Omnipotence is a funny thing. An adjective normally bestowed upon human beings possessing transcendent and redefining talents, but also a gift that in the long run carries with it a terribly slow and socially acidic, terminal disease. The only cure of which is deconstruction of the self or physical death. – Random made up quote
I finally managed a few nights ago to sit down and properly watch Citizen Kane (1941). For a film scholar several years into the business this has been somewhat of an embarrassment (although only one amongst many) that I have been almost unwilling to admit. However, I am a firm believer in serendipity, that is the concept not the shitty John Cusack film and or that things occur at different times for different reasons. The pertinence of this particular fact deals with the recent death of a certain Michael Joseph Jackson, you might have heard of him. Not having seen Citizen Kane until now actually provided a different aspect or illumination upon the tragedy of Michel Jackson’s untimely death that I might otherwise not have come across. That is, two and two would not have been put together.
The parallel between Jackson and the film begins as follows: Charles Foster Kane, aka Citizen Cane, in the film begins as a young child who inherits an exorbitant amount of wealth that immediately has an impact upon his life, making it essentially impossible to grow up as a “normal” human being under “normal” circumstances, his world must be tailored made to fit him. We the viewer are then transported rather quickly to Kane as a young adult with an interest and extraordinary talent for running a newspaper, aided by his fortune, that quickly turns him into an even wealthier “media mogul”. This is all fine and dandy but eventually sees Kane, and his somewhat honest attitude, attempt to run for public office. Here his honest character is quickly dispatched by dishonest competition, a sex scandal is created and suddenly Kane finds himself on a downward spiral to becoming a complete recluse. An enormous estate is built in Florida named Xanadu, an enormous estate that serves in the end as Kane’s sarcophagus.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take a genius to see the similarities here. Jackson started out as a very talented child in the group the Jackson 5. Instead of pure capital like Charles Foster Kane, he possessed a fairly large amount of what Pierre Bourdieu calls social capital, present and obtained by his ability to sing, dance and captivate a crowd. The story for me as a child of the 80’s, much like the one in Citizen Kane, quickly begins its next chapter with Jackson as the ultra popular entertainer that sees his records outsell anything that has come before them, his star power dwarfing anyone else existent in the entertainment industry, arguably making him the most famous individual to ever tread upon this planet. At this point, like Charles Foster Kane, Jackson seemingly tried to use his star power to enact social change differing from the movie in the fact that one has to say Jackson, unlike Kane, succeeded; bypassing the need for public office due to his immense popularity. The story of Jackson’s life though is not quite, as you well know, as simply defined as I have written above and definitely does not have its end or entirety summed up by the aforementioned facts.
Much more gruesome than Kane’s inability to obtain public office and his subsequent descent, we the public bore witness to what the tabloids dubbed him “Wacko Jacko” a sort of surgically enhanced liminal figure. As Dave Chappelle alluded to, a person who underwent countless enhancements to impress us. Perhaps not completely admitted nor seen from this perspective until after his death, we were witness to a child that never grew up, a self-admitted modern day Peter Pan, who attempted to rebuild a childhood that never existed, complete with his own “never never land” in the form of a ranch. Like Kane’s Xanadu, Neverland Ranch seemed to function as a socially constrictive sarcophagus that housed pop-culture artifacts of the times and allowed for what many believed to be weird and inappropriate social interaction with children that Jackson thought of as his peers. Fast forward to two molestation cases later and Jackson ceased to be a liminal figure, for many becoming only a pedophile.
What makes the two stories so interesting, as I alluded to in the first few lines of this post, deals with ideas of omnipotence and its function in a capitalist society. Simply put, expanding markets are always in need of the next big star that opens and or bridges a gap and at certain points in time these stars become so big and burn so bright that they threaten the stability of the entire system. Instead of inspiring massive record sales, book sales or box office receipts they begin to inspire such things as social change and creative thought, dangerously unpredictable things. They also inspire fanaticism and massive amounts of interest into the banal personal details of the star’s life, eventually spinning everything out of control and into the realm of pure speculation. The point is that these stars begin to expand the market beyond what the checks and balances in the system can peacefully control or contain. I am not saying there is some sort of evil collective that decides the limits upon success. However, I do believe that it is simply a fact of capitalist nature that when someone rises and wins so big it is inevitable that they have to loose and fall; the system is predicated upon this fact.
