Briefly explain how Welles weaves the themes of evil and power together in the screenplay for Citizen Kane

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. Thematically, Kane is so complex that only a brief itemizing of some of its themes is possible within these few pages. Like most of Welles’s other movies, Citizen Kane might well be entitled The Arrogance of Power.
2. Welles was attracted to themes traditionally associated with classical tragedy and the epic: the downfall of a public figure because of arrogance and pride. Power and wealth are corrupting, and the corrupt devour themselves. The innocent usually survive, but they are severely scarred. “All the characters I’ve played are various forms of Faust,” Welles stated. All have bartered their souls and lost.
3. Welles’s sense of evil is mature and complex, seldom conventionalized. He was one of the few American filmmakers of his generation to explore the darker side of the human condition without resorting to a simplified psychology or to moralistic clichés.
4. Though his universe is essentially doomed, it’s shot through with ambiguities, contradictions, and moments of transient beauty.
5. Welles considered himself a moralist, but his movies are never priggish or sanctimonious.
Instead of facile condemnations, Kane laments the loss of innocence: “Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of a failure with a death in it,” Welles stateD. “But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat. To me that’s the central theme in Western culture, the lost paradise.”