Screening Report - Citizen Kane (1941)

“Rosebud.” A word that means the world to one man and nothing to the world who so earnestly tries to discover that meaning. Orson Welles 1941 Citizen Kane jumps around through the life of that citizen, Charles Foster Kane (Welles), talking to lovers, “friends,” and enemies trying to get an unbiased report of the man’s life and “Rosebud” (Welles, Citizen Kane)

I’ll start with my reaction: I’ve seen Citizen Kane before and honestly didn’t really appreciate it. I mean, I thought it was nice, but I didn’t appreciate it or really even grasp what “Rosebud” meant. Upon seeing it a second time, however, I loved it. Wells is really a master at his craft. He manages to break cinematic boundaries and create a great piece of art while also telling a great and engaging story. I feel as though the more times I see it, the more I will appreciate it because each time I know I’ll pick out something new. For instance, this time around, I picked out the theme of love. Kane, like all people, needs love, but on his terms and without giving it in return. He makes people love him, he “earns” it, all while making it impossible for them to earn his in return. He searches for the love he had when he was a boy, the love that was taken from him the day he was taken from his parents, the day when he played with the sled named “Rosebud.” “Rosebud” is so important because it symbolizes everything he sought in life--love. He buys people things, makes promises, signs documents, builds opera houses, throws parties--all to makes people love him on his own terms. He also spends insane amounts of money buying the world’s greatest treasures, building the greatest house. He tries to fill a void with people and things that can only be filled by “Rosebud,” and it’s that depth, the pity that the audience feels, the masterful writing that reveals that madness, the execution at the hands of the actors--all of those and more are why I really do enjoy this film now. It’s a very human tale of a very inhuman man of the need for love and I love it. 

Now for the more analytical side of things. The ending is really key in the film. In something like Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000) where the ending is a twist that the audience should have seen coming if they paid attention, Citizen Kane’s ending demands that the viewer go back and see it a second time. If the audience paid attention to the color scheme’s in Unbreakable they would notice that blue is bad and so Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) must therefore be bad because he’s always in blue. The color scheme has a serious, blatant, continuous presence in the film that cannot be ignored. In Citizen Kane there is no real forewarning as to what “Rosebud” is, no real hint that it’s the sled. The only hint we receive is the snowglobe with the snowy cabin in the very beginning which we quickly forget about as the newsreel plays and bombards us with information. The audience must rewatch the film a second time, at least, to understand what the sled means and represents. Aside from what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the ending, that shot of the sled burning with all the other trash, tells us that for all the collecting Kane did, for all of his extravagance, what meant the most to him was that time when life was simple. He got caught up in a whirlwind of excitement, business, women, fame, and himself after he was ripped from that simplicity and it ending up being his demise. But the ending shows us the vulnerability of the man who would be king; it shows us the child inside of Kane that only wanted to go back to that shoddy cabin in the snow with his old sled and be loved by his parents. The ending makes the audience pity Kane more than we already did. As much as it’s not like something like Unbreakable, it achieves something similar: it makes the audience look at a character and his motivations with different eyes. The real difference is that the ending of Citizen Kane really requires that the audience go back and watch it a second time whereas Unbreakable does not. 

One of the more interesting parts of the film is how it’s told from beginning to end. The plot (the reporter (William Alland)  finding out about Kane’s life) starts at the end of the story (of Kane’s life and the news story surrounding his life and death). The film jumps between two linear timelines: the reporter’s journey and Kane’s life. The jumping about is the plot, but the story really starts long before, back even before the film shows Kane as a child. The way the plot is structured really shows us the high and low points of Kane’s life as we watch him change from an innocent, young boy into a pathetic, old man from the eyes of those who thought they knew him best. The shifting between past and present gives the audience almost 20-20 as we hear and see about what kind of man he became before he became him. 

For that past, there is no omnipotent narrator, only his lovers, enemies, and supposed friends who speak of it; however, the present uses omnipotent narration. It starts with the castle and Kane’s death and then follows the reporter around until the end when it shows us something the reporter, or any of the other significant characters, could never have seen: the burning of the sled. The present is objective, simply and honestly giving the audience a window into this story, but the past is not. Short of his death, the only parts of Kane’s life we see are seen through the eyes of those who knew him, we only see what they want us to see. Kane could have done a lot of good, but we only see the bad, his affair, his egotism, his controlling nature. Now, that’s not the make the case that Kane was actually a good guy, but only to explain that we only see what the narrator’s want us to. They choose to tell specific stories about Kane’s life, stories that impacted them and show how they remembered Kane; his days at the papers, his affair, his speech, his nights at the opera, his days at Xanadu--all are told by people around him at that moment. There isn’t a single moment in Kane’s life, except his death, that isn’t shown through the eyes of someone near him. So the film manages to have both objective and subjective narration present throughout the whole of it.
Finally, the narration does not follow a sort of simply three act structure. It follows more a five-act one (“Dramatic Structure”) if anything. For a five-act structure the film has a very firm exposition period; we see Kane die, the newsreel, have the plot set up for us, and see his early childhood. We then get into the rising action: Kane buys a newspaper to run, he makes it successful, steals other reporters (at which we see the first glimpse of his downfall), makes promises (which he won’t keep) about standing up for the little guys, and gets married. All of this sets up Kane’s fall from grace as it were. The climax comes very pointedly when Kane get caught cheating. He is about to win an election when it his wife and everyone else find out about his mistress. It’s the high point that the plot has been leading up to and from which the main character goes downhill; it’s Hamlet’s moment when he kills Polonius, Othello’s moment when decides to kill Desdemona, and the moment in King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1623) when the evil sisters kill Gloucester. From this climax, comes from falling action. It is Kane’s second marriage up to scene where the reporter says he never found out what “Rosebud” was. It’s the downhill of Kane’s sad life where he really loses everything important--his friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), his second wife (Dorothy Comingore), his political aspirations, and eventually his life. The last part is the resolution wherein the loose ends are tied up; the reporter finishes as best he can his story, Xanadu is sold off bit by bit, and the audience learns, finally, what “Rosebud” is. Sure, someone could fit that into a three-act structure, but it better fits the dramatic five-act (“Dramatic Structure”).

In short, Citizen Kane is five-acts of dual narration that weave plot and story into, what I consider to be, a masterful and beautifully sad tale of one man’s quest to regain what he lost: “Rosebud.”



"Dramatic Structure." Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 19 Sept.
   2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure>.

Welles, Orson, dir. Citizen Kane. Screenplay by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz. RKO Radio
   Pictures, 1941. Film.