The fall I speak of, from what I can tell during my studies and time spent dealing with the subject, can take place in few varying ways. Normally it is either a self deconstruction perpetrated in order to relieve oneself from the burden of omnipotence. In such a case I would use a figure like Bob Dylan as an example, who at his peak in the late 60’s changed the very popular way he preformed music and seemingly shunned any ideas that were attached to him as a spokesman for social change, something many thought to be the core of Dylan’s music and popularity. The second option here as I see it is the news media. In their frantic search for details and information pertaining to a given celebrity often times a certain amount of conflict is created between the media and an individual. At its core the media believes it provides a service to society in informing them if someone or something is dishonest. With omnipotent stars it really becomes a hunt to provide the public with a corrected picture of the individual to double check and inform idealizing fans of the blemishes and personal details that sometimes suggest that a star is simply put “just as fucked up as you or I”. With Dylan again as the example here we have the media’s attempts at providing his proper background, stripping away the mystery into his seemingly auspicious beginnings. Possibly, I could even state that the media functions as a limiting body for such aspiring individuals, begging the question would you really want to be exposed, putting people into an ever questioning position of am I worthy of praise, am I any good at what I do, can I really enact change?
It is here that the two stories I began this post with differ. Charles Foster Kane in the film gives up and retires as recluse to Xanadu with his wife. While Michel Jackson never seemingly by his own hand wanted to leave the spotlight (he was for all intensive purposes born, raised and ultimately laid to rest there) fluctuating in and out of the spot light. Citizen Kane is interesting on its own as showing a man’s deconstruction by a device that he himself builds and deploys, a tabloid, or speculation based newspaper. Michael Jackson I do not believe is really a victim of an establishment he willingly helped to create; it is however a similarity in his deconstruction that he shares with Kane. Like Kane, Jackson’s death has spurred a hunt for a MacGuffin, or I should say a whole slew of them. It’s as if the media is shocked and to some extent feeling guilty, appropriately trying to balance the scales or their prior verdict on Jackson, not so much for Jackson himself, but for their own future reputation and credibility, they must “get it right”.
I would like to think there is a great amount of honest truth to my sentiments described herein, albeit not based upon any kind of insider perspective into Michel Jackson unlike that which the media has been frantically, even to this day, searching for. It is more a set of observations that a movie like Citizen Kane, made long before Michael Jackson’s birth and rise to fame, has brought into perspective for me. The film even in 1941 was not just a fictional piece; it contains many meta-film aspects that deal with then contemporary figures of arguable omnipotence such as William Randolph Hearst and Howard Hughes, coupled with the controversies surrounding them. Sometimes knowledge and texts can provide a solid blueprint or filter through which we can better see the reality of a given situation. For me such is the case with Orson Welles‘ master piece Citizen Kane in conjunction with the death of Michael Jackson. It shows clearly for me the who and why of the event and much like the boys from the paper in Citizen Kane, the boys on CNN and other “reputable” news networks are still busy trying to find out just what rosebud means. I guess I still have my own concerns with it as well, but they only pertain to just how widely applicable the definition of a MacGuffin fits. Is rosebud in the case of Jackson’s death an honest interest, an admonishment of guilt, a cathartic experience for the networks and the fans who participated in the speculation or just an elaborate societal smoke screen so we don’t see the mechanism at work, sot of like a bourgeois escape lever if you will?
In the end I hope to have proved at the very least why one can debate Citizen Kane as being one of the greatest, if not “the” greatest film ever made, that there is some well based merit to such a discussion. To be so highly applicable to this day, pertaining to the life and circumstances surrounding such an enormous icon is an amazing achievement that shows the film and film maker’s mastery in capturing a pure essence beyond banal details, displaying in the process cinema’s timelessness. My thoughts pertaining to Michael Jackson are a much more complicated topic; it’s not fictional, although elements of it appear to be so. His is a tragic death and more so than that, a tragic life that borderlines in my opinion on persecution by the media and his fans. Not to mention that one of popular culture’s biggest icons and money maker dies at a time when the entire system has been rocked by enormous earthquakes of ethics and injustice. To a person who spends a fair amount of time in musty tombs of knowledge, who has intently studied as many aspects of the system I live in as I possibly can, it simply provides a great example about how real life is almost always more unbelievable and dramatic than fictional work. Or perhaps it all proves the fact that there simply is no difference; we are all pulled along by the same timeless narrative devices.
