Citizen Kane's fascist opera house

This Tartar Woman series began with John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror, and in that film, Agnes Moorehead played his mother. But Moorehead played another mother fifteen years earlier in Orson Welles’ epic, Citizen Kane, another film referencing a Khan: this one Kubla Khan of Xanadu, the name of Charles Kane’s compound.

Kubla Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan. The connection is admittedly superficial, but Citizen Kane provides a thread that illustrates why these Hollywood-connected arms dealers were pairing pianos with violence, and it all goes back to Benito Mussolini’s use of music to promote what he called “collective discipline.”

Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. Mankiewicz was part of that wave of screenwriters who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s with a connection to military intelligence.

In Herman’s case, the military connection was through his son Don, but Herman himself was also in the military, and one year after Citizen Kane was released, Herman Mankiewicz joined the Writers’ War Board (WWB), a private entity producing government propaganda. According to Wikipedia, the WWB “worked, according to an employee, as ‘an arm of the government.’ And the activities were so extensive that it has been called the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’.”

The Wikipedia article goes on to discuss its funding this way: “The civilian WWB was formed at the request of Julian Street Jr., head of the writing staff for the U.S. Treasury Department. Street spoke with playwright Howard Lindsay about organizing a group of prominent writers to promote the sale of war bonds.” That’s the financial reality here, Hollywood screenwriters who considered themselves “artists,” but who were really just promoting and increasing the national debt to fund war and the military industrial complex. This was especially true of the wave of screenwriters who showed up in Hollywood in the late 1920s with their various connections to military intelligence.

Orson Welles was producing his own versions of propaganda, including a radio series in the early 1940s called “Ceiling Unlimited.” That show promoted and glorified the aviation industry and was funded by Lockheed-Vega. According to Wikipedia, this show was “a prime contribution to the war effort” made by Orson Welles.

So together, these two Hollywood war propagandists co-wrote the fictional story of Charles Foster Kane, patterned after the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. But Citizen Kane wasn’t propaganda; it was disclosure, meant for an audience with eyes to see.

The film was a Mercury production, as in the Mercury Theatre, developed by John Houseman and Orson Welles with an interesting name; in an earlier video we looked at Mercury as the “swift messenger,” a metaphor of communicating state propaganda.This 1641 book is a manual for kings and governments: basic precepts of propaganda and how to fool people with obscured meaning and obscured grammar. It says here that plain arguments are not “so lively and persuasive as when they steal into a man’s assent (agreement) under the covert of a parable.” And here, it’s saying that even though fallible men may unwillingly betray state secrets, this book will teach men how to “conceal.”

But really, it’s a book for writers, like screenwriters in Hollywood and we can see evidence in Citizen Kane that Orson Welles was fully aware of the meaning of “Mercury” as it concerns propaganda. This is in keeping with the origins of the Mercury Theatre, which started out as part of the Federal Theatre Project, a government program started under FDR’s New Deal intended to spur the economy by creating and funding works projects.

The 1641 book from which the Mercury Theatre got its name was called Mercury, the Secret and Swift Messenger. Or rather, this was its title. What the book was called is a different thing, altogether, and the rhetorical distinction between what something is called and its title is part of a larger rhetorical concept called the “use-mention distinction.” This distinction is what gives both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass their fanciful level of wordplay. It’s also why the Mad Hatter, poisoned by mercury in the making of his hats, sets the tone of “madness” in both stories.

We might even view the logo of the Mercury Theatre as an expression of use-mention distinction. The Mercury Theatre was originally located in an old Broadway theater on 41st Street in New York City, and this area of town was understood as a part of the Broadway theater district. So it was called Broadway, but its title was 41st Street, the implication being that the Mercury Theatre was a revolution taking over Broadway.

The author of Mercury was John Wilkins. He was one of the founders of the Royal Society and who fell heavily on the side of parliamentarianism, which I have previously argued is an early form of corporate governance. John Wilkins was married to the youngest sister of the parliamentarian cum dictator Oliver Cromwell, and it was Cromwell who got him his position as Master of Trinity College at Cambridge.

In Mercury, Wilkins also talks about rhetorical conventions, rhetorical meaning “language that is intended to influence, persuade, or impress an audience rather than convey objective information,” as in news or journalism. One item listed under Wilkins’ heading, the “secrecy of speech,” is inversion, which explains the entire tone and purpose of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. It also explains the symbolic reasoning for filming Susan’s reflection in her vanity mirror, something we’ll look at later.

