I was sitting at the window in my Chicago Loop hotel room on a January night in 2018, looking across the Chicago River at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a blandly Contextualist glass and steel skyscraper on Wabash with the same big gold letters spelling out the developer’s name on the side as though it was a can of Spam that the tenants of the Manhattan buildings on Riverside Boulevard insisted be removed from theirs’ when I realized for myself that the critical years of the conservative assault on the so-called “liberal consensus” had arrived and that, this time, at least for the moment, it looked as though the oligarchs were going to carry the day.
I looked down at the sheets of ice shuffling and reshuffling themselves like cards in the river and returned to my work on the screenplay of Orson Rehearsed, the “operafilm” I was developing with a local new music group called the Fifth House Ensemble and my own New Mercury Collective as part of a faculty residency at the Chicago College of Performing Arts set up Henry Fogel and Rudy Marcozzi, with whom I had struck an agreement to give composition lessons to a handful of young composers in exchange for the school’s financial and technical support of my projects. Roosevelt would approve of the project I have in mind: polymathic Orson Welles captured in the Bardo between the now and what comes after. An understandable response to the diagnosis of a deteriorating aortic valve I had just received.
The sheets of ice shuffled and reshuffled themselves below. I wrote, “Orson is meta-modern in its disregard for outmoded conceptions of high and low art; it exists after elitism. It isn’t that the music is eclectic, it is that the idea of style is irrelevant. It is post stylistic. As the political tool of the Big Lie roars back into civic life, I want to conjure for the auditor the dread I feel as a citizen and father. I’ll do this by acknowledging the arbitrariness of traditional narrative, seeking Truth in a corkscrew fashion with Möbius strip-like dramaturgy.” I looked up from my sketchbook, where three figures were taking shape on the stage of an empty theater. He's too much a man, truth is too manifold, for there to be a single avatar. There must be three — a sort of Holy Trinity of the Mind. I rose reflexively and pulled the blind shut, thinking, there’s a difference between a magician and a con man. “There’s no happy ending, just death. The curtain falls; the hero simply dies; a solo piano plays a ragtime tune to an empty theater.”
I can see what used to be the American Bar Association’s building from here if I raise the blind. I can see where dad worked when I was a kid, the bridge where I dropped a coin into the river after he died in case he needed the fare for Charon. Instead I put the pen down, closed the sketchbook, switched off the light, placed my mask securely over my nose and mouth, turned on the CPAP machine, and lay back on the bed atop the covers, breathing steadily so the machine could establish the correct air pressure. I’m alone in a hotel room far from home: if I don’t wear this damned thing, then I could die in my sleep. I closed my eyes and imagined, as I had often done while shooting the short “Orson Memory Palace” films, that I was observing as Orson played Solitaire in the house on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood the way that my father played the game the night my mother died.
1. ONE OF SPADES
Oh, how we enjoy cutting our heroes down to size. Type “drunk Orson” into a search engine and an awful video of an aged, bloated, wounded-bear of an Orson Welles, three sheets to the wind, seated at a table gripping a wine glass, slurring advertising pabulum about a mediocre table wine comes up. We laugh. He's ridiculous, worthy of our contempt. Yet, at 29, in 1944, Welles was still beautiful, stumping for weeks on end for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Welles is said to have coached FDR in public speaking; he wrote speeches for him. Only three years after he and Herman J. Mankiewicz had taken on William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, a gigantic Authority and Power figure, in Citizen Kane, Welles replied to a “get well” telegram from the president (Welles had made himself ill campaigning for FDR) by pledging that, “this is the most important work I could ever engage in.”
2. TWO OF DIAMONDS
Welles’ greatest success as an actor and director in the theater was probably his legendary “modern dress” Caesar, a bare-stage, poor theater reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that debuted in November 1937 as the Mercury Theater's first production. Born of necessity—there was little budget, and street clothes were free — the genius was in the recontextualization of the play as a critique of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Theatrical lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal and Welles collaborated on Caesar's lighting, which — since there was no set — shouldered the majority of the emotional and psychological storytelling. A gifted visual artist, Welles knew the importance of not illuminating the most important thing on the stage, as well as light's ability to shape and define physical space with filmic fluidity. That Leni Riefenstahl’s agitprop Triumph of the Will had already thrown up “cathedrals of light” was known — it also happened to be financially prudent, and in step with the flowering of an emergent theatrical technology. Deftly fusing the iconography of religion and politics, he used electric light to take the place of “Divine Radiance” like Prometheus stealing fire. Light, however evocative, is in itself soulless, and he knew that. The result was that he evoked the gestalt of Auden's Age of Anxiety, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time existential ennui of the characters in Sartre's Paths to Freedom. That's a lot of illumination to pile on an Everyman Brutus’ shoulders.
