I Don't Care What You Think of Citizen Kane!
Every once in a while some detestable human being feels the need to post an insufferable, self-evidently wrong tweet about how people might like the childish entertainments of people like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg but they ultimately just make clattering nonsense for dumb babies and not art for adults.
Most recently some tool named Jonathan Weisberg tweeted, “Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarantino... they're master story tellers with the sensibilities of children. Scorsese's obssession with gangsters is 14 year old boys' stuff. You can admire their talent without lauding their juvenile material. Maybe then we'd get some actual grown up movies.”
Clearly Weisberg clearly composed the tweet after an Alice Doesn’t Love Here Anymore, Kundun, Age of Innocence and Silence quadruple feature, as those are my favorite hyper-masculine Scorsese movies about the Mafia.
As is invariably the case, Film Twitter was mortified that someone had expressed an extremely stupid, extremely wrong, extremely ill-informed opinion on the internet and swung into action.
A friend posted about the viral tweet on Facebook and, as I am prone to do, I made a joke about how people thought Citizen Kane was good or whatever when it was just Orson Welles going, “Ga Ga Goo Goo. I’m a baby” and it literally being the cinematic equivalent of a baby dropping a monster load in its diaper.
I made the mistake of mentioning Citizen Kane on the internet. By doing so I was accidentally begging the universe to inundate me with opinions about Orson Welles’ towering masterpiece, a perennial contender for greatest film of all time.
Misreading the tone and intent of my comment, someone responded that while Citizen Kane is incontrovertibly an impressive technical achievement, contemporary audiences might have a hard time engaging with it emotionally.
My knee jerk response was not an honorable one. I wanted to respond, “I DON’T FUCKING CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT CITIZEN KANE. I DON’T CARE WHAT ANYBODY THINKS ABOUT CITIZEN KANE.”
I am never a fan of the question, “Is a piece of entertainment held up as incontrovertible masterpiece really all that great?”
I know why that question is asked and asked and then asked again. It has a lot to do with page-views and clicks but also with our innate tendency to rebel against the dictates of conventional wisdom, and there are few pieces of conventional wisdom more set in stone than the idea that Citizen Kane is, if not the single greatest movie ever made, then one of the best movies ever.
It’s a matter that has been litigated and then re-litigated and then re-litigated some more. It’s been argued and re-argued so often that there’s no life left in it. It’s fucking exhausted. It’s exhausting. Let’s move on.
I don’t care if you don’t like Citizen Kane. I don’t care if you think it’s overrated. I happen to find the very concept of “overrated” maddening and intellectually arrogant and bankrupt, if not quite as maddening and intellectually arrogant as imagining that the world angrily demands your take on the artistic merit of Citizen Kane and you must consequently offer it whenever given the opportunity.
I don’t care if you think Citizen Kane is boring. That, honestly tells me more about you than it does about Citizen Kane. I similarly find “boring” to be just about the vaguest and most meaningless criticism imaginable.
That said, I realize that by writing about how I don’t want to hear anyone’s opinions about Citizen Kane I am opening myself up to commenters arguing about Citizen Kane’s merits.
Let’s spare ourselves that aggravation and instead discuss a less exhausted subject: is Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered a surrealistic masterpiece or what?
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