Liggera, Joseph

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Bridgewater ReviewVolume 4 | Issue 2 Article 10Sep-1986Cultural Commentary: Looking For Orson WellesJoseph LiggeraBridgewater State CollegeThis item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.Recommended CitationLiggera, Joseph (1986). Cultural Commentary: Looking For Orson Welles. Bridgewater Review, 4(2), 16-18.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol4/iss2/1016Cultural Commentary _Looking For Orson WellesJoseph LiggeraThis is my second article aboutthe death of Orson Welles andthe meaning of his life and work.The first I junked because I had falleninto the trap of chasing each flash andflicker of Welles' career, then trying topull them together into a coherentimage of the man. Welles is and was somany bits and pieces, brilliance andbunkum, that he remains as he wishedto be, ever elusive. I am so teased by thecontradictions of the man that under-standing him sometimes is more in-triguing than understanding myself.It is tempting to start bOy calling him agenius, and to ask the inevitable ques-tion: "Who is Orson Welles?" Wellesis devious, the various aspects of hispersonality splintered and dispersed.Any critic of Welles' must not onlyexamine the man but himself as well; acritic must ask the fundamental ques-tion n "Who am l?" n and, "Who am Iin relation to Orson Welles?"For my part, whoever I am, there isnot a time that I can remember when Idid not "know" who Orson Welleswas, so fixed was he in my conscious-ness, and probably, the consciousnessof America. I knew Welles as an actorand a voice first, having been born ayear before the release of his filmCitizen Kane. By the time I was growingup, Welles had already been reduced tothe status of a legend. He wished to beknown as an active maker of his ownfilms, not for his involvement in otherpeople's films or films for literature.Some time during my teens his imagewas blown up to the dimensions of anoversized balloon, like those in theMacy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Myview of him took on a luminous,romantic glow because, though his best·work was well behind him, he was stillblustering as if it were still in front ofhim, if he were given a chance. War ofthe Worlds, the Mercury Theater,Shakespeare in modern dress, classicperformances (notably in Jane Eyre) --that was all behind him. But Wellesnever gave it up. He seemed to beforever young, and nearly every discov-ery I made about media art proved tome that Welles had been there; if notfirst, at least flashiest. Then, like PapaHemingway's The Old Man and TheSea, the gargantuan boy genius reacheddown and produced his long, gruellingmasterworking of Kafka's The TriaLWe all knew then that Welles was nohas-been. We, the young art fanciers ofmy day, embraced him.There is the tendency, then, to besentimental with praise for Welles, tomake excuses for him, or to rail at thefailure of Hollywood money people totake another chance on a Welles pro-ject. Failing such feelings, a more realis-tic light may begin to shine in theWellesian darkness. First, it becomesclear that the public maintained a nos-talgia about art, nigh and low, nostalgiafor a simpler, slower, more peacefultime than Welles ever seemed to want.There was also a nostalgia for language,for spoken words like those of Shake-speare, Kafka or Tarkington. Welleshad a love/hate relationship with hisaudience, the great beast of the publicwho he alternately fooled and em-braced. Lastly, he was most famous forhis multiple expressive virtuoso talentthat raised radio, film, even televisioncommercials to something finer thanthey seemed capable of becoming. Nos-talgia, an intimate relationship with hispublic n his seers and hearers -- and hishistronic talent nlet us look at these tofind Welles.He made two films that keep pop-ping into everyone's list of the GreatestFilms of All Time, the second of whichis The Magnificent Ambersons, based ona Booth Tarkington novel. It is saidthat Welles believed the studio hadbutchered it, and that he, to his dyingday, vowed to bring together the re-maining living actors and shoot a newending. For once there is no Wellespersona in the film, though he couldnot resist narrating it. Nevertheless, thefilm is rife with nostalgia, not only fortimes past, but for the kind of quick,yet graceful prose, that Tarkingtonwrote. The opening credits are a joy.loseph Cotten, swirling throughchanges of costume, foreshadows thefilm's celebration of the gay turn-of-the-century life. Snow falls and sleighbells tinkle. Welles narrates that inthose days, they had time for every-thing. Alas, the whole of that