Citizen Kane and the ghost in the newsreel

The posters for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had a tagline that wasn’t just about a haunted hotel; they hinted at a horror embedded in the very soil of a nation. It’s that same feeling you get when you watch Citizen Kane, which marks its 84th anniversary this month. To watch it today is to witness a cinematic ghost story. But the ghost isn’t the mystery of Rosebud; it’s the forgotten political war that haunts every frame of the film.

To truly understand why this masterpiece was not just made, but had to be made, you need to see a recent film: David Fincher’s Mank. It is the missing piece of the puzzle, the origin story of the rage and disillusionment that fuelled one of the greatest acts of rebellion in Hollywood history. It answers the question that makes Citizen Kane so powerful: what could make a man risk everything to write such a savage, soul-crushing story about the most powerful man in America?

To get what Fincher is doing, you have to feel the desperation in California back in the 1930s. The Great Depression had wrung the common man out like a sponge. Into this ghost town rides Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author, with an audacious campaign for governor. His vision had a name that felt like a prayer: EPIC (End Poverty In California; And no, don’t confuse it with a certain four-letter acronym from our times; the irony is a bit too thick to swallow). It was a blueprint for a new society: massive public works, State-run collectives for the jobless, and a tax system that actually taxed the wealthy. For the disillusioned, it wasn’t just a ray of sunshine; it was lightning in a bottle.

And the powerful decided to smash that bottle. Mank peels back the curtain on this forgotten war, watching capitalist giants like William Randolph Hearst do everything they could to strangle a socialist movement in its crib. They saw the EPIC campaign not as a cry for help, but as a threat to their divine right to make more money by manipulating the working class. And so, the modern smear campaign was born. Hearst’s newspapers printed fictional quotes from Sinclair’s novels as policy. But the real innovation came from the movie studios. Louis B Mayer of MGM used the dream factory to manufacture nightmares, producing fake newsreels where paid actors played shiftless vagrants pouring into California to live under a future “Dictator Sinclair.” For audiences in the 1930s, the newsreel was truth. You never suspected the moving pictures would lie.

That playbook never went away; it just went digital. Hearst’s out-of-context quotes are now doctored video clips and viral sound-bites stripped of context, designed to enrage. The paid actors have been replaced by anonymous troll farms and coordinated online mobs, creating the illusion of a grassroots movement to shout down dissent. The fear of Sinclair’s “army of the poor” is the same fear stoked by algorithm-fuelled stories about political opponents coming to destroy our way of life.

But even Hearst couldn’t have imagined the machine we have now. What he and Mayer did with brute force, Artificial Intelligence does with surgical precision. AI is the perfection of their manipulative dream. It can create deepfakes so real they are impossible to doubt. It can generate millions of targetted, personalised messages to prey on individual fears, creating a “tide of terror” that feels completely real because it was designed specifically for you. The fake newsreel was a weapon of mass destruction; propaganda-by-algorithm is a smart bomb aimed directly at your psyche.

This is why you must understand Mank to fully grasp the fury of Citizen Kane. The film shows us its writer, Herman Mankiewicz, watching this whole rotten spectacle from inside Hearst’s castle. When he finally writes Kane, it’s not just a job; it’s an act of revenge. He isn’t just telling a story about a rich man; he’s exposing the soul of the very system that crushed a democratic movement. He takes the weapon they invented – the moving picture – and fires it back at them.

When you watch Citizen Kane after seeing Mank, it transforms. It’s no longer just a classic film; it’s the final, desperate broadcast from a man who saw the machine being built and tried to warn us. The great paradox is that the world hasn’t changed. Smear campaigns and the manipulation of the masses still exist; they’ve just gotten better at it. But Fincher’s film reminds us of something extraordinary. It shows that these fascist symptoms existed even then. And just as Albert Camus knew, it also shows us that flawed individuals like Mank existed, too. They are not our postcard leaders. But in the moments that matter, they find a way to rise. They find a way to fight back.

(The writer is an associate professor of English at Besant Women’s College, Mangaluru, and a published writer and critic with a PhD in film studies)