV drama was born, or at the very least, one of the most popular variations of it: the anti-hero odyssey.
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Do we ever love our anti-hero dramas! Stories of corrupt men (always men) whose pursuit of wealth, success, power, or the American Dream costs them the values they once held or should hold, yet who are at the same time complicated, understandable, relatable figures we can’t help but latch on to in some way. In the 2000s and 2010s, this character had a notable TV renaissance beginning with Tony Soprano, and continuing on in Al Swearengen of Deadwood, Don Draper of Mad Men, Walter White of Breaking Bad, Nucky Thompson of Boardwalk Empire (and also some early 2010s Netflix guy whose name I can’t remember). It tapered off a little by the middle of the last decade, but we still more recently got the eponymous characters of Hannibal and BoJack Horseman, Tommy Shelby of Peaky Blinders, and Marty Byrde of Ozark to continue the tradition. And it is a tradition, one that predates Tony Soprano, as much of a nexus point as he is, as well as even those films that directly inspired such characters. In multiple respects, this figure goes back to a singular source, a source that just happens to be most commonly regarded as the greatest film of all time.
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I had the pleasure recently of watching Citizen Kane for its’ 80th anniversary on the big screen for the first time. It is a monumental movie at any scope, but still in this context it felt particularly powerful: the low-angle shots that force you to look up at Kane, the deep focus photography that keeps everything equally crisp and draws your eye to the details that are most important, the tricks of perspective that somehow catch me off guard every single time, the make-up as good and convincing as any modern CG-aging effects, and the scene transitions that beautifully melt into each other with exquisite care. But aside from all that, it’s just a tremendously compelling story, all centred around this man who pursued power and wealth and influence and excess, though at great personal cost, driving away all who could have cared about him and dying alone. Watching the movie this time I recognized in Charles Foster Kane the template for these subsequent characters that have come to be a staple in American pop culture, especially in recent decades.
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Of course Kane is a figure unlike his descendants, who is perceived at a distance. The film is designed so that we can only infer his character and personality, his story being entirely related through second-hand sources. By contrast, The Sopranos routinely goes into the head of Tony -one of its’ central tenets, his therapy, allows us explicit access to his inner thoughts and feelings, unfiltered. But in what we have to go off of in Kane, we can gather he was “corrupted” as a youth, like Tony was, like Draper was, like BoJack was. His innocence was lost by a sudden change of circumstance. Ever since then, he has sought validation, respect, and particularly love -as Jed Leland puts it plainly: “All he ever wanted out of life was love. That’s the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. He just didn’t have any to give.” Most of his descendant characters are, in roundabout ways, after the same thing. BoJack Horseman is maybe the prime example in that department: neglected and abused as a child by his parents, he grew up to chase celebrity and any kind of mass adoration that came with it to fill that emptiness he felt inside -born out of an unhealthy deficit of connection with others. In Kane, we see the shadow of this emptiness and desperate need to fill it after Susan leaves him, one of the rare glimpses we get of the real man beneath the tycoon. And we feel for him, we relate to the sadness that the one thing he can find solace in is the reminder of his childhood.
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We love and we loathe Charles Foster Kane. Just as we love and loathe Tony Soprano, and all of the other modern anti-heroes whose horrible behaviours and actions are matched by a certain sympathy in their outlook or background or situation. At the start of the series, we’re introduced to Tony in therapy before we see him engage in any typical mobster activity. We see the side of him that is self-conscious, troubled, willing to step outside his ego to seek professional help for his panic attacks and distressing dreams. It’s as the episodes and seasons roll along that we get more a picture of the crimes and cruelties this man is capable of. Walter White seems to be a perfectly upstanding, relatively normal chemistry teacher when we first meet him, whose descent into and consumption by crime is gradual though unrelenting. Even Don Draper doesn’t seem all that bad in his debut, charming and confident despite dealing in the murky waters of advertising cigarettes. It’s not until the end of that first episode that we learn he’s kind of a scumbag.
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What is it about this character that we like so much? Why are we drawn to him and why did Citizen Kane work so well? It should be noted that prior to Kane there were plenty of anti-hero movie protagonists, especially in the years before the Production Code -but often they were gangster characters designed to evoke no sympathy. Paul Muni in Scarface and James Cagney in Public Enemy were not playing people you could in any way relate to on an emotional or psychological level. But along comes Orson Welles to ask the question ‘what if these larger than life figures, the powerful ultra-capitalists we’re meant to despise (for good reason) had a soul?’
