Citizen Kane, The Social Network, and the American Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

This poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley has captured popular imagination for more than two centuries, its central image of a massive sculpture fallen to ruins in an even more massive desert evoking the unrelenting power of time and the decay of all things. The figure we learn of in the poem, the mighty Ozymandias, is better known to historians as the pharaoh Ramses II, among Ancient Egypt’s most powerful rulers and possibly the one said to have enslaved the Israelites in the Book of Exodus. Here, though, that great power and accompanying hubris play ironically, as time has rendered Ozymandias’ proclamations empty boasts. He tells us to “Look on my Works,” yet “Nothing beside remains,” the works are nowhere to be found. The statue’s face is “half sunk” and “shattered,” cut off from the legs as though the mighty king were beheaded. Mortals may build great monuments to themselves and rule over all they can see, but all that will wither at the hand of time. The sands will bury everything: their power, their regality, their “cold command,” and the story that survives will not be one of a king ascended to godhood, but of the universe laying waste to humanity’s pride, turning our great works of vanity into a “colossal Wreck” in an empty desert.

Yet something does survive of Ozymandias. The inscribed command to “Look on my Works” prompts us initially to assume some great city surrounding the statue for which the pharaoh takes credit, something we can no longer see. But perhaps the work we are meant to look on is the statue itself, the artistic depiction of the mighty pharaoh that prompts our despair, makes us tremble in reverence. For while the corporal, political power of the pharaoh and his kingdom have eroded, the art about him survives, and makes its way to us through all the time and testimonies in between.

The poem is a nesting doll of storytellers and perspectives: its narrator makes only a brief appearance in the first line, telling of their encounter with a traveler, who then tells their own story of an encounter with the fallen statue, or perhaps only a story they have heard from someone else. From the expression on the statue the traveler imagines the sculptor who made it, imagines that the sculptor interpreted the pharaoh himself, that he “well those passions read” and “mocked them” with his hand. And from the traveler’s account we get another layer of perspective, as from the inscription on the pedestal the pharaoh now speaks directly. A massive game of telephone has occurred across millennia: the sculptor reads the pharaoh’s regality and transforms that impression into a stone visage. The traveler from the antique land sees that visage thousands of years later and tells the poem’s narrator, and the poem’s narrator tells us. And across all those storytellers, the message, the passions of the imperious Ozymandias yet survive.

In the poem, then, Shelley draws a distinction between material and artistic power: material power is subject to the inevitable collapse time wreaks, but artistic power is everlasting. The king may die and the kingdom may fall, but a myth persists that can still immortalize them. The trouble is that the artistic power is not subject to the iron control, the cold command, that material power carries. A myth of Ozymandias’ godlike power may survive, but only inside Shelley’s myth of his fallen pride.

In contemporary America, our figures of myth are not warrior kings but people of enterprise. We revere not those who rule as gods from a divine lineage but those who rise out of the masses and build kingdoms of their own through hard work and ingenuity. We call this ideal the American Dream, but it might be more accurate to call it the American Myth, both for its centrality to our cultural values and for its propensity to mislead those who most fervently believe in it. Regarding this American capitalist myth, there are two films which act much like Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” telling stories of mighty titans fallen from grace while tracing the mythmaking that surrounds them. The first, Orson Welles’ lauded debut feature Citizen Kane, which unravels the rise and fall of a fictionalized version of yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst, and the second, The Social Network, which charts the rise of Facebook and its very-much-a-real-human creator Mark Zuckerberg.

The fundamental thrust of both films is the cost of success within America’s capitalist gauntlet. Both Kane and Zuckerberg rise from humble (well, relatively humble) roots to become among the richest and most influential people in the world, but in doing so they sacrifice all their principles and alienate all the people closest to them. They each become an Ozymandias with their own kingdom to lord over, but can find no one with whom to inhabit that kingdom.

The opening shots of Citizen Kane convey this idea quite clearly, as we creep our way through Kane’s sprawling Xanadu estate, its lavish pools and exotic zoo which have fallen into disrepair without anyone to use them. The film’s other scenes in Xanadu create a similar effect, with Gregg Toland’s deep focus cinematography in the palace’s cavernous corridors emphasizing all the negative space, the distance between Kane and any other figures. Kane dies alone, emperor of an empty realm.

