Sean Tarjoto
Film  per. 3
Sr. Lampert
13 April 1999

The Story of the Story of Citizen Kane

	Citizen Kane is a simple idea about a wildly successful media mogul, and the perspectives his surviving friends and relatives answer to a curious reporter, whose face we never see.  At its release, the meaning of this avant-garde form of narration was, like so many films before their time, ill received.  The majority of filmgoers, puzzled by the film’s non-linear structure (coupled with high contrast lighting and unorthodox camera work) developed its already small release into a box office flop.  It was new, original, and unflatteringly biographical.  Aside from its incredible technical artistry, Oscar-caliber performances, and political statement, lies the integral part of any film, the story.  It’s complex plot causes it to illustrate across so many levels both in fine execution and dense material, the need to be viewed and understood again.  Citizen Kane is one of those films you need to watch twice just to see once.
	Among the cleverest of Welles’ story ideas was the “News on the March” reel bombarding the established somberness elicited by the low-key death scene of Charles Foster Kane.  All the audience may mysteriously acknowledge is the death of someone and their last utterance: “Rosebud”.  The News on the March was a clever way of enforcing suspension of disbelief in the century’s early theatres serviced with newsreel clips.  Its booming volume and sudden appearance not only jolted audiences’ attention but also crosses the border between film and reality.  One might say the newsreel is a montage of the entire film disguised as actual media.  This is not a technique popular audiences should have been unaccustomed to, given the frightening examples of Welles previous work.  His convincing radio broadcast of the Martian invasion chronicled by H.G. Wells (of no relation to Welles other than pronunciation) War of the Worlds spread genuine public panic.  Here, in the newsreel, however, is a relatively objective view of Kane’s life, separate from the accounts of those who knew him, as well as a subtle joke against a real celebrity.
	What follows is an honest, at times unflattering revelation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential men.  Citizen Kane is the unauthorized biography of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, one of news media’s most powerful personas.  That the American Film Institute placed the film at the top of its 100 best films is an appropriate irony, one that Welles’ film elicits through the effects of the reporter Jedediah Leland. 
	Leland is neither protagonist nor antagonist, but the supposedly objective, and perhaps even wise “face” of investigative journalism.  Leland drives the plot of Kane with every encounter in his attempt to answer the question begging closure from the beginning: who or what is Rosebud?  The answer, Leland has, is that we may never know.  Journalism’s nose only sniffs out this supposition at the end of the film, and Leland’s investigation; he doesn’t believe, “any one word can explain a man’s life”.  A lofty philosophical claim that rings true until the sobering, tragic, ending, the burning of Kane’s childhood sled.  
	Achieving the American Dream or failing to at the expense of dignity or the feeling of self-worth is a popular motif issued often in American drama.  Whether Charles Foster Kane merely lost his sled in the maze of collections at Xanadu, or rather, lost the chance to play it as a child is the answer the audience must grapple with: that the price of material success is innocence.