sequence,and the best of what follows, is directlyfrom Tarkington's prose. Welles' se-cret is out. He loves words. He simplyputs pictures to them, brilliantly. Bythe end of the film, the huge mansionbecomes dark and ominous as thefamily fortunes fall. With them goesnostalgia, and in comes the automo-bile, running roughshod over mosteverything and burying what it missesin soot.Citizen Kane, too, had its roots innostalgia. The newspaper magnate isdone in because his famous sleigh waswrested from him, and he dies clutch-ing a child's crystal ball with a snowscene inside as he utters his last word,recalling the name in the sled, "Rose-bud." The little man, Bernstein, arrivesto work as editor of a New York citypaper with a horse drawn truck loadedwith all his belongings. The older re-porters close shop at the end of the day,and the whole paper, presses too, sleeppeacefully at night n until young Kanetakes over and wakes them up. But healso is from an older era. First heannounces he will make The Enquirer asimportant to the people of the city as"the gas in that lamp." (The enfantterrible is nostalgic about a gas lamp?)Later Kane cannot understand how hisinnocent affair is made to look scandal-ous by other papers, or why he cannotmake everyone love him by buyingthem things. In fact, he thinks like anaging pater familias and is amazed whentold that working men are nowunionizing and no longer need hisbenevolence.Welles' nostalgia is refreshing in thathe never joined the despair rampant inhis century. Instead, he only camealong to play with his toys: the papers,radio, film, television, acting. Nonethe-less, every Welles film is heavy at theend and, if Welles stars, as he usuallydoes, we feel his weight, physical andpsychic. Then he falters, totters, andfinally collapses, seemingly of his ownweight, but really for his wanting whathas been long gone. Hence Kane dieswith his fond memories of the snows ofthe Middle West from his lost child-hood. Welles, asked what he thoughtof the twentieth century, revealed hisnostalgia in his reply that he "couldpick a better one out of a hat."To Welles, the world had becomefragmented and corrupt. A better wayof life lay buried in some horse andbuggy past. He found it impossible toface the stark realities (or evils) ofmodern life. That is why Welles' great-est artistic sin is that each of his filmsgoes to pieces at the end, heapingimages of immense size and blacknesson an audience previously charmed byhis celebration of form and, seemingly,of life. He has style but no content.Unlike Hemingway, also a great stylist,he does not teach us anything abouthow to live our lives. Grasping to17Cultural Commentary continued18recapture innocence, Welles triesmightily to hold back Original Sin, butin the end he suffers the Fall,repeatedly.As an American artist cut in theimage of Whitman, Welles establisheda relationship with his audience thatwas intimate and based on his under-standing of the common man. At hisbest, he simply assumed we wouldthink as he did. The momentum of his"song of himself" carried us along.But underneath, Welles was hard atwork trying to educate his audienceand bring them up to the level of highart, such as Shakespeare's. Welles onceasserted that the key to his work wasthe word. Where better to turn, then,but to the Bard, whom Welles lovedfrom his childhood. Welles wished tobring words alive for an audience thathad been force-fed Shakespeare's playsin high school.His audience could be found sittingin a movie theater, waiting to be enter-tained. The trick was to join art andentertainment. Thus, his film of Mac-beth starts with a preface to explain thedynamics of the play, has a Holy Manto etch the tension of pagan evil versusChristianity, and switches lines amongminor characters. These changes aremade to promote Shakespeare to ageneral audience. His Falstaff loosesthe verse as if it were actual speech or,to moviegoers, dialogue. His pyrotech-nic film technique is subordinated towords, is used to support words, andstill retain the fluidity of the film.These two films, plus his Othello,achieve something of the Whitmanideal; if not to see the audience as itsown poem, at least to trust it to be ledinto appreciating someone else's.Welles also invented or found a "littleman," a sidekick, in each film in whichhe acted, whom he loved and abused,reflecting no doubt his ambivalenceabout an audience he both needed andthought was too dense to appreciatehim.Perhaps Welles' greatest talent isthat he was, in many respects, a teacherwho taught by doing, by performing ina new way. It was his knack for reveal-ing and re-creating forms, particularlyof film, that put him