Orson Welles played with the lessons in Mercury, the Secret and Swift Messengerthroughout his entire career, and a good example is his 1973 film F for Fake. which is full of use-mention distinction and rhetorical miscues and confusions.

BTW, one of the first plays the Mercury Theatre produced was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with an anti-Italian-fascist message. You’ll have to decide for yourself if its message was real or fake, slow or swift. We all know that Welles had a habit of staging fake news, and he says, of the time just after the War of the Worlds broadcast: “I didn’t go to jail. I went to Hollywood.”

The disclosure in Citizen Kane regarding how media was tasked with shaping the public’s support of specific wars was simple and obvious. As Kane says in his newspaper office: “You provide the prose poems; I’ll provide the war.” And many people were already aware of how war was sold to the public, especially those who had read Merchants of Death. But later in the film, his disclosure about war, creating the lucrative demand for war movies and Hollywood armaments, grew much more cryptic as the Kane empire was expanded into broader forms of entertainment than just the news.

When Charlie Kane first meets Susan Alexander, his mistress who later becomes his second wife, she tells him she’s a singer. She’s just invited him up to her apartment, where he stands, facing her, next to her vanity. Here, Charlie’s lines are filmed by a camera directly in front of him, but we only see Susan reflected in the mirror. Susan is being inverted in real time: from toothache pain to laughter, then later, from floosy mistress to respectable opera singer, the same inverted reality Nick Nightingale saw through his blindfold in the mirror hanging above his piano. And not surprisingly, Charlie soon asks Susan, “Have you got a piano?”

She had been telling him that she wanted to be a singer. But this statement was immediately qualified, or more specifically, it was completely denied: “I wanted to be a singer, I guess. That is, I didn’t. My mother did.” It was also her mother who wanted her to sing opera, even though Susan lacked the vocal range. “You know what mothers are like.” And Charles, sort of resigned now, replies: “Yes, I know.”

He’s pensively thinking of Agnes Moorehead. In Hollywood, Moorehead was the mother who would later raise Genghis Khan to be great in The Conqueror of 1956. Kane’s version of an Agnes Moorehead mother set him up, if not to be great, then at least to be rich. This is deep Roman corporate symbolism. In the creation myth of Rome, when the god Mars raped the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia and fathered the twins Romulus and Remus, Mars apologized for his behavior by promising their mother that her children would be “great.” Charles Foster Kane flirted with the idea of greatness, but so far had only succeeded in remaining rich. So he set his sights on Susan Alexander, deciding to make her great: something both their mothers could be proud of. In fact, he was going to make Susan a star.

The weaving together of Kane’s desire to make Susan Alexander into his own female “Alexander the Great,” as well as the Roman mother archetype being promised her children will be “great,” twists back into the 1641 book, Mercury, the Secret and Swift Messenger, where Wilkins documents the symbol of a star. In Chapter 12, Wilkins mentions this same maternal ambition that Mrs. Kane and Mrs. Alexander both express: “There are many superstitious women in these times, who believe this (the star) to be so lucky a character, that they always work it upon the swadling of their young children, thinking thereby to make them more healthful and prosperous in their lives.” And the path to stardom for Susan will be exactly as her mother first predicted: opera.

When Susan takes Charlie into the parlor, where the piano is, she sings for him in English. The film then fast-forwards to her singing the same song, “Una voce poco fa” (“a voice a little while ago”) in Italian. The song is from Rossini’s opera, The Barber of Seville. This use of opera in Citizen Kane is saying something specific with regard to WWII-era fascism.

In traditional Italian opera like The Barber of Seville a piano wasn’t part of the public performance. Opera singers were accompanied by an orchestra. But modernist composers began to experiment with opera norms, and the Generazione dell’ottanta (Generation of 1880) began to feature the piano in operatic music. For the Italian composer Alfredo Casella and his 1931 opera La Donna Serpente, the piano was used more like a drum. As Google AI tells us, “Casella used the instrument not for traditional bel canto accompaniment, but as a percussive voice.” This was avant-garde music, similar to the piano compositions George Antheil would write in which a piano was likened to a machine, or even to a gun.

As she sings, Susan Alexander plays the piano in a similar way, not as a melodic or lyrical accompaniment, but as a percussive beat using the song’s chord progression. (This is made more clear in the video.)

