Why Nearly Every Big American Movie Is Trying to Be The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane

After years of analysing filmmakers' agendas and influences, I have found that nearly all prominent American filmmakers, at least the ones trying to tell stories for the broadest American audience, are trying to tell one of two types of stories: The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane. Knowing these two categories also reveals why big studios like Marvel were struggling at the time I wrote this.

This is far from a universal rule, and I am not out to accuse the films we love of being derivative. But I have been floating this running theory throughout my film analysis that year, and I owe readers a real explanation of what I mean by it.

Iron Man, Barbie and Oppenheimer each pick one of the two models

Some examples of what I mean. Iron Man is really Citizen Kane: it is the story of a billionaire who seems to die in the opening minutes, and then we spend the rest of the movie unpacking who he really is through the eyes of his business relationships, his lovers and the press.

Barbie is aiming for The Wizard of Oz, both internally in the references the movie makes and structurally, as the story of a young woman waking up from a dream. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, is aiming for Citizen Kane, as almost a documentary point of view assessment of a cryptic American figure, told as a soul searching cautionary tale.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone draws a tenuous connection between two unrelated movies just to sound clever, and I recognise that we have never been more in a media illiterate, everything equals everything era of algorithm friendly overanalysis. So rather than just asserting the theory, I want to investigate the history of Hollywood, what it means to make an American film, and why these two films matter so much.

The evidence: The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane

Exhibit one is The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's 1939 adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is a classic musical fantasy about a Kansas farm girl, played by Judy Garland, who travels to a Technicolor dream world, murders two witches and learns that there's no place like home. I have to point out one detail from the scene where she opens the door: they actually painted Judy Garland's body double sepia toned to match the set, then swapped in Garland to walk into the colourful world. As I put it, "this movie rocks."

Exhibit two is Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' 1941 morality tale about a newsman who tries to fix America but sells his soul. It was a thinly veiled hit piece on the real life media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Rosebud was reportedly Hearst's private nickname for an intimate part of his mistress's body, but the harsher insult was putting ironic quotes around the word singer for the character based on that actual mistress. You don't hear that on the Hearst Castle tour.

Both films are classics. They have ranked in the top 10 of the AFI's 100 best films ever made, and both have won over audiences and film lovers for their timeless themes and the groundbreaking cinema techniques each one invented.

Oz transports us, Kane calls us to action

I believe that every American film made since the mid 20th century has been constructed in the model of one of these two films. I do not mean in their form, because technology and aesthetic styles have obviously evolved, but in their function: what each one hopes to accomplish with its audience. In a nutshell, "Wizard of Oz type movies are fairy tales that transport us out of our lives and invite us to dream." Citizen Kane movies are morality plays that reflect our lives and call us to action.

I have to credit a guest on the Blank Check podcast in 2019 who, discussing Miyazaki's animated masterpiece Spirited Away and comparing it to another Japanese film, used this metaphor: "I think all interesting movies are either puzzles or dreams." In his view, that other film is a puzzle and Spirited Away is a dream.

You could think of Wizard of Oz movies as dreams and Citizen Kane movies as puzzles, but my categories don't align quite that neatly. It is fun that he used the qualifier of interesting movies, because I think he would feel that a lot of movies don't really know what they are trying to do. My qualifier is American movies.

Two American myths: the traveler and the disrupter

I think The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane speak to two core myths that are uniquely important to Americans: the story of the traveler and the story of the disrupter.

The story of the traveler is the classic Joseph Campbell monomyth. A character goes on a journey, meets people along the way, goes on quests to achieve what they think they need, realises that what they want is not what they need, pays a price for it, and then circles back home having changed.

The story of the disrupter is closer to classic Greek tragedy. A character believes they are trying to fix everything in the world, pays the price for it, and reaches some sort of pathos.

The Wizard of Oz is the American dream you wake up from

The Wizard of Oz begins in Kansas in the 1930s, the decade of the Dust Bowl, when many farmers in the United States lost everything and were forced westward. Dorothy travels to a new land and finds herself a fish out of water. One thing that makes America unique is its status as a nation of immigrants: people fleeing religious persecution, seeking economic opportunity, brought here as slaves, escaping famine, or seeking a safe haven from war or political unrest. We all come from somewhere.

Core to the American identity is the call to adventure, leaving the nest out of restlessness or necessity and hitting the road, either to a new land or just to chase the sunset in a westward expansion. That is the American dream. But the American dream is just that, a dream, something one wakes up from. So we inevitably wake from that illusion, left questioning what is real and trusting only the comforts of home.

The qualities of Wizard of Oz movies follow from that. They are stories about restless dreamers who leave home for an adventure, down a rabbit hole or into a heart of darkness of some kind. The fun of the movie is watching a character react and adapt to extraordinary new circumstances. The adventure forces the hero to assemble a diverse team, because the hero alone is inadequate and needs to learn something in a coming of age story. The extraordinary nature of the adventure causes the hero to lose their grip on reality at some point, and the heroes are driven by a compelling central mystery before being awakened to the truth.

