51 GREATEST FICTIONAL BAD GUYS
#19. CHARLES FOSTER KANE from CITIZEN KANE
Everything you heard is true, CITIZEN KANE is the greatest motion picture ever made. It has a lot of achievements heaped on its name: innovations in camerawork and deep focus, new make-up techniques, use of sound design and overlapping dialogue. But for me, its greatest achievement is taking a posturing, adulterous, self-important rich asshole and making him sympathetic.
Everything about Kane is about promise: he inherits wealth but chooses to use it to advance social change. He publishes a Declaration of Principals that vows he’ll be the “working man’s” champion — a beacon of honesty and integrity. All of these are lies. It’s a sure bet Kane’s own nature betrays him: he learns betrayal well at a young age when his mother coldly turns him over to a stranger to grow up in more prerogative circumstances. But most of us break faith with our ideals because the clock slowly beats it out of us nonetheless.
Sometimes just making it to the end of the day with the bills paid and dodging a high dose of self-deprecation is a good measure of one’s own success, let alone finding the momentum to tilt windmills. And not that I own a Xanadu filled with parrots, tigers and jabbering monkeys (my zoo consists of two rat terriers), I sure pity how Kane’s youthful piss-and-vinegar gusto slowly deteriorates into a lumbering, balding worm of a man left to ransack his wife’s room with all the stiffness of Frankenstein’s Monster.
In my favorite moment, the middle-aged Kane is forced to look at his Declaration of Principals and how he’s become a parody of it. He stands there stoic, fury building up in him like Mount Vesuvius ready to blow. And this is why he’s on this list. A hero would see this as an epiphany for change; a villain doubles-down on his own corruption. He wrecks lives for his own pride, collects things instead of building relationships, confuses arrogance with character. Lonely, twisted and unloved, Kane’s ghost haunted Xanadu long before he ever whispered the word Rosebud.
Charles Kane: “You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhb3U2cONs
