(2016) Citizen Kane

Finding my several years old last entry here about Citizen Kane surprised me quite a bit, as it reflects less understanding of this movie than Stroheim's review. But even now, when most of it makes good sense to me, it seems as if it conveys two parallel, yet somewhat contradicting messages. On the one hand, it looks like a criticism of the American dream and the self-made man. Kane, in a sense, is portrayed like he could be any American, almost to an extent that he feels like a papier-mâché figure, and that may indeed give him a touch of implausibleness, at least as a normal person. Maybe Welles was trying to say that no person is supposed to be normal under Kane's conditions (even Kane hints that when talking to Thatcher), but Kane is crippled by this Rosebud thing that makes his condition highly personal and his character realistic. Rosebud is not a big riddle: the answer is almost spoon-fed to the viewer, though some basic knowledge in psychology (which was supposedly fashionable at the time) certainly helps. Kane is grabbed from his family at the age of 8, so suddenly that his childhood and his playing with his sledge “Rosebud” is interrupted literally at the same moment. Little is shown about the following years, but the Christmas scene strongly implies that from that moment, he had no parent figures to speak of. That is certainly not the right condition for a child's emotional development, and if it wasn't obvious, the old Leland eloquently explains that Kane was, simply speaking, emotionally retarded. Maybe you could argue that it somehow fits in criticising American magnates and their glorification, hinting that most of them are just sociopaths, but it rather could be a harsh insult against Hearst, basically telling “the poor thing must have had no childhood”. In his foreword for Marion's 1975 book, Welles explains item by item how the key motifs in Citizen Kane are clearly different from those in Hearst's life, but I'm not entirely convinced. Hearst Castle and Marion are perfectly recognisable – and thus, Kane, too –, and those differences turn the former two and Kane's childhood into things that, while admittedly untrue, still recognizable and rudely insulting for Hearst. It seems to me that Kane was supposed to be both Hearst and and a generic successful American, but it's hard to tell which (if any) was supposed to be the main idea.