Last week I watched “Citizen Kane” (dir. Orson Wells, 1941) for the first time in more decades than I can remember. I didn’t really enjoy the experience, maybe because the initial premise (tearing a boy away from his home for a huge inheritance) is as misshapen as the psychological development of the lead role, Charles Foster Kane. There is also the crass materialism, the emptiness of Kane’s soul, and his insatiable appetite for the adoration of others. His unhappy loneliness in the end as the only occupant (not including servants) of a giant castle filled with statues and other valuable artifacts from Europe was presumably the point of this bleak story, one that might be construed as a moral tale.

I should have liked the references to newspaper moguls and opinion making to be less oblique, though that might have pushed one of them too far in real life. (Apparently William Randolph Hearst did what he could to suppress the film because it hit too close to home.) Or maybe this context was secondary to Kane’s personal development anyway. After all, this was an era when foreign correspondents reported on populists and dictators, and psychoanalysis was in vogue. Sure, it was an era of mass politics, but these masses had their great men, for better or worse.

None of this is a criticism of the film. I just didn’t enjoy it. Perhaps the biggest problem is how readily Kane can stand in for certain men in our own time. The film’s dark, fatalistic overtones reinforced this effect in my mind. Still, there is one external factor that helped me to contextualize “Citizen Kane” better this time around: I actually saw the Hearst Castle in 2018, a truly extraordinary monument, fascinating and unsettling at the same time.

Indoor pool modeled after ancient Roman baths, lots of gold and blue, except for the white statues and the white bases of electric lamps.

Indoor Roman Pool at Hearst Castle