If you compare life to a movie, the only protagonist is of course yourself. We never know who the director is, so there's no way to spoil our lives in advance. When the plot was finally over, he had to die, and there was no time to think and summarize.
Luckily, we have movies. Yang Dechang once said: The film has extended the life expectancy of human beings by at least three times. So the trivialities and feathers of life will no longer bind our souls that desire freedom. Through the window of the movie, we freely enter the spiritual world of others and experience a magnificent life. For example, I watched Citizen Kane today.
Citizen Kane was filmed in 1940 and released in 1941 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. As a black-and-white film, its classic status is unquestionable. Even today, it still shows a strong pioneering spirit. It is a watershed between modern and contemporary cinema. Whether it is academic professionals or ordinary film fans, "Citizen Kane" in their eyes is a unique existence. Its classics are far above time.
One of the charms of the classic is its imaginative artistic space, based on the various interpretations of the "Citizen Kane" film. This article intends to start from Kane's personal image and explore the dilemma and meaning of life under the shackles of human nature.
As a big person in the context of the big times, trying to describe Kane's character in two words is futile. In particular, ghost director Orson Wells presents Kane in the eyes of different characters to the audience through a flashback narrative similar to peeling an onion, which makes the character image full of ambiguity and uncertainty.
Perhaps, we can use the axis of time to classify Kane's characters at different stages of life. Restore the director's deconstructed fragments and form a complete puzzle to restore a clear Kane.
1. A young child who smashes a snowball
In the midst of a snowy expanse full of metaphorical surprises, the film draws the narrative: in 1868, how a tenant in arrears of rent left a title deed to the host landlord Mary Kane (Kane's mother) a property deed for the abandoned mine "Colorado Gold Mine" that was considered worthless.
Little Kane happily paddled the sleigh, happily scattering in the snow. And for Secher, the uninvited guest, the guide who will start his legendary life in the future. He behaved very unhappily and smashed him hard with his own sleigh.
2. Newspaper operators who have dropped out of multiple universities
Kane: Oh no, I was expelled from college — several colleges. Don't you remember? Charles Foster Kane, who owns 82,631 shares of the MetStalke Forwarding Company.
The bank, as the guardian, did not restrain Kane's seemingly innate wildness. None of the prestigious universities could keep this wild horse. Kane, who was full of ambition, put the first stop of his career on running a newspaper. His newspaper philosophy was simple and beautiful, that is, to "ensure that the decent and industrious inhabitants of the city would not be looted by a group of money-obsessed robbers." Even if you lose a million yuan a year, you will not hesitate to do anything.
3. The bridal dream of a political bridesmaid
The ambitious Kane, with his genius eloquence, mercilessly mocked his political opponents. It seems that the governor's throne is already in the bag. In fact, as a political novice, he completely underestimated the complexity of politics. Aggressiveness on the surface does not allow you to win, and a counter-attack off the field is fatal.
As the film conveys: Kane, as the maker of mass opinion, has always been a bridesmaid in politics, not a bridesmaid.
4, a paranoid husband with a strong male color
The contender Kane is caught in the Love Nest and the "Singer"
As a by-product of the failure of the political campaign, Kane showed great enthusiasm for the cause of the singer's wife. Hire a professional who specializes in guiding your wife. Using his connections, he has held a huge opera loop concert for his wife many times. He even built an opera house for his wife in Chicago.
Intriguingly, he published a bad review of his wife's opera in his "Inquirer"! Even though his wife was already very disgusted with his singing career, he was still stubborn to make her a good opera singer.
5. The owner of Shangdu who locks the door and locks the household
In his later years, Kane was deeply simple and no longer keen on socializing. He piled up the soil for the mountain, enclosed hundreds of acres of land and built a luxurious manor. He bought a large number of rare beasts from all over the world, and the works of art that were extremely valuable in Europe were all included in his Shangdu estate.
His wife, who likes to be lively, is also forced to live a similar life of captivity with him. In order to pass the time, I had to do boring jigsaw puzzles in the manor every day. In the end, the intolerable wife eventually left him. Even if Kane was furious or even pleaded, he could not save his wife's heart.
Kane in the eyes of others has been labeled with many labels. Such as "patriots", "democrats", "pacifists", "war mongers", "traitors", "idealists", "Americans". These are the kinds of labels that people from different perspectives put on Kane. They conflict with each other and seem difficult to concentrate on one person.
For example, as a newspaper tycoon, his original intention of running a newspaper was rich in people's nature and justice. Colleague Li Lan even regarded his newspaper declaration as sacred as the Declaration of Independence. But then he shamelessly declared: What the people want to know depends on what I want them to know!
In fact, that kind of indisputable unified evaluation is mostly present at someone's funeral. In a sense, it doesn't fully encompass complex human nature. Just as society is often not the ideal black and white, the characters' evaluation of the non-good and bad is also rough and simple. Especially Kane!
Moreover, no one can get inside Kane's heart. Because that place, like his Shangdu Manor, impressively wrote "Private territory, no entry." Even, newspaper reporters had to interview a number of people associated with Kane to explore his true heart by searching for the meaning of the "rose bud" that Kane muttered before his death.
In 1932, Hemingway proposed the famous "Iceberg Principle" in his documentary work Death in the Afternoon. Using the metaphor of "iceberg", he believes that the author should only describe the part of the "iceberg" exposed to the water, and the underwater part should be supplemented by the text's prompts for the reader to imagine.
As the protagonist of the film, Kane's heart is like a huge iceberg. Perhaps, the rose bud is the golden key that can easily open the door to Kane's inner world.
The film's finale reveals the true meaning of "rosebud", which is just a line of text on Kane's favorite sleigh as a child.
Why did Kane remember this line? The film does not give a definitive answer. But from the time he was alive, Kane went to the warehouse in West Manhattan many times... Go in search of childhood. I think the answer is self-evident, kane nostalgic for that once youthful self.
In the last moments, Kane did not think about his expensive works of art and his life, he only missed his sleigh and the snowy childhood. After his hand was unable to grasp the crystal ball of destiny, Kane passed away.
Even more ironically, those rare treasures from Europe. Kane boasted that others had made two thousand years of statues, but it took him five years to buy the artwork. In the end, it was burned to the ground, leaving only the black smoke and ashes after the raging fire.
As the film's narrator says: He, like anyone else in our time, attracts love, hate, and attracts discussion. But when he was dying, he was thinking about something called a rose bud.
If life is only like the first sight, what autumn wind and sorrow paint fan. After writing this film review, I felt like I was desperately trying to grab something from the film, but it was as if I had lost something. In this fleeting moment, I remembered a quote from Bernstein in the film, so let's end with it!
You're still too young, huh... (Remembering his name) Mr. Thomson. A person may remember things that you don't think he will remember. You believe me. One day, as early as 1896, I was taking a ferry to Jersey, and when the boat left the dock, another ferry was about to dock... (Slowly) a girl stood on the boat waiting to disembark. She wore a white dress and held a white parasol in her hand. I saw that she only blinked, and she didn't see me at all. But I bet I haven't thought about her for a month since.