The audience is meant to feel awe at the spectacle and leave their lives behind for two hours or so, and when done well the movie ends by suspending us in a dreamlike state. These movies resemble the experience of having a dream or a nightmare. They celebrate the diversity of the big wide world outside our walls, and they include moments we argue with friends about, unsure whether they were real or hallucinations.

Citizen Kane is the cautionary tale of the disrupter

I know the word disrupter carries the cringe worthy entrepreneur and innovator meaning that gets deconstructed in movies like Glass Onion, and yes, I agree, "disruptors are the worst." Similarly unique to the American DNA is the way the country embraced the Industrial Revolution and became a nation of workaholism. We are not the only country like this now, but in my opinion we invented it. We disrupted humanity, and sorry about that, Earth.

Citizen Kane takes a harsher stance on the American dream: unchecked ambition corrupts the heart and turns us cold, and the higher we climb, the further we get from what makes us human. You could argue these stories come from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the Great American Novel, and its myth that every great American figure is to some extent a con artist, a reinvention of his own making. It is really The Wizard of Oz told from the perspective of the man behind the curtain instead of Dorothy.

Citizen Kane movies are morality plays about a clever but flawed innovator, entrepreneur or disrupter who achieves great success but gradually erodes to the point of catharsis. The central character is an obsessive who feels alienated from their world but turns that obsession into profit, fame or glory, short term success at the expense of long term happiness or community. They are set in worlds that look like our own present or past, and they explore or satirise parts of American society and its institutions.

The fun is watching the protagonist transform, succeed and suffer. They are often structured out of sequence, using flashbacks, shifting points of view and unreliable narrators, and they instruct us on how best to live. They work as cautionary tales, ending with the hero dying, accepting their fate, realising their crimes, or finally letting go of an obsession or relationship. Not all of them are downers: I include workplace and romantic comedies, because they tend to be about idiosyncratic jerks who need to learn how to get over themselves.

Why the theory applies only to American films

I am only talking about American films because directors raised in other countries are working through entirely different cultural experiences. Bong Joon Ho was certainly influenced by American cinema, but his critiques of capitalism in Parasite, Okja and Snowpiercer are distinctly Korean. Martin McDonagh's films defy these categories, as there is something distinctly Irish about In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin that doesn't have to speak to the American experience. There are certainly cross cultural influences: Miyazaki's Spirited Away is a Wizard of Oz type story, but it is also so much more than that.

I also exclude the works of Akira Kurosawa, even though his 1950 film Rashomon was compared to Citizen Kane for its similarly shifting point of view and unreliable narrators. Kurosawa had not seen Citizen Kane, largely because William Randolph Hearst censored the film, and many people around the world had not seen it until RKO sold the TV rights in 1955.

I think it is unfair to include films that came out before Citizen Kane or The Wizard of Oz, like Gone with the Wind or Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. Casablanca came out in 1942, and it is just unlikely that Michael Curtiz would have seen Citizen Kane before he started shooting it.

How Kubrick, Spielberg and Scorsese inherited both paths

Citizen Kane went on to circulate on American television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that is when film critics started to talk about it as the best film ever made. That was right around the time filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma were honing their artistic voices as young men.

You could say all these directors were taught to dream thematically by The Wizard of Oz and taught ethics cinematically by Citizen Kane. Of course there were other huge influences, like The Greatest Show on Earth on Spielberg, but these were the two movies they all had in common. They gave every generation of American filmmakers two clear paths: to transport the audience or to transform their soul.

Marvel works best when it commits to one story

As of 2023, franchises like Marvel Studios had been at their best when leaning hard into one of these two types of stories. WandaVision and Loki were both Wizard of Oz type stories. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was a story of Citizen Rocket, told through flashbacks until he found redemption, leaving us with strong life lessons about abuse.

But Marvel and many big franchises keep trying to have it all, delivering inward looking character deconstructions that also take us to surreal worlds. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness began as a Wizard of Oz story, then halfway through shifted into being about Stephen Strange as an obsessive threat to the multiverse. Shang Chi started off as a Citizen Kane type story about Shang Chi and Wenwu's past, with powerful themes of family, abuse and regret, and then it starts talking about alternate dimensions and soul sucking dragons.

I believe Hollywood films are better off setting expectations clearly and keeping their intentions straightforward, so audiences don't feel this whiplash effect. Barbie, one of the biggest films of 2023, is the story of The Wizard of Oz, and Oppenheimer is the story of Citizen Kane. Both of these quirky movies outperformed most other movies that year, and I think it is because they connected with American audiences by telling the story of traveling to a new, scary and exciting place, or the story of being really obsessed with something and then regretting it.

Two stories American audiences will always love

So are there only two types of movies? No. You can categorise movies however you want. But I believe there are two types of stories American audiences will always love to hear again.

Whenever I return to this distinction between The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane, this is what I mean. It is not a new natural law, free of exception, that every movie has to be run through as a test. It is the way I look at movies, and I think it could be a helpful way for others to consider them too.

Should big franchises pick one path, transporting us or transforming us, or can a film successfully try to do both?