The same emptiness overtakes Mark Zuckerberg by the end of The Social Network, but in a less obvious way. Citizen Kane’s arc of a powerful figure falling into isolation and irrelevance uses much the same iconography as Shelley: massive monuments to one’s own ego fallen into decrepit ruin. One of Kane’s chief hobbies, in fact, is collecting ancient statues, and he names his estate Xanadu after the decadent summer home of the Ozymandias-like Kubla Khan. But while The Social Network maintains the Ozymandias narrative, it replaces this classical iconography with one more apt for the technological age of isolation Mark helped bring about. Thus, the isolation in which Mark finds himself at the end of the film is not the literal kind where he is a hermit in an ivory tower who hardly sets eyes upon another person, but a much more pernicious kind that has become commonplace in the world he has built, where he is surrounded by people but starved of any human connection. In his pursuit of wealth and influence throughout the film he pushes away everyone who engages with him on a human level and replaces them with yes-men disciples, culminating with his betrayal of his best friend Eduardo. The film leaves him staring at his laptop screen, endlessly refreshing his Facebook feed waiting for his ex-girlfriend to accept his friend request. Today, it’s a banal cliché to suggest that the social media that was supposed to bring us together has only made us more isolated. But when the film was made in 2010, that was still a counterintuitive statement, and yet The Social Network identifies Mark as perhaps the first victim of that phenomenon.

Both Citizen Kane and The Social Network, then, center around a loss of innocence. For Kane, this innocence is famously symbolized through Rosebud, his dying word which turns out to refer to his childhood sled, a relic of a simpler time before he was taken away from his home and made to integrate into wealthy society, before he became a news baron, politician, and personification of wealth, a memory of when he could just be a boy. It is that simplicity he longs for amidst all his wealth and power, which he has distanced himself from through his ambition and ego.

Mark’s Rosebud is Erica, his girlfriend who breaks up with him at the film’s opening and whose Facebook page he refreshes again and again in its final scene. The opening conversation between the two is one of the very rare instances in the film when a character interacts with Mark purely as another person, not as a genius programmer or creator of a successful company. She matches wits with Mark, activating his insecurities, and stands her ground against his casual misogyny. The result of their conversation, Erica maintaining her dignity and breaking up with him, hurts Mark so deeply that he essentially creates Facebook as a way to never have to experience it again. He builds a digital world and a programmer culture where he is the supreme lord, where he will never feel insecure or uncool and no one around him will have either the insight or self-respect to tell him what a child he is. That world of hollow admirers of course ends up being unsatisfying, and by the end of the film he longs for someone like Erica outside of his cult who can see him as an actual person.

In these respects, then, Citizen Kane and The Social Network make a key amendment to the image of fallen power we get in “Ozymandias.” In Shelley’s poem, the implication is that the march of time is the culprit behind the ruined, fallen statue. Ozymandias may well have ruled over a mighty kingdom in his day, but time destroys even the mightiest. Ozymandias is not special, is not a god. Collapse happens to everything, regardless of the height of its apex. But for Kane and Zuckerberg, the empty ruin that marks their destination is not the result of some outside influence such as time, it is a direct result of their pursuit of kingly power. The actions which brought them their wealth and influence were the same actions which isolated them from their original innocence. The state of ruined, lonely decadence was not something the forces of the universe brought upon them, but something they brought upon themselves. It was the only possible outcome. For these films, there are no great works of Ozymandias for us to look on and despair, and never were. The only image of Ozymandias there ever can be is that of the toppled statue in the barren desert. That is the only place kingly power can ever take you. In this way, Citizen Kane and The Social Network give a thorough deconstruction of the American Myth. If you follow its guidance, if you dedicate yourself to power and success above all else, the only way you can end up is broken and alone.

But while the material power of Ozymandias decays, the artistic power persists. Likewise, while their pursuits of wealth and power leave Kane and Zuckerberg empty and isolated, the narratives of their success still carry weight and add fuel to the American Myth. Both films focus not just on the individual journeys Kane and Mark take towards their imperious isolation, but also on how their stories are told, the myths that arise surrounding them. This is most evident in Citizen Kane, which frames itself as an investigation into an unknowable figure. Following its opening of Kane’s death that imbues the film with its central mystery, we get an extended newsreel obituary for Kane that serves as an objective account of the man and a jumping-off point for the remainder of the film. It provides us all the facts we will come to learn about Kane’s life, but absent any of the psychological context or artistic framing the film will later provide them. From there, the reporter Thompson, our audience surrogate, is tasked with discovering the meaning of Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” and so over the rest of the film interviews the central figures in Kane’s life in hopes of discovering the secret that will explain the man’s life. His task, essentially, is to take the facts of Charles Foster Kane’s life and turn them into a narrative, a story we can carry forward through the generations.

