The movie Citizen Kane gave an intriguing look at how the virtue of giving may not be as beneficial to one’s life as generally taught. In the movie, Kane goes through life proclaiming himself to be a representative of the underprivileged, although he is anything but underprivileged as the sixth richest man in the world. Kane tries to offset his wealth by giving his friends and family anything they want, an action that can almost be aligned to the thought of “buying one’s friends.” While these moves do succeed in keeping people close to him, the people who care about Kane most, namely Mr. Leland and Sarah, see through his acts as merely a way to try to please himself, not a way to please the gifts’ recipients.
As the movie progresses it becomes more and more apparent that Kane gives gifts as a way to gain love, he thinks that by giving gifts he is showing love to others and receives it in turn. However, this could not be further from the truth. Kane cannot connect his apparent generosity to a true feeling of love because he does not understand that generosity must involve giving something that you care about, not just giving something to someone for the sake of giving.
I thought it was interesting how Citizen Kane explored the ways in which “giving” could be used for selfish purposes. Charles Kane builds his second wife an opera house so that she can become a singer. However, as she explains, she never wanted to sing, and as we see in the film, it was Kane who forced her to perform when she wanted to stop, because he wanted people to believe she was a “real” opera singer. Even though Charles Kane believes he is being generous and “giving” his wife something she told him she wanted, in reality he is using his money to get his own way. I think this also relates to your point that Kane is using money to buy love, or as a substitute for love. He and Susan Alexander don’t seem to have a very strong relationship, so he uses money to try to create a life together, by building a house, an opera house, etc.
This post exemplifies the common phrase that “money can’t buy love”. Many times, nowadays, people believe the money will be the solution to their problems. The fight for education, to get a good job, seems for a lot of people to be rooted in the idea of being financially stable. The idea that people don’t appreciate him just because he has money correlates well with the idea that money won’t necessarily give people the satisfaction in life that they are looking for. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be hard to understand that and people have to learn it the hard way.
I think that there’s a big difference between giving and forcing something upon someone against their own wishes. It was nice that Kane wanted to give his wife the tools to showcase her talents to the world; but it was NOT nice that Kane forced this singing career upon his wife despite her expressed dismay and opposition to the idea. So I don’t necessarily think that giving is a bad thing – it just needs to be done the right way.