America the Barbaric: Citizen Kane (1941), Do the Right Thing (1989), This is America (2018)
The status quo great American metaphor might still be the “shining city on a hill”. Today we read more about actual fortified hilltop bunkers built by HNWI (high-net-worth individuals) far from big cities, as recently documented everywhere (Survival of the Richest, “Masque of the Red Death” from Radicalized by Cory Doctorow, Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich). Maybe the bunkers are built underground or in old missile silos. Maybe there are electrified gates and weapons of mass destruction aimed through old school embrasures. Maybe there are moats and drawbridges. Less a metaphor than an early warning alarm for the rest of us. The aspirational American Dream is now to make enough money to hunker down in New Zealand, accessible only by private helicopter.
Here’s a new American metaphor: a great big hedge maze with some kind of prize at its center. A sports pitch for the class-based competitions of Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. The goal? Maybe to get to the center, but, alternatively, to get out. Neither is easy. Your starting position is where you were born; some very few start at the center, many more much further from the center. Then there are outsiders trying to get in. The trick to surviving in America, if it itself survives, may be recognizing and negotiating an economic and social labyrinth. Finding your way to the center is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible.
… half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled. ~ Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
This simplistic maze analogy is obscured by deeply-ingrained, simplistic myths. Capitalism. The free market. Bootstrap economics. But, this maze persists because of multi-generational owners maintaining their status as owners and multi-generational workers remaining workers, a paradigm established with slavery. We could say that the maze is constantly adapting as family money accumulates and dissipates and power dynamics change, and the paths through the maze must be continuously remapped, but the maze endures because of perpetual roles: the affluent 1% and everyone else.
Systems like Rentier Capitalism keep most of us as close to poverty conditions as possible. The aflluent maintain institutionalized patriarchal and racist structures to generate an endless supply of working class. The affluent myopically build their bunkers, suburban enclaves, gated mansions, and corporate entities as bastions against the 99%. We intermittently and ineffectively rebel. The affluent respond by shifting the walls of the maze; changing the rules, creating new shell games, pushing dividend recapitalisations, allowing wages to stagnate while healthcare and housing costs rise, turning free labor into high-priced items, building up a police state, emboldening racists, escalating gun sales, disappearing immigrants, etc.. This all furthers the status quo.
Donald Childish Gambino Glover’s This is America says all this in a few short minutes.
Orson Welles and Spike Lee, a half decade apart and coming from not completely but still pretty much diametrically opposed origins, in many ways sketch the same America, a maze of extreme capitalism, or crony capitalism, or late-stage capitalism. An Econ 101 course could do far worse than make Citizen Kane and Do the Right Thing required viewing. The two films together paint a fuller picture of the complexities of America than either one alone. Welles and Lee build worlds highlighting insular American cultural scenes, create innovative shots and exaggerated compositions and edit elastically and play with conventions. And they both put an actor/director turn at the center of their films. Kane and Mookie, respectively, stand-out as trickster gods or agents of chaos in their stories, at least for moments, and in so doing delineate the elementary extremes of the societies filling their backdrops.
Lee makes in-your-face introductions to more than a dozen characters, the owners and customers of a Brooklyn pizzeria, through the course of a very hot day in which tensions flare. Mookie travels between all these parties, negotiating the White rage of his employers and the Black outrage of his neighbors. Mookie plays both sides so that he can feed his family. We find him both diffusing fights with a humanistic camaraderie and ultimately lighting the fuse of the most significant blow to one of the neighborhood’s main examples of white hegemony. He’s joyous, intellectual and dignified, if a little benignly selfish, somehow surviving on a few hundred bucks a week while motivated by ambitions rooted in the American Dream, and Lee, positioning Mookie between Malcom X and MLK’s diverging approaches to social inequality, offers no solution other than malleable tenacity. All the characters have strategies but no one has answers. Economically-speaking, this is the view from the bottom 99% of our country looking up.
The power dynamics of Do the Right Thing are fascinating. The white pizzeria owners are Italian American immigrants using the imagery of Italian American success to proclaim their authority. The other business owners in the neighborhood are Korean. In the context of the haves and have-nots of the neighborhood the newer immigrants are the haves. But from the point of view of tycoons in Manhattan skyscrapers looking out across the East River, everyone living in Brooklyn between 1941 and 1989, except maybe for the Larry Bird-loving gentrification bro, are outside the maze.
Citizen Kane is all top down. Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, like Mookie, is a scoundrel with a gentle disrespect for cultural customs. While Mookie is trapped by economic limitations, though, Kane is trapped by his seemingly-destined role as white hegemony personified. Race, of course, is not a significant component of Citizen Kane, but class certainly is. The film basically tracks the tragedy of the richest man in America, “America’s Kublai Khan”, a William Randolph Hearst stand-in, who abandons his principles. Kane in his youth uses yellow journalism to attack Wall Street, the hand that feeds him, and to “look after the interests of the underprivileged”. His newspaper’s first issue runs his “Declaration of Principles”, directly written with the citizens of neighborhoods like Bedford–Stuyvesant in mind. Years pass and we find him using the principles as empty campaign promises. Kane plays both sides, too, to ultimately fuel a brittle ego. “He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life.”
In the hierarchy of archetypes defined by Do the Right Thing, Kane is kind of Lee’s pizzeria owner Sal, or Sal’s more racist son Pino, i.e. the figures at the top of the food chain, so to speak, but maximized, elevated from neighborhoods and tenements, and from owning and running or inheriting a pizza joint in an under-served community, to inheriting and running a newspaper empire and living in walled-off estates. The young Kane mirrors Mookie’s joy, a carefree and self-satisfied joy that basically embodies the American Dream, but like Sal and Pino his ambitions come with a lucky inheritance, a particular racial profile and thus realizable opportunities. Welles carefully reveals the course of his industrialist’s life from poverty to excess through a reporter’s interviews with the people who got trapped in his wake. As Kane gets more powerful, he destroys more people. He strays from basic humanism as consumerist urges corrupt his soul.
Citizen Kane is a propaganda tool, though. It serves to pacify the masses. It says the winners are miserable; the American Dream is a lie; if you’re losing don’t worry about it because the ability to accumulate whatever you want represents a maze with no center, a labyrinthine meaninglessness. The classical Greek labyrinth was a prison designed to hold the Minotaur, an additional deep-rooted negative connotation of a place you don’t want to be trapped within. And Citizen Kane opens and closes like a horror film, with Bernard Herrmann’s musical compositions akin to those found in Universal monster movies, with creepy noir montages of a castle, the black smoke from the cremation of a mystery object and the death rattle of our protagonist as a monster.
It’s an entirely superficial premise. In real life industrial capitalists enjoy the best this world has to offer and can eff off to their vacation bunkers when the world they’ve been slowly destroying finally comes crashing down. And what we find, in actuality, all around us, and in the cartoon agitprop of Do the Right Thing and This is America, is an ever more evident control state and Grifter Capitalism’s many many victims.
Victims, but also angels, the creators of one of the true American art forms. “… at the center of culture but the edge of society…” as author Alex Ross writes about Arnold Schoenberg and Viennese Jews on the eve of Nazism in “The Rest Is Noise”. Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy lists the accomplishments:
WE LOVE ROLL CALL, Y’ALL! Boogie Down Productions, Rob Base, Dana Dane, Marley Marl, Olatunji, Chuck D, Ray Charles, EPMD, EU, Alberta Hunter, Run-D.M.C., Stetsasonic, Sugar Bear, John Coltrane, Big Daddy Kane, Salt-n-Pepa, Luther Vandross, McCoy Tyner, Biz Markie, New Edition, Otis Redding, Anita Baker, Thelonious Monk, Marcus Miller, Branford Marsalis, James Brown, Wayne Shorter, Tracy Chapman, Miles Davis, Force MDs, Oliver Nelson, Fred Wesley, Maceo, Janet Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, George Clinton, Count Basie, Mtume, Stevie Wonder, Bobby McFerrin, Dexter Gordon, Sam Cooke, Parliament-Funkadelic, Al Jarreau, Teddy Pendergrass, Joe Williams, Wynton Marsalis, Phyllis Hyman, Sade, Sarah Vaughn, Roland Kirk, Keith Sweat, Kool Moe Dee, Prince, Ella Fitzgerald, Dianne Reeves, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Bessie Smith, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Steel Pulse, Little Richard, Mahalia Jackson, Jackie Wilson, Cannonball AND Nat Adderley, Quincy Jones, Marvin Gaye, Charles Mingus AND Marion Williams. We wanna thank you all for makin’ our lives just a little brighter here on We Love Radio!
Long live Radio Rahim.
More: What is Rentier Capitalism?, Survival of the Richest, Radicalized by Cory Doctorow, Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich, The Enduring Urgency of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing at 30, The Shadow: A hundred years of Orson Welles, Citizen Trump: What the Donald’s love of Citizen Kane reveals about him, Citizen Kane and the meaning of Rosebud, Citizen Kane on Criterion, Do the Right Thing: Walking in Stereo, Little Known Story Behind Do the Right Thing, Roger Ebert on Do the Right Thing, Props, Things and Do the Right Thing, `Do The Right Thing` At Least Takes a Stab at Complexity, Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’ video is a beautiful nightmare, Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”, ‘This Is America’: Breaking down Childish Gambino’s powerful new music video, Childish Gambino shows pop music can be powerfully political despite censorship, Why White People Stay Silent on Racism, and What to Read First, Anti-Racism Bibliography Google Sheet, Victoria Alexander’s Anti-racist Reading List on Twitter, The Rise (and Fall) of Citizen Kane As the Greatest Movie Ever Made
Originally published at https://cinematicexcess.com on September 6, 2019.
