Citizenship

Rating: 8/10 (20 April 2013)

At the peak of the debt bubble last decade, David Siegel, CEO and owner of the world's largest time share developer, leveraged his already leveraged fortune to build America's largest house. Dubbed un-ironically "Versailles," the 90,000 square-foot monstrosity started to take root in the Florida Everglades. When the bubble popped, so did Siegel's fortune and family, and the home, half-finished, went to foreclosure.
Remarkably, documentarian Lauren Greenfield captured the rise and fall of this modern day Xanadu--gaudy enough to make Donald Trump blush--in "Queen of Versailles" (2012), which took top directing honors at the Sundance Film Festival. The comparisons it begs to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941), itself an untouchable fortress, are inescapable. Like Charles Foster Kane (Welles), Siegel used the scalability of market capitalism to accumulate unwieldy millions and then sought to sequester it, and himself, in a monument down in that state that Civilized people consider barely worthy of citizenship. And so each of these two men was first among their equals--but not quite even equal himself.
We watch Kane and Siegel grow fat, hubristic, and surly while they lose their wealth, reputation and family. But Kane has been remembered for 72 years, whereas Siegel will soon be forgotten. Why did we care so much to decipher Kane's Rosebud while we couldn't care less about Siegel's? Is it that Kane's life's work was vindicating our core value of freedom of the press, whereas Siegel's was indulging our ego, groupthink, and materialism with the thought that we could and should own a second home?
To see that it isn't, return to the news room debate that follows the screening of an obit of Kane at the beginning of that film. The editors query: What matters more?: What he did or who he was? Our quest as citizen journalists--proxied by Jerry Thompson (William Alland), whose back is almost always to the camera--resolves that the answer is the latter. To write the definitive Kane obit, we need to know who this love interest Rosebud is, Thompson presumes. We discover Rosebud was no woman, but rather the symbol of the last moment of fun, family and autonomy in Kane's life.
Money wrecks all that, and Kane's last-ditch effort to wreck the wrecker by tearing his love nest to tatters is too little, too late. Greenfield's film, on the other hand, never gives us a sympathetic, pre-wealth Siegel whom we might root for, or at least be curious about. We know only what he did, rather than who he was, and so it is mostly with schadenfreude that we witness his implosion.
Queen of Versailles isn't the only current release inviting parallels to Welles' chef d'oeuvre. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's "Citizen Koch" (forthcoming 2013) digs into the funding of the modern Republican Party by plutocrats, including the Koch brothers. The doc is set against the backdrop of the aptly captioned Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 559 U.S. 310 (2010), which held that citizens do not lose their First Amendment protections merely because they channel their voice through corporations. Indeed, was Kane's constitutionally-protected yellow journalism any nobler than the Hillary Clinton hit job cooked up by Citizens United?
What these films and this case share in common is the question of what we may and should do with accumulated wealth. Ironically, that's a question that newspaper moguls have to worry less and less about these days. Just visit Sam Simeon, whose 90,000 square feet Siegel was likely trying to best. William Randolph Hearst's real-life Xanadu, overlooking the Pacific from its perch on the bluffs just north of San Luis Obispo, stands as a monument to the value that could once be extracted by controlling mass media. Perhaps motivated by Welles' film, the Hearst Corporation secured a more sympathetic legacy for Hearst Castle than Kane did for Xanadu by donating it to the state of California to be used as a state park. We'll see whether the ongoing decline of print journalism will force the corporation (which also owns various non-print traditional and new media assets) to sell the grounds near the Castle that, according to a state park tour guide in 2010, it still owns.
The less newspaper publishers have to worry about what to do with wealth, the more we newspaper readers have to worry about where to get the news. Part of the answer will be finding it ourselves, as citizen journalists. Traditional media, from CNN (iReport) to the TriBeCa Film Festival (Vine competition categories), will try to channel and co-opt that trend, but they can't put this genie back in the bottle. And so technology, which globalized us in the 20th century, will re-localize us after all.