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Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Citizen Kane. We had just gotten done talking about

the complicated way that Kane comes across, especially in that scene where

Getty is threatening him and the Getty doesn't come across entirely as

simply a villain in contrast to Kane, Kane is just as a villain in that scene.

And something you said, Aaron, I thought was very interesting, which is that he never does anything good good and I'm trying to think if he

ever does anything good. And it you know on first blush that seems right to me and it

would be interesting to think of what if the film had him do something that was unequivocally good that it's kind of saved the cat moment in the film where the protagonist is made likable to the audience, whatever his trajectory is going to be, it might make the tragic

downfall. They might give it more emotional heft, I don't know.

In that first scene where we first see him as an adult

in the newsroom, young Orson Wells,

there's at least a hint of that.

There's a kind of idealism there, seems it makes you think that maybe you're

going to see him actually do good things with his newspaper maybe he is going to

expose someone's corruption and the one the person who's corruption he does

expose Gedis that again that is made more complicated by the fact that he wants to defeat

Gedis politically and is using his own newspaper in a corrupt way to support his own

campaign. Thinking through this, I can think of one instance in which he does something we might call good.

And I'm thinking that this might actually turn out to be a lot more significant, maybe

symbolically than I had considered before.

And that's when he's distracting Susan, when she has her too fake, right?

I love that scene.

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