The many narrators who provide the details of Kane’s life function like the various storytellers in “Ozymandias.” We are not meant to take any one of them as wholly reliable. Rather, they each provide a unique perspective that illuminates some aspect of Kane. When we combine the various accounts, we can approximate some image of the person Charles Foster Kane, but it is only an approximation. Thompson’s quest for Rosebud comes up empty and he admits at the end of the film he still does not really know who Kane was. The film does reveal to us the meaning of Rosebud, uniquely offering us at the very end a god’s-eye glimpse behind all the narratives of Kane, but by this point we ought to be vigilant enough not to take Rosebud’s identity as our all-encompassing answer to the Kane enigma, to not reduce the man solely to his lost childhood innocence. Thompson makes a very good point in the prior scene that what a person is thinking about when they die does not define their life. In truth, Rosebud is not an authoritative answer the film privileges us with. It is just another narrative of Kane’s life, Kane’s own narrative, and it is no more authoritative than anyone else’s.

Like in “Ozymandias,” then, in Citizen Kane we only learn the story of this fallen titan through layers and layers of testimony and interpretation. The true nature of the man behind all the newsreels remains a mystery, and what we get instead is a myth of the American emperor of industry ending up lost and alone in his own palace. The film’s title, which labels Kane not as a baron, a visionary, or a villain, but simply “citizen,” highlights its status as a parable. Kane may have been principally based on William Randolph Hearst, but he represents all Americans, and more broadly the ideals and mythos of America. Take it from Kane himself, who is quoted thus in the newsreel: “I am, have been, and will only be one thing – an American.” Just as “Ozymandias” affirms the pharaoh’s power in the survival of his message through artistry while at the same time subverting it with the image of his ruined power, so too does Citizen Kane advance the American Myth in the same breath as it undercuts it. In the narrative we piece together of Kane’s life, we see how his pursuit of the American Myth has ruined him, yet the stories we see built up around Kane make him an exemplar of that very myth.

The Social Network’s story is also told to us indirectly, through the frame of two depositions against Mark Zuckerberg. Though these depositions, directed towards gathering legal evidence against Mark, are less conducive to the kind of narrative-building Thompson seeks in Citizen Kane, they still emphasize the events of the film as being told to us through a particular perspective, cluing us to focus not just on the story being told but the motive behind telling that story in this particular way. Most of Mark’s actions in the film are in fact directed towards a narrative, to building out a myth which will shield him from the insecurity he is so burdened by at the film’s outset. It is a subset of the American Myth which we see take hold in the film and which rose to even further prominence in the years following the film’s release: the myth of Silicon Valley.

A simple desire fuels the Mark Zuckerberg of The Social Network: he wants to be one of the cool kids. Hence his obsession with getting into one of the Harvard final clubs. Hence his hurt when Erica correctly calls him out for thinking his unpopularity is due to his nerdiness and not his asshole behavior. Hence Facebook. The website fills a psychological need for Mark: its popularity heightens his social status, makes him cool. His refusal to monetize Facebook initially draws from his need to keep the platform cool, and that is more of an ego-based decision than a business-based one. Mark realizes he will never be accepted among the world of the old money elite, as represented by the Winklevi, and so creates his own narrative, supercharges the myth of Silicon Valley to turn him and his nerdy ilk into the cool kids. He, with the help of ego-massaging parasite Sean Parker, makes the idea of the programmer-turned-billionaire into its own mythos. He replaces as the ideal of success under the American Myth the image of Charles Foster Kane in his Xanadu palace with the image of a programmer in his pajamas flipping off a boardroom of old money snobbery.

The film makes clear that this Silicon Valley story is a myth and in no way aspirational. It identifies the behavior of Mark and his followers as immature, insecure, and frequently misogynistic. The prototypical image of Silicon Valley culture the film gives us is of Mark hiring Facebook interns through a hackathon turned into a drinking contest. The inception of this culture is Mark drunkenly building a website that has people rank female Harvard students based on hotness, and its culmination is Sean Parker doing cocaine with underage girls. Yet for its explicit criticism of the myth and culture that Mark cultivates, the film in its wired style still emulates and advances this mythos. Mark’s drunken Facemash hacking is scored to addictive house music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Mark still gets to deliver Aaron Sorkin’s sharp, witty dialogue and give mic drop monologues espousing his own genius. The difference between the text critical of Zuckerberg and style that glorifies him may have been due to documented differences in sympathy towards Mark’s character between Sorkin and director David Fincher, but whatever the cause or intentionality, the film’s portrayal of Mark’s rise to power and his ownage of the Winklevi and their fellow elite is often romantic. Certainly, the Silicon Valley myth grew in the years following the film, and the label of genius tech billionaire has since been unduly foisted upon other figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman. By this point, the replacement of the Kane vision of American success with the Silicon Valley vision is nearly complete, as the tech bros that sprung out of Zuckerberg’s culture have taken residence in the highest echelons of the U.S. government and formed their own establishment.

Like “Ozymandias” and like Citizen Kane, then, The Social Network is a story not just of the price of success, but also the myths that rise out of that success, and survive even when the individual in question is ruined. Here, the myth advanced is Mark’s own version of the American myth that puts him and the immature, irresponsible, tech innovator he embodies as the object of desire, and like “Ozymandias” and Citizen Kane, the film propagates this myth and testifies to its power even as the text itself denounces it.

In “Ozymandias,” Citizen Kane, and The Social Network, we get the same story of the inevitable ruin that comes out of great power told across three historical conceptions of power and success. In “Ozymandias,” it is the classical image of monarchical power, of a larger-than-life king of kings standing atop his mighty empire. But ruin comes from the inevitable decay of time, which topples his monuments and leaves only a broken statue in a barren desert claiming dominion over the wasteland. In Citizen Kane, it is the American myth of an industrial baron building his empire from nothing and amassing incomprehensible wealth. But ruin comes for him too, for he finds that in his focus to build his kingdom, he has pushed away anyone who might live in it. In The Social Network, it is today’s Silicon Valley myth of a savvy technician building a new future which topples the old industrialists. But ruin comes from his own creation, as the network of digital connection he builds isolates him from any real connection.

But even amidst the ruin this success brings, myths persist. Even as his statue lies in shambles, we marvel at the majesty of Ozymandias as his claims of divinity make their way to us through sculptor and storyteller thousands of years later. Out of the enigma of the man Charles Foster Kane comes a myth from the accounts of those who knew him that constitutes the quintessential American story. As Mark Zuckerberg manipulates and backstabs his way to billions, there arises a new myth of the tech billionaire genius others now seek to embody. The artworks that tell us these stories carry forward these myths even as they refute them.

What we must remember about the myth-propagating power of art, though, is that it is as flexible as it is durable. The legend of Ozymandias survives through the power of art, but it has changed from the boasts of an invincible king to a reflection on the mortality of even the greatest things. Ramses II is long dead, and even as the myth he built for himself survived it did so as a relic of a bygone time. Perhaps the same will happen for the American Myth, which still captivates so many today. William Randolph Hearst too is dead and buried, and as the idea of power he embodied is swept away for the idea embodied by the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, we may increasingly come to see that vision of success as a relic.

In the case of Zuckerberg, though, we are still at the height of his material power and the myth that underlies it. The Social Network, which came before Cambridge Analytica, the Rohingya genocide, and January 6, feels somewhat naïve given the state of Facebook now. But if “Ozymandias” teaches us anything, it’s that material power is short-lived but the stories we tell about it are enduring. Hence, The Social Network, even for its lack of foresight and invocation of the Silicon Valley myth, has become all the more important in the wake of today’s Facebook, as a story that shows Zuckerberg as a deeply flawed human rather than a mythological idol, whose insecure pursuit of status can only bring him to ruin. In time, we may view the film as we do the “Ozymandias” poem today: telling us a story of a powerful figure from a long-past time whose influence has faded, and who reaches us only as a shattered work of vanity against a desolate wasteland, the lone and level sands stretching across the barren metaverse.

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