The percussive piano had become part of what we might call the fascist aesthetic. In 1931, Benito Mussolini put out a directive banning traditional operatic music, at least for state commissions. In the directive, he wrote: “I order that from now on [the embassies and consulates] should not foster in any way musical ventures in opera, songs, concerts, or musical soirées. In fact, one should turn a blind eye to them. Exceptions should be made for the symphony orchestra performances, which promote an idea of collective group discipline […]. It is high time for the world […] to [get to] know a different type of Italian from that of yesterday, the singer and mandolin player performing for the amusement of others. Caruso and those similar to him were or are the old Italy.” Instead, the modernist, avant-garde piano was now seen as influencing psychology in a way that promoted fascism.

Mussolini had a close relationship with Alfredo Casella. In fact, Google calls Casella the “unofficial musical propagandist for Mussolini’s fascist regime.” Mussolini had attended the premiere of Casella’s opera that used the percussive piano. In addition to writing what many call “fascist music,” Casella was also one of the founders of the Corporation of New Music in 1923 to expose Italian audiences to avant-garde music. In another coincidence, George Antheil had been a student of Alfredo Casella for a brief time in 1920 and the two had very similar perspectives on the piano. In fact, George Antheil seems to be connected to every node we’re looking at in this series, as Antheil was hired by Orson Welles to write the music for his 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai.

Fascism, as corporatism, is the political elevation of the corporate group above the individual, and because Casella’s percussive piano was somewhat reminiscent of the rhythm of a marching company of soldiers, it made a good musical symbol for the collective as a fascist ideal. When Susan Alexander plays percussive piano to accompany her own opera singing, this is also a fascist musical statement, and what we find in Citizen Kane and its operatic subplot is a retelling of modern fascism’s creep into the U.S. In the newsreel at the beginning of the film, Kane is accused of being both a communist and a fascist, and he gives, instead, a third interpretation: that he’s an American.

This is assumed to be a denial, as no true American could be either communist or fascist, but that assumption is the central illusion of the film. Nobody catches it because it’s true that Kane is nothing like a communist. But Kane the American citizen echoes Mussolini’s own third way, between capitalism and socialism, which is corporatism.

And Kane is most definitely a corporate person. He explains it to the rich man who acted as his guardian: “Mr. Thatcher, you don’t realize you’re talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who has eighty-two thousand, six hundred and thirty-one shares of Metropolitan Transfer… I sympathize with you… On the other hand, I am the publisher of the Enquirer.” Kane has two separate identities that are bound or joined, incorporated into one body: a corporate person. He is a corporate personhood, incarnate.

Not only that, Kane is literally marked in the film as “guilty” in Roman shorthand, shown here with his initial K pinned to his cravat.

Going back to the book after which Welles named his theater, Mercury the Secret and Swift Messenger, in a chapter on the use of stenography by the Romans, Wilkins explained the single letter K: “When the judges were to inscribe their several opinions on a little stone or Tessera, to be cast into the Urn; by the note A, they did absolve, by K condemn.” The fact that K, A, and N all referred to verdicts is curious with respect to the name Kane. And this tessera, the token jurors used to cast an anonymous verdict, was also the Roman name for a theater ticket. Kane, bearing the Roman verdict of guilt in a theatrical setting.

The tipoff is in the film’s title: Citizen Kane. The Latin root of citizen is civis. Both the words civis and civic are related to a city or municipality. Wikipedia defines a municipality this way: “In ancient Rome, the Latin term municipium referred to a town or city. Etymologically, the municipium was a social contract among municipes (’duty holders’), or citizens of the town. The duties (munera) were a communal obligation assumed by the municipes in exchange for the privileges and protections of citizenship. Every citizen was a municeps.” Being a citizen, then, is a person entitled to privileges and protections, just as corporations continue to enjoy in 21st century America. But it’s the label of citizen that elevates the mere individual to the group or corporate identity of the municipality.

And going back to the beginning of this series, when Hollywood and Howard Hughes dismissively stripped the Tartar woman in The Conqueror, we can point to the fact that when attempting to describe the barbarism of the Tartars, they were often described as “un-civilized,” which is code for un-Romanized and, as we’ve seen before, generally in opposition to the corporate form and the corporate system, the fascist system that actually predates Mussolini, having existed in the U.S. since its founding.

The next hint Welles gives us, disclosing the reality that U.S. citizens already exist in a Roman fascist economy, comes when Kane sets out to build Susan an opera house in Chicago… not in New York, Kane’s power base, but in Chicago where Leland has gone. After the election, Leland had lost his respect for Kane, but being no more than a vassal in Kane’s empire, he has to ask permission to be transferred to his newspaper branch in Chicago. So it’s in Chicago that Kane will build an opera house in an attempt to chase down and improve not only his friend’s opinion of him, but the world’s opinion of him.

