Celebrity
Watching 'Citizen Kane' in late 2024
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 Roman Pool at Hearst Castle
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
When Russia makes yet another nuclear threat, why is the biggest scaredy cat in the room always a would-be “man’s man” like Joe Rogan? Also, when did doing the right thing cease to be a part of normative masculinity for so many Americans?
Imagining Some of the Worst: Domestic Edition
I doubt I’ll have the bandwidth to follow the machinations in Washington’s halls of power, as I did during the previous administration. I got out of the habit under the current one because I was exhausted, didn’t feel threatened, and ended up living a twelve-hour drive away. And now I want to focus on the parts of my life and world where my individual agency, talents, and interests might be leveraged for things more constructive, more life-affirming.
First, though, I’ll allow myself to imagine some of the worst coming our way, just to get the darkness out of my mind and into words: the destruction of the regulatory state and of our public medical, environmental, climate, and weather research infrastructure; the violent and cruel erasure of entire communities; the enslavement, indentured servitude, or other forms of abusive exploitation of people without papers under the “protection” of unscrupulous employers, landlords, neighbors, and government agents; the creation of a new generation of Hoovervilles inhabited by people with no health insurance, no immunizations, and pensioners whose Social Security checks and Medicare benefits no longer keep them housed; preventable contagious diseases killing our children; lawfully mandated medical malpractice killing girls, women, and trans men with the bad luck to become pregnant; the loss of LGBTQ+ family, friends, and community members to exile, to self-harm, and to the violence of bullies given license by their chosen leader; the possibility that insulin might grow out of my reach; the knowledge that Medicare will never cover the costs of help with elder care while I still need such help, and while private equity funds squeeze what they can out of old folks homes, leaving them woefully understaffed, their populations vulnerable to contagious disease, inattention, and abuse.
It doesn’t have to go this way, not even under the next president. But do we think a GOP-controlled Senate will respect the filibuster the next time around, if they manage to get the House too? Isn’t that just one more convention that the next president can demand they drop? And have any of them demonstrated even the slightest willingness to defend their institution, sure in the knowledge that they are part of a separate branch of government? GOP representatives in the House are no better, as they demonstrated during the previous president’s two impeachments.
American presidents have enormous amounts of power, and now, it seems, controlling the party and the mob will give the next president even more. Or will some Republican legislators put their constituents ahead of the slash-and-burn ideologues? What groups will they decide government might have a role in protecting? Of course, the House could still flip Democratic. Some Republicans could develop a conscience. Or the ambitions, incompetence, and contradictory aims, values, and beliefs of Orange Face’s supporters could lead to lots of friendly fire and delays.
Caveat: the GOP marched in lockstep to regain the presidency, but we have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. It’s possible they prefer to carry out dissent internally. It’s also a sure thing that Mr. Red Tie will keep all eyes on himself, with lots of help from the media, while the poisons are concocted in Congress and in other parts of the executive branch.
Wealthy 'Criminally Insane' Playboy Posing with Captors (ca. 1913–14)
Sometimes the world loves a notorious, wealthy, narcissistic, sociopathic, murdering playboy sadist. This one was Harry K. Thaw, seen here posing in chummy fashion with Canadian police and immigration officers around the time of his escape from the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in New York. What a strange photo!
Credit: Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, ca. 1913–14, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017648770/.
A remarkable indictment: “We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’" by John D Miller (head of marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal for some 25 years), U.S. News, Oct. 16, 2024.
There are two documentary films streaming on Paramount+ right now that I find inspiring and motivating: “Superpower” (2023), directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman; and “Kiss the Future” (2024), directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain. The first centers on Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelinsky in Russia’s current war against Ukraine, and the second goes back to the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–96).
A theme common to each film is ordinary citizens standing up to genocidal aggressors. There is also the relationship between popular culture and politics in war, including the role of international celebrity. In the first movie, an entertainer-turned-president must lead a country in war, supported by a self-mobilizing citizenry. Moreover, one of the directors is himself an entertainer. In the second movie, inhabitants of a city under constant fire find a way to get by and even thrive with punk rock and dance. They are later joined on TV and then in person by the band U2.
'The American Face of Fascism'
It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.
– Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest about Trump,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2016