3. THREE OF CLUBS
The first scene of Kane after the newsreel is triply reflective: In a movie called Citizen Kane, able actors portraying Reporters (observers of life; supposedly seekers of truth) watch a newsreel (photographs of a life edited together — “fake” news?) in the dark. They're aware that they are missing something and set out on a search for the meaning of “Rosebud.” The Mob in Caesar is transformed into secret police: they're looking for safety in the wrong place. The reporters return empty-handed; the Mob succeeds in handing power over to exactly the sort of politicians it deserves.
Welles believed in FDR the way Beethoven believed in Napoleon. Albert Einstein, the first publicly intellectual scientist, famously spoke out against nuclear weapons; but it was the popularizer, Carl Sagan, who really captured peoples’ imaginations with Cosmos. He did so by traversing the liminal zone between advanced scientific study and poetry. Welles sought truth, too; but, rather than looking out into the cosmos, or taking to the political bully pulpit, he looked inward, choosing as his vessel of exploration the plays of Shakespeare. He repurposed Polonius’ advice, “to thine own self be true” to read, “to love, Jedidiah, on our own terms” in Kane.
My father quoted the line to me as he poured us each an amaretto the night Mother died. As though that explained anything, anything at all, I remember thinking at the time.
Welles did want to be loved, and he knew how to arrange that. (Leonard Bernstein to Ned Rorem: “Our problem is not that we want everyone to love us; its that we’ll never meet everyone.”) Welles seems to have believed that he'd make a fine politician (he contemplated a run against McCarthy in '43), but he was self-aware enough to have the corrupt politician point out to Kane that looking for love from the Mob will get you nowhere. There's plenty of commentary about Welles’ search for the “Rosebud” of love. Most of it limns a narrative which describes a much-caressed genius-boy of nine who lost his mother prematurely, and his charismatic father soon after. It's easy to pigeon-hole Welles the way Harold C. Schonberg, and even friends like Oscar Levant viewed Bernstein — as the “great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights.” But Welles saw past the transaction to what lies beyond acceptance, even admiration.
“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and the Muppets would take seats in the Senate,” wrote Welles at some point. What would he have made of Late-Stage Capitalism, Kakistocracy, and the ascendance of the Tech Bros?
Throughout his work, Welles asked whether love is true, or if Love is Truth, and the other way around. Of course we get the politicians we deserve. Does Donald Trump, think about love? Paraphrasing Robert Bolt's screenplay toLawrence of Arabia, “some men lie to others; they conceal the truth. Other men lie to themselves; they forget where they hid it.” True, one cannot write about love with tears in one’s eyes, but Welles was a romantic who did not lie to himself. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about crafting the illusion of love, as manifest in his fascination with magic tricks, for example, his documentary essay F for Fake, and so forth.
Welles points out, through the character of Jedidiah in Kane, “That's all [Kane] wanted out of life ... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give.” Like Bernstein, Welles had an enormous capacity to give and to get love; that capacity made them both great popularizers and artists. But Welles could have settled into a senate seat about as comfortably as Bernstein the executive directorship of an orchestra.
4. FOUR OF DIAMONDS
Welles’ dramaturgical chops were those of one who, like Bernstein, intuitively knew exactly what the emotional and psychological nuclear reactors powering a scene were, what each relationship sparked from, what powered each work as a whole. If Bernstein had Mahler, Welles had Shakespeare, and both did their finest work in the theater when editing and reinterpreting the Bard — Bernstein with West Side Story and Welles with Caesar.
He sought artistic freedom (as opposed to simple self-actualization, which is easier, because it requires only selfishness and singleness of mind to achieve), of course, and achieved it. While to the outside world Welles lamented that he spent ninety percent of his time raising money, he wisely had Kane lament, “If I hadn't been rich, I'd have been a truly great man.” I believe that Welles’ masterpiece was not Kane, or Chimes, but Moby Dick Rehearsed. Why? Because thirty years after having noted that RKO had given him the “world's biggest train set,” he was able to create a theatrical sandbox in which every performance was different, every evening like a page from Joyce's Ulysses, disconnected from other performances, but connected because the ideas flow from one place to the next like water. He found a way to be paid to do as he pleased.
The enormous self-restraint required to cope with complete artistic freedom (and to therefore not deserve the slings and arrows of every critic who lays it on with the “self-indulgence” rap because it’s easy, and because they can) prompted Stravinsky to point out at the start of the 20th century that, "now that we can do whatever we want to do, we must first decide what we do not want to do." Welles understood that people resent being preached to—hence the Bible's parables, which really are ripping yarns. He understood that, for every Poetics of Music (whether ghost-written by a Robert Kraft or not), Carl Sagan Cosmos, Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces, or Bernstein Harvard lecture, there will always be a host of intellectuals smarter, more insightful, more adept at argument, poised to envelop the scene in the smoke of argument, the entanglements of nomenclature, the rules of rhetoric, so that, in a couple of beats, we're all back on “safe” ground, mundanely talking about talking about the thing rather than doing the scary work of, as Wallace Stevens pointed out, grappling with “not ideas of the thing but the thing itself.”
It takes a poet running at full bore to conjoin, as Welles did in Midnight, Shakespeare’s “nimbus floods” with Melville's allegorical mists, and the moral haze hanging over Walt Whitman's descriptions in Specimen Days with a healthy, Midwestern dollop of 1 Corinthians on top, reminding us, like the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, that “we see through a glass, darkly.”
Which brings us back to those reporters sitting in the dark at the beginning of Kane, seeking truth in fiction. Manifesting the Aristotelian admonition to grapple with the Art and Life paradigm, Welles staged them as denizens of Plato’s Cave. Behind the fire, the javelin of light stabbing down from the projection booth, is a stage / screen. We're all puppeteers, he reminds us, vying with one another to construct the most viable reality. Remember high school classics class? If you skipped it, or didn't do your homework; or if you did do your homework and you have fallen for the effluvial torrent of the Big Lie, then you have feelings and identify what you see and don't like as “fake news.”
Nevertheless, one person escapes the Cave. He emerges into the sunlight, sees the Cave for the prison and illusion that it is, re-examines his former existence, and determines to return to the Cave to spread the Good News. Naturally, they crucify him. (Look at him! He doesn't work out; he's obviously not disciplined or in control of himself! He's fat, drunk, doing a wine commercial. He's the object of ridicule who seems to have learned nothing from Falstaff, for there he is, looking and acting just like him! Why should we believe anything he says?) As Andre points out so wittily to Wally in My Dinner With Andre, New York City may in fact be a prototype of the concentration camp of the 21st century, built by the inmates who take a perverse pride in what they've created. “Aren't we schizophrenics?” he asks. “Are these flickering shadows Reality?” asks the returning escapee, the reporters, the audience, the artist.
5. FIVE OF HEARTS
“Rosebud” is whatever you want it to be and then again not. It is the key, but then it isn’t; it’s like the keys in Hitchcock’s films — Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, even Psycho. It’s a McGuffin, that’s all: Rosebud’s a plot trigger. “Let’s go see a film,” said Mother that Christmas vacation, and then having her reveal to me during a screening of the 39 Steps (more keys!) that she had cancer. Lost childhood, lost parents, lost lovers, lost youth, lost dreams, loss, loss, loss. Welles allowed that Kane, the ultimate narcissist, must “at least have loved his mother.” Maybe Rosebud wasn't a sled; maybe Rosebud was just a Head Fake — a cosmic basketballer looking straight at you while passing off to his teammate.
Jedidiah pans Kane's wife's performance. She, of course, has little talent, and Jedidiah has a choice: he can go easy on her out of compassion and pity, or he can assess her as an extension of her husband’s ego. She's “nothing special,” but she's special to Kane. (“When everyone's special, nobody is.”) Rilke reminds us that Art is never understood by criticism; beauty's beholder’s eye, and so on; but Kane's inability to see his wife as separate from himself is what motivates him. He demands she be perceived as gifted the way that our current president feels that he's a genius because “fate is what happened.” Jedidiah hits the nail on the head. (“Never,” my Uncle Clifford once admonished me, “rub a man's rhubarb.”) Kane must fire him just as surely as the denizens of the Cave must, upon the Hero’s return, reject the bringer of news of the blazing, brilliant, brightly-lit outside world.
“Ask not what you can do for your country,” quipped Welles. “Ask what’s for lunch.” Lucas, Spielberg, and other more “commercially viable” great filmmakers made more money and acquired more Power; but Welles’ Authority has never been questioned. When he tried to play the game of life on their terms, he couldn’t help leaving the clichés on the cutting room floor instead of cooking them into meta-modernist, self-referential speeches about creativity and the avoidance of responsibility for what you’ve just said. Because he couldn’t help becoming invested. He cared. Even Touch of Evil is an art film flying under the radar as a potboiler with Charlton Heston serving as Hollywood's canary in the cinematic coal mine. Welles had heard the Chimes at Midnight. He had learned that it is more important to be understood, in the end, than it is to be loved.
The night Mother died in my arms, my father, who had been playing Solitaire downstairs, quoted Joseph Cotton's line to me by way of explaining himself and why his wife hadn't died in his arms. When my own personal Jedidiah writes his review and hands it to me, I hope that I shall have mostly kept my eyes on the ball.
Delivering this talk at Amherst College in March 2018.
This essay served as working notes for a public address at the Chicago College of Performing Arts Center for Arts Leadership delivered on 18 January 2018 and on 5 March 2018 at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.