So why did the film script of Mankiewicz and Welles move Leland to Chicago? Because building an opera house in Chicago brings the story home to a man named Samuel Insull, another tycoon on which Welles based the character of Charles Foster Kane, but this time, with an empire whose underlying fascist principles could be exposed by shining the right light.

The original opera in the script of Citizen Kane was Thaïs by Jules Massenet, an opera about a female courtesan from Alexandria, which might also explain the character name of Susan Alexander. The mirror aria from that opera takes us back to the scene in Susan’s apartment where we see Susan only as a reflection in a mirror. But Orson Welles couldn’t secure the rights to use the music of Thaïs, so another piece of music was composed specifically for the movie.

On opening night, Susan is dressed up in the Tartar aesthetic (a Mata Hari costume), yelled at by her Italian voice coach, and left standing alone in the “limelight.” The lighting of Susan on stage is important. In fact, throughout the entire film Welles used a lighting technique called chiaroscuro, a combination of two Italian words meaning light and dark (a dichotomy very much like public and private). The technique, as it’s used in Citizen Kane, is reminiscent of Plato’s myth of the cave where men sit facing the cave wall opposite its entrance and interpret reality from the shadows cast by the sun outside. This same symbolic imagery is shown over and over in the film as the sun shining through windows into several giant and dark cave-like institutions.

A related symbol in Citizen Kane is the light bulb. The night Charlie and Susan first meet, he makes shadow puppets on the wall, but with the single lightbulb pointing directly and glaringly into the camera. This foreshadows Susan standing under another single light bulb, as another finger puppet of Charlie Kane projected onto the cave wall, reality reduced to a shadow for an audience that’s not yet awake. But the single light bulb hanging over Susan’s head also points to Samuel Insull, the electricity baron who also happened to build the Civic Opera House in Chicago in 1929.

Insull started out as Thomas Edison’s personal secretary and later became one of the founders of General Electric. In 1892, Insull left GE to head up Chicago Edison. That company eventually grew into Commonwealth Edison and held an electrical utility monopoly in Chicago. Insull was one of those robber barons who embraced government regulation of his industry, as most of them did. According to Wikipedia, “As a result of owning these diverse companies, Insull is credited with being one of the early proponents for regulation of industry. He saw that federal and state regulation would recognize electric utilities as natural monopolies, allowing them to grow with little competition and to sell electricity to broader segments of the market. At the same time, a regulated monopoly could keep costs down by eliminating duplication of infrastructure by competing companies, while prices could be kept to reasonable rates by regulators.”

Samuel Insull helped shape the modern U.S. model of the regulated private utility, a model similar to the fascist structure of a public-private partnership where a privately owned company operates as a legally protected monopoly while its rates are publicly regulated. People assume that this is a fair trade-off: the private company can still make a profit, but the public is protected from the monopoly charging too much, as they tend to do. And this is what the tycoons like Insull want us to believe, but the reality is that lowered prices can also be raised by that regulation. When the rates are raised, it’s a regulatory lever allowing utilities like electricity to recover approved costs and earn a guaranteed return on its investments: a perk of regulation.

Normally, when a private company invests its money back into the firm, that investment poses a RISK. The company might not make a return on that investment. But when a public utility invests its private profits back into the company, the risk is much lower. That risk has been shifted to the ratepayers themselves who can’t choose to find a cheaper alternative because they’re dealing with a public, regulated monopoly.

Let me restate this concept with the help of ChatGPT: “In a competitive market, investors ordinarily bear the risk that a capital investment may not pay off. In the regulated utility model, by contrast, much of that investment risk can be shifted to ratepayers, who may be required to cover approved costs through higher rates while the utility remains privately owned and continues to earn returns on its rate base.”

AI goes on to say that regulators do this because something like electricity is considered an “essential” service that requires investment to keep it running smoothly. “Investors are more willing to finance those investments if they have a reasonable expectation of cost recovery and a fair return.” What this means is that the government is yet again picking winners, guaranteeing returns on investment for certain investors. One of the best ways to guarantee your investment returns is to invest in regulated utilities where the regulation ensures your ability to profit.

This is just one reason why the robber barons of the early 20th century pushed so hard for their industries to be “regulated.”