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It’s no secret Kane was largely inspired by media baron William Randolph Hearst, the bleak and empty castle of Xanadu an obvious analogue to Hearsts’ own San Simeon. Welles and co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz had no reason to like Hearst that much, and indeed adapted many of his worst traits into Kane, but they must have seen the humanity in him -a tragedy perhaps to his story that could be expanded upon, and that was well within Welles’ comfort zone of drama. Apart from Citizen Kane, Welles may be best remembered for his affinity for Shakespearean tragedy: his first major brush with fame was in his Mercury Theatre’s 1937 production of Julius Caesar; he went on to direct and star in film adaptations of Macbeth and Othello, and a quasi-adaptation of the Henriad, The Chimes at Midnight, which turns the story of those plays into the Tragedy of Falstaff. To Citizen Kane, he brought those themes of Shakespearean tragedy that had clearly influenced the way he perceives drama, appropriating and updating them for the modern world. Kane was an ambitious Macbeth, an insecure Othello, a deluded Lear, and a stubborn Coriolanus. He is grand and operatic within his newspaper empire, but in those critical moments still just a man.
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The moral relativity of human nature is what unites Kane with those earlier classical figures, as well as with those subsequent characters he has in turn inspired. The capacity for unsavory people to have either that shred of conscience or be motivated out of something understandable, or else have factors perhaps beyond their control accounting for their actions and character. Some of these guys were just born into worlds that necessitated they be ruthless. Tony didn’t have much of a choice, nor did Al Swearengen or Nucky Thompson –Draper and BoJack just needed to survive. It’s simply what they know –on some level, all just do what it takes.
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For the most part. David Ehrlich recently described Tony Soprano’s unique space in this archetype as “the bottomless pit”, the guy who always goes for broke on each new risk and gain alike, never satisfied with what he’s got, always willing to dig himself deeper, either unaware of or unconcerned that there’s no escape. This scope of corruption and self-destruction in itself is of course, enticing for viewers in the same way Kane’s scandals and excesses were in 1941. These stories all tap into that perverse fascination we have with vice and greed, excess and exploitation –the root perhaps of why we are drawn to such narratives of criminals and the morally bankrupt. However, the anti-hero drama wants us to be aware of that, to know that our engagement with such characters and topics is not exempt from challenge. Kane does this perhaps most markedly pertaining to his election campaign, asking us to view Kane objectively for the first time in the movie. A significant moment in Breaking Bad at the end of season two forces us to question our investment in Walt when the repercussions of his actions leads to a catastrophic death toll. BoJack Horseman has a whole season (the fifth) bent on interrogating the impulse to excuse BoJack’s actions. And David Chase never shied away from provoking a kind of audience complicity in the heinous deeds carried out by his mob.
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Yet it is precisely because we empathize with them that our enjoyment of them needs to be confronted in the first place. If we connect with these personalities, what does it say about us? More importantly, how does it serve to distinguish ourselves from them? I think in some ways, the fact we are allowed to empathize with the anti-hero is good for our own introspection, to reinforce our own sense of moral clarity. We can relate on some level to their feelings but can reassure ourselves we would act on them differently. The truth is that we are attracted to figures with nuanced dimensions and it’s much more exciting to depict the moral inner conflict of a villain than a traditional hero. It goes against the binary and that intrigues our compulsion for anomaly. There’s something comforting too in the thesis that even bad people have values, whether or not we can identify with those values or not.
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I suppose it’s fair to say there’s a little bit of everyone in Charles Foster Kane, and it accounts for how he’s been able to resonate so well for so long. The same might even be said of Tony Soprano, Walter White, and the rest, though perhaps not as clearly. In a way, the fact we are directly placed in their shoes maybe lessens their universality –we more or less are privy to exactly how and why they operate. But Kane? “I don’t think any word can explain a mans’ life” says Thompson, the reporter. Even he acknowledges it’s all interpretation, guesswork, rejecting the notion that the secret of Rosebud is even all that important to understanding who Kane really was. It’s the genius in Citizen Kane’s structure that gives the figure of Kane his unique ubiquitous appeal. Because he’s elusive, distant, his portrait entirely subjective, he is that much more captivating. All and none of his descendants are there in his make-up.
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Kane is a complex entity, and I think everyone on some level aspires to him. Its’ those base desires, in spite of all the corruption he wreaks and the badness he brings into the world (through essentially creating the precursor to Fox News), for love and for happiness that so reflect our own core needs as human beings. That’s what he was after all, a human being –not God or Ruler but Citizen Kane. And yet we wouldn’t be as attuned if he wasn’t the personality he was. Welles maybe didn’t think much of this at the time, but the reverberations of what Charles Foster Kane represented paved the way for such things as the New Hollywood movement, the French New Wave, and up to the rise of HBO and the prestige-TV era, dominated by many of these shows that owe Welles’ great newspaper magnate a significant debt of gratitude. Our relationship to the anti-hero archetype was codified by Kane, and it has always come right back to him. We live in the world that Kane built: the true Xanadu, eighty years in the making.
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