Cultural Influence
Xanadu has been used in recent times to represent the foolish excess of lavish lifestyles such as Kane's. Various celebrities — for example Michael Jackson with his Neverland Ranch — have been compared to Kane, with their inability to spend wisely and their gradual disconnection from the everyday world. Xanadu's symbolic meaning of a prison built for oneself resonates to this day. Bill Gates' house has been nicknamed "Xanadu 2.0" in reference to the fictional mansion of this article.
When similarly stylized Gothic buildings appear in film, Xanadu is often considered a source of inspiration and the similarity is often noted by critics. This includes Hogwarts in Roger Ebert's review of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Read more about this topic: Xanadu (Citizen Kane)
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or influence:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“We could not well camp higher, for want of fuel; and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too, like a good citizen of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)