Samuel Insull would later build the Chicago Civic Opera; it opened just days after the great stock market crash of 1929. In the 1920s, the word “civic” carried strong associations with a public benefit to the community, and the name of Kane’s “Municipal” Opera House carried that same implication: a public opera house for “citizens” who, like Kane, consider themselves American but who live inside a fascist or corporate economy in which many industries were based on this same public-private arrangement: a privately owned company operated an essential public service under a municipal franchise and some degree of public regulation.

But, of course, opera wasn’t an essential service to the public. Or was it? It seems that opera, and music in general, may have been considered an essential industry to the elites because of its ability to entertain and, thus, persuade an audience.

In The Next Octave, I talk about how music has been used by the elites as a tool to influence popular opinion and entrain behavior. For example, in Plutarch’s essay “Concerning Music,” he wrote that music was used in ancient Greece to psych soldiers up for the fight, “believing the use of music beneficially efficacious to incite to all serious actions, especially to the adventuring upon warlike dangers.”

The importance of using music as a rhetorical tool of manipulation was also well understood by Benito Mussolini. He had renovated the Teatro Reale dell’Opera in 1926 in order to reflect the “cult of romanità,” the fascist cult of the ancient Roman empire. Mussolini considered this to be a unifying symbol of Rome’s imperial past, legitimizing the Fascist regime as the expected evolution of the ancient Roman identity. And recall that Mussolini stated what he saw as the value of orchestral music in his 1931 state directive on music: “Exceptions should be made for the symphony orchestra performances, which promote an idea of collective group discipline…”

That’s one way the fascists wanted to use music: to promote collective group discipline. But music can be used many ways to suit many different political purposes. And this type of group manipulation and entraining was exactly the reason the Federal Theatre Project got started in the U.S. The project produced several plays that pushed political messages to drum up public support. Its most famous piece of propaganda was “The Cradle Will Rock,” a play that offered the answer to corporate corruption and greed to be organizing workers into their own corporate body: a union. The message was, we can solve the problems one group creates by creating another group: the fascist version of problem-reaction-solution. And the man who directed this play was none other than Orson Welles.

Many of the characters in “The Cradle Will Rock” have allegorical names like Reverend Salvation and Dr. Specialist, replacing the concept of the individual human being with a corporate personhood: a symbol of everyman filling various roles depending on their day jobs.

Mr. Mister is the corporate boss in the play, and his name ties directly back to the medieval corporate guilds, the predecessors of modern corporations. The guilds were groups of men separated out by industry that evolved into the livery companies still ensconced in the City of London today. These guilds were like trade associations, finding ways to limit competition whether by other firms or by apprentices or journeymen looking for work. To enter one of these industries, you had to join the guild, pay your dues, and obey its rules regarding work standards and pricing, so as not to undercut your fellow brothers in the guild. The term “mister” derives from the guild term mistery meaning a trade that protected its own “tricks of the trade,” which were held secret and communicated only behind the closed doors of the guildhall. A mister, then, was a tradesman having mastered the misteries of his trade, as master and mister eventually became interchangeable.

But above all, this play operating as propaganda, celebrating the corporatization of Mr. Mister’s employees, was a musical: its lines were almost entirely sung, like an opera. So yes, the opera form and the opera house in which it was performed, were seen by the elites as an essential and important utility for the manipulation and indoctrination of the masses, and this is the reason both Insull and Welles saw the opera house as both Civic and Municipal.

However, the Works Progress Administration, the government agency funding the Federal Theatre Project, shut the play down on opening night, a stunt likely orchestrated by Welles himself, because shutting the play down made news. And so, what might have otherwise been a mildly successful piece of union propaganda became a sensationalized piece of news that propelled the play into something infamous, something that could succeed in polarizing the country. But while it’s true that Houseman and Welles held a bias for left-wing ideals, the government itself was never interested in pushing a pro-union message. The government was interested in polarizing the public with the help of musical theater, just as it had been using the film industry for decades prior to glorify war and to drum up public support for funding war.

The night it was shut down, Orson Welles hurriedly moved the actors into another theater, and instead of the orchestra that was supposed to accompany the play, they used a piano, the preferred instrument for “collective group discipline.”

The creep of American fascism illustrated by Citizen Kane is important because it brings us back to Hedy Lamarr’s first husband, Fritz Mandl. It also brings us forward to George Antheil’s best friend Ezra Pound, and next time, we’ll descend further into the world of Italian fascism in which people like Ezra Pound, Fritz Mandl, and George Antheil were central.