My friend Sam forwarded me a YouTube video yesterday with the title:
“Donald Trump Movie Review – Orson Welles – ‘Citizen Kane'”
“Oh God,” I thought. “Here comes a stupid AI mashup.”
But no. The video was uploaded to YouTube back in 2015. I checked just now — it was recorded in 2002.
Trump looks kind of the same, just younger. He is in fact reviewing Citizen Kane. The review is not tremendously long nor tremendously insightful. But Trump does say the following:
===
The word “Rosebud,” for whatever reason, has captivated movie goers and movie watchers for so many years, and to this day is maybe the most significant word in film. Perhaps if they came up with another word that meant the same thing it wouldn’t have worked. But “Rosebud” works.
===
If you haven’t seen Citizen Kane, “Rosebud” is the word with which the movie opens, and which the isolated and bitter multimillionaire Charles Foster Kane whispers as he’s dying. Nobody in the movie knows what it means. As the movie goes on, we the audience find out it’s the name for Kane’s boyhood sled, a throwback to happier times.
With that explanation out of the way, let me get back to Trump’s point. It stands, and not just for Rosebud and for film. Consider:
Would Einstein have become the gentle, frizzy-haired, absent-minded genius we all recognize 70 years after his death, had his last name been, say, Berkowitz?
Would Disney be the brand it is today if Walt Disney had been born Walt Johnson? (“Johnsonland: The Happiest Place on Earth”)
And would Citizen Kane have been as impactful if Kane, on his deathbed, were clutching a snowglobe and whispering, “Pelican Runner…”
This ties into an email I wrote a few weeks ago, about how some words really do have magic power, over and above their meaning.
Trump I guess knows this well, and that’s why he is well-known to experiment with phrasing and words in public, seeing how people react in live situations as he speaks in front of crowds.
It’s why Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert and a trained hypnotist, predicted before anyone thought it was possible that Trump would rise to power, based solely on what he, Adams, was seeing Trump doing in rallies and speeches and on the campaign trail.
It’s yet another connection between different-seeming but highly-related fields like political propaganda, and hypnosis, and screenwriting.
If this is the kind of stuff that works for you, you can find more here: