Bonus Material: Snyder Xanadu

Behind the scenes at The Curly R

Occasionally, Curly R will bring readers backstage for a peek into the minds that give life to this enterprise. This is a companion piece to Curly R's Avarice that Consumes All Things, examining Dan Snyder's nanny troubles and his history of disdain for little people and 'their' rules. This post is provided at no charge to readers and will come in the form of a hidden easter egg on disc 2 of Curly R: the Motion Picture starring Taye Diggs as Curly R, Tom Cruise as Jason La Canfora, Christian Bale as Hogs Haven, Dame Edna as Dan Steinberg, Dakota Fanning as Hog Heaven and Billy Bob Thorton as Wilbert Montgomery.

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One of things I like most about creative writing is the discovery portion. Thanks to teh internets there is a nearly bottomless repository of information at our fingertips, all of it linked, either explicitly by hyperlinks and subject matter, or implicitly by human intervention in the form of searches and free association. As the edge of the internet, the interface and the stuff we see, continues more closely to resemble the underlying infrastructure of the internet, the guts that connect and route user requests between among and through networks, the human intervention piece in finding the related data begins to minimize, but the free association in relating disparate chunks of information increases.

Hence a simple search for soon-to-return-from-a-devastating-hit Trent Green's comprehensive Redskins statistics, which were tough to find because he took most of his snaps in preseason in a period where stats are not well represented on the web, morphs into a dissertation on a future past for Trent. Call it user aggregation, cut-ups, meta-derivation, whatever, it's continually pushing through the present limitations to find ways to tease out the next level of association. Rinse and repeat.

If you have not seen Citizen Kane lately, go and add it to your Netflix queue right now. Put the HBO movie RKO 281 right behind it and watch them on consecutive nights. The former film from 1941 is, peculiarly in my opinion, considered one of the greatest films of all time (I would consider it one of the most audacious for sure) and the latter is the 1999 meta-version of the film, chronicling the making of Citizen Kane: the sets, methods, writing and the deadlines. It also is the making of the making of the movie: the politics of movie studios in the 1940s, anti-semitism and a looming WWII, and the lengths to which newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst went to derail the movie, whose main character, Charles Foster Kane, is a thin fictionalization of WRH.

Beyond reproach in a looser regluatory era, William Randolph Hearst was a robber baron, a virtual monopolist, independently wealthy from family holdings in mining, ranching and forestry interests, and controlled media markets in every major city in the country. His political career stalled, WRH turned to his media outlets to support his political ambitions and pushed a sensationalist form of journalism designed to whip readers into division rather than to illuminate. He was accused of fabricating stories and rewriting other news outlets' stories and crediting them to nonexistent Hearst 'correspondents.' All the while churning red meat to his readers he was supporting legislative agendas that quietly benefited his fortune in non-media endeavors, as usual to the detriment of the common man.

Orson thought William Randolph Hearst irresponsible in his ways, using his empire to quell unfriendly voices, advocating for American intervention overseas all the while lining his pockets from other businesses and conceived of Citizen Kane as an expose of WRH's life, peering into the world of privilege and wealth where there is never any accountability. It's the same world where Tom and Daisy Buchanan live in The Great Gatsby. As the camera watches Charles Foster Kane disintegrate in Citizen Kane, so does Nick Carraway witness the reckless and indifferent behavior of Tom and Daisy.

Having before seen pictures of the Snyder mansion, which in Hollywood fashion is not merely a sprawling complex but a sprawling complex once owned by Jordan's Queen Noor, and still not big enough for the Snyders, the image of Xanadu, Charles Foster Kane's gothic castle on a 40 thousand acre estate in the mountainous 'the desert' of Florida came to mind immediately. Xanadu is of course the movie stand-in for Hearst Castle, William Randolph Hearst's 56-bedroom, 61-bathroom castle on 40 thousand acres in San Simeon California.

Iconographically though, I could not have anticipated the similarity in the image of the construction of the Xanadu scale set for Citizen Kane and the image from the May 19 2006 Washington Post story on the Interior official taking the fall for Dan Snyder cutting down the trees. Here are the images:


The construction of the model set of Xanadu for Citizen Kane, 1941.



Dan Snyder's mansion after the trees had been cut and the remedial saplings had been planted, 2006.

Note the weird symmetry of these two images. In the Xanadu image, boom machinery is in the foreground, whereas the Snyder image has trees in their place. Both give a sense of distance more than depth: the nominal subject of the image, the mansion house, is a long way from you and I, and maybe we don't want to be there.

Despite the apparent grandeur of the estate houses, the middleground is really the subject of both images. The Xanadu image middleground shows the desolation of the fictional Florida high desert, with scrub dotting the rise to the main estate. In the Snyder image the cleared floor of the stand of trees conveys the same desolation, with dotted scrub replaced by the vertical lines of the saplings. In the former image the scrub brush will never amount to much and if you are a pessimist, you might believe the the saplings planted in the latter, when mature might not really be big trees, but rather smaller native flowering trees like dogwoods or cherry trees, thus preserving Dan's ill-gotten view. In both images the middleground symbolizes the distance, or 'desert' between the men that own these houses and the men that gaze upon them from afar.

Finally as the image draws back to the background and the estate mansions themselves, we see large and imposing structures far away on a hill. Now the concept of castles and estates on a hill did not originate with William Randolph Hearst or Orson Welles, but the similarity in composition is striking. They appear to mirror images of each other, with the Xanadu estate house featuring the first-level additon on the right and the Snyder mansion with the analogous feature on the left. The feeling of height conveys the achievements of the men inside: they climbed the hill and now they are on top.

For reference, here is an image of the Hearst Castle in San Simeon California:



This image in comparison to the others reveals the difference between true excess and make believe. In reality the hill is higher than Xanadu's, the palace more magnificent and the grounds teeming with life. William Randolph Hearst would never need to cut down trees to improve his view; he simply built his abode above them.

Is Dan Snyder the modern incarnation of William Randolph Hearst and Charles Foster Kane? No. He is their simulacrum.



Backstage image from here.
Construction of Xanadu scale model on the set of Citizen Kane, 1941: Wikipedia from here.
Dan & Tanya Snyder's mansion in Montgomery County Maryland: Katherine Frey / Washington Post from here.
Hearst Castle in San Simeon California from here.