American Politics & Pop Culture

The film Citizen Kane is critical of American culture. The film critiques how American culture lost its democratic nature in three ways; through the media, capitalism, and individualism. Orson Welles ties these three things together in a story to act as a reflection of what's happened to America. First Orson Welles owns a newspapers company and he is ridiculing and mocking an actual event called "yellow journalism." And in particular the infamous event of newspapers in America reporting a lie that the Spanish armada had attacked the American navy in the gulf around Cuba in the late 19th century. Mr Thatcher says"'Enemy Armada Off Jersey Coast you know you haven't the slightest proof that this - this armada - is off the Jersey Coast." Mr. Kane says "Can you prove it isn't?" Mr. Berntein recieves a telegram reporting from Cuba by Mr. Wheeler "I could send you some prose poems about palm trees and sunrises...there's no war here." Mr. Kane responds "You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war." Mr. Kane is openly engaging in ridiculous and blatant forms of yellow journalism to satirize it.
Capitalism is another avenue of deterioration of American culture reflected in the film. Kane explains to Thatcher "it is also my pleasure - to see to it that decent, hard-working people of this city are not robbed blind by a group of money-mad pirates because, God help them, they have no one to look after their interests!...If I don't defend the interests of the underprivileged, somebody else will - maybe somebody without any money or any property and that would be too bad." Here he is just mocking the idealism of rich helping the poor. It seems like a deliberate, sarcastic joke. Kane lived in the world largest estate next to Disneyworld? Film calls it Xanadu. He seemed to be a boy with too much money and not enough responsibillity. Throughout the film he wasted money on frivolous things. He commented "I can't help that i don't own every statue in Europe, they've been making statues for two thousand years," or something of the like. In the end as evidenced by the film, he was quite unhappy with all his wealth, and what he really wanted was just his happy childhood.
His happy childhood leads into the final element of Welles critique of American culture in Citizen Kane which is individualism. Kane showed an utter disregard for what his readers knew and didn't know. His wife tries to educate him about being unscrupulous. "People will think..." He finishes her sentence "What I tell them to think." He later had an affair and left the same wife and their child for another woman. He later alienated her from himself too. He showed an inability to live in a social family setting or even a long term relationship. Also in the opening montage after the screening of "news on the march" we see a reporter asking several people who knew Charles Foster Kane in his lifetime questions about him and their stories were like a pastiche, incoherent, disjuctive. And in the end, the reporter couldn't find out the answer to the question what does "rosebud" mean? It seems that everyone was just looking out for themselves and no one really gave a damn about the other from the singer who yelled at him to "get out" to the concierge who tried to sell the reporter some information. Additionally, what Kane really wanted was his happy and poor childhood back that he had been alienated from to have an oversaturated overstimulated life away from his family and parents. It seems to be the message of the film. The film seems to be a statement on the narcissicm of American culture and what it has become because of capitalism, media, and individualism.