Ambersons, & Welles' precocious pessimism

[Colmena]

Just watched Magnificent Ambersons again. It's been so long, this may be only my second time. And it was during that first time watching MA that I was able to appreciate Welles' genius for the first time, specifically the dramatic intensity and technical prowess of one of those scenes with George and Aunt Fanny in the staircase. (By contrast, the first time I saw CK, in college, I didn't get it. The complexity of the plot & structure was too much for me, I was confused, couldn't get a grip on it.)

With CK we have this heady & paradoxical combination of a brilliant young man, in his ambitious, open-minded, show-off manner, taking on an old man's sad story: the dual failures of Kane's life of loss, his dying alone, combined with Thompson's failure to identify "Rosebud."

With MA, this paradoxical conjunction of a young man seizing upon an old man's POV is heightened into what is, for me, this massive puzzle: How does it happen that someone so young, so brilliant, so successful, so full of energy and life as OW in his mid-20's would want to put forward this movie of historical pessimism, romantic pessimism, and existential fatalism?? (By existential fatalism, I mean the theme of the inescapable total loss of life's force and meaning, which would have been the point that the movie would have left us with, in the final meeting of Eugene and Fanny, if MA hadn't been tampered with.)

He was drawn to the pessimism(s) in Tarkington's novel, and then (as he says) consciously determined to intensify it.

If pressed to explain Welles' precocious fascination with pessimism, decline, fatalism, self-destruction, morbidity, etc. I turn to his life experience of

a) Losing the pre- 20th century backwater of Grand Detour, his own lost "Rosebud."

b) Seeing his father destroy himself through alcohol.

c) Losing both parents, as a child. And with both we have certain particular and peculiar intensities: Cutting himself off from his father, which I take to be the grounds for him saying that he "killed" his father, and that intense deathbed scene with his mother. These may be relevant.

Anything else to say about the sources of Welles' precocious pessimism?

[mteal]

I think, as you said Colmena, that losing both parents as a child certainly helped make Welles into a “profound pessimist”, as he once described himself. I remember reading one critic (can’t remember the name offhand) who, after watching a revival double feature of KANE and AMBERSONS, noted how obsessed with death the young Welles seemed. Not just the deaths of individuals, but the deaths of ages as well, particularly the period just before he was born. As art historian James Beswick Whitehead put it, the artistic and cultural legacy of the Victorian Age was so massive, so voluminous, that the 20th Century could think of little to do with it except consign most of it to the attic of history. I think it’s likely though, that another reason why Welles had such a love for stories of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, besides wanting to rescue them from that attic, was because that was also the world his parents had lived in. In bringing to life the world of the Ambersons – surely one of the most astonishing and poignant evocations of a vanished age ever put on film – Welles was, in a sense, symbolically bringing his parents back to life through the magic alchemy of celluloid.

As far as Welles’s “fatalism” goes (which is defined - yes, I had to look it up - as “the acceptance of all things and events as inevitable and unalterable; submission to fate"), Welles appeared to have had an ambivalent belief in curses (the power to control someone else’s fate), and even had personal experience with them, so it’s logical to assume he had an ambivalent belief in destiny or fate as well. I think it was a question that he wrestled in his art with throughout his entire career. It’s probably a reason, for example, why he has Joseph K fight back against his assassins at the end of THE TRIAL, rather then submit passively to his fate, as K does in Kafka’s novel.

Welles obviously, was one of the true trans-Atlantic figures of the 20th Century, as he embodied both pessimistic and optimistic attitudes. Like that other mid-westerner George Amberson Minafer, he became less optimistically willful and more pessimistic and fatalistic after a long sojourn in Europe, but never abandoned hope entirely. As Welles said, he was a profound pessimist, but he was allergic to despair.

[Colmena]

Thanks for the reply, Mteal.

Where does that Welles quote come from, if you please.

Thinking about his topic (the childhood of trauma of losing one's parents that hangs over the adult Welles) brings me back to the import of Rosebud. When Welles confesses to having /losing his own Rosebud, in interview with Peter B, it pertains to a simple matter of losing childhood happiness, esp the scene of him dancing by himself at Grand Detour. But Kane's "Rosebud" involves both a loss of childhood happiness (of sorts) and also the trauma of losing his parents (esp his mother), and it is a trauma that hangs over his adulthood. Tho we don't find this out until the end, when we see him crying when he first whispers "Rosebud," after smashing up Susan's room... and then the sled.

Also, re W's precocious fascination with death, it's Welles who plays the part of Death in "Hearts of Age," right? I've also heard said that it's Vance.

[mteal]

He plays some kind of ghoulish old man in HEARTS OF AGE, but whether that's supposed to represent death I'm not really sure.

That quote came, I believe, from a 1962 interview with Huw Wheldon concerning THE TRIAL, where Welles said something to the effect that, as an American ("hard-wired for optimism" as Alvin Toffler once described us), he could not buy in Kafka's bleak worldview completely.