into the centralnervous system of the public. What hedid in Kane was to show that art is a liethat can either lead us closer to thetruth than we could otherwise know inthe corrupt world of reality, or that canbe used to manipulate us. It depends onthe mind behind the form. Welles wasclear that there was a mind behind theform, be it Shakespeare's, Welles', oreven that of an egoist like Kane. Inshowing us how he was making Kane,in the very act of doing it, Welles wasteaching us to analyze form and to seewhat was being d6ne to us. None of thedevices in Kane -- the newsreels, deepfocus, odd camera angles, aural non-sequiturs -- are real ways of seeing andhearing. Yet, together, they make anartistic "lie" that is the film's truth.Welles' talent finally was destroyedby the unresolved strain between hisreal and fantasy worlds, by the contrastbetween his vision of decadence andthe glitter of his private life. One dayWelles' crew, filming a documentary inRio, (Welles was away at the time) sawWelles established arelationship with his audiencethat was intimate and basedon his understanding of thecommon man.a local hero fall out of a boat and bedevoured by a shark. Worse, six dayslater the shark was caught with thepartly digested head and arms of theman still in its stomach. Welles hadbeen on an extended bash at the time,revelling in his new found fame. He wasblamed. (This gory episode later in-forms the overview of his Lady FromShanghi. There the Irish lug hero lam-bastes his wealthy employers for theirwasteful lives and for .going at eachother like "sharks in a frenzy.") InWelles' vision, nostalgia darkens toreality in his depiction of a societywhich, even among its elite, devoursitself.The last two decades of Welles' lifewere nearly fruitless as far as filmproduction was concerned. Yet he con-tinued to use his great talent for in-forming and manipulating the public,turning handstands to maintain hispopularity. Welles kept himself afloatvia a number of television roles andremained widely known. His reputa-tion, buoyed by the sympathies ofmany of the best artists and critics --tens of whom he had worked with overthe years -- kept refreshing itself, butalso led away from his art and to theman as a personality. Hence the trapwhich opened this paper: Welles tryingto make us believe he is necessary to us.Nostalgia, his view of the commonman, and his talent -- these are places tolook when trying to find Welles. Insumming up, then, what are his accom-plishments? First, he was able to manip-ulate forms, particularly media, in away that simultaneously deceived anddelighted his audience. Second, he wasa teacher, revealing in the act of cre-ating how form dictates content and,despite its immediacy and suggestionof catching reality in the act, is reallyspun out of a maker with a singularview of the truth. Third, he was anentertainer par excellence, one of thefinest motion picture actors Americancinema has yet produced. Fourth, hemade literature accessible on film in away that preserved the word as theessence of its art, and still maintainedfilm form while using it as a medium oftranslation. Last, he was, as everyonehears, the man who gave film its vocab-ulary. What this means is that hecreated a way for film to express itstruth in its own voice, freeing it fromits origins in other arts.Why, then, is Welles not one of theluminaries of that century which hejoyously influenced and simultaneous-ly abhorred? The answer lies within hisfailure to face the oldest leger de mainof all, reality. His refusal to fall fromgrace, his need to cling to innocenceand to continuously express shock atthe world's corruption; these leaveWelles in a rut of his own making.These failures also prevent him fromapproaching the greatest artistry of histime, notably Ingmar Bergman andHemingway whose innovations gave usfresh language while tackling realityhead on. Welles' greatest work wascollaborative, usually drawing on litera-ture and/or the talents of other cre-ative people, as in the case of CitizenKane. On his own, his opus was medi-ocre and he was content to play hislamented "legend" to the hilt. He usedthe legend as an excuse, as another rusein which, like his broadcast of War ofThe Worlds, he first warned his audi-ence and then went right ahead anddeceived them. Perhaps he was cheat-ing his audiences as he felt life, orreality, had cheatedhim.Joseph Liggera is an Associate Professor ofEnglish at Bridgewater State College.

Cultural Commentary: Looking For Orson Welles

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Cultural Commentary: Looking For Orson Welles

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