Sean Tarjoto
Film  per. 3
Sr. Lampert
13 April 1999
Citizen Kane Test Paper

The burning of Rosebud in a crowded incinerator has been cited as anti-climatic by critics of Orson Welles’Citizen Kane, this year, declared atop the American Film Institute’s Best American Film of the Century.  However, it may be the Welles’ unorthodox and avant-garde style which much of the public has viewed as “anti-climatic”, in the denial of what is an integral and flawed part of the American psyche.  The revelation of Rosebud’s identity as the point of the film has been cited as predictable, but this is a criticism that is based on the (nowadays) old sense of closure played out in films today (some, ironically, in tribute to Citizen Kane). 
Let us retrace the structure of Rosebud’s foreshadowing. That the smashed snowglobe at Kane’s death scene is the only other example of a snowy weather setting in the film is matched by the first flashback scene where Kane is seen as a child sledding through the snowy hill near his old house, shortly before being given to Thatcher’s care.  This classic scene details Kane’s sudden loss of childhood as the price of survival.  At the time of Kane’s release, film had only been decades old, leaving plenty of room for originality, but few for the analyzation of the effects of booming American economics; today’s criticism of the ending is due to our insensitivity to this entirely too common element in the American dilemma: where the achievement of the American Dream is at the cost of the innocence of childhood.
It has been said that the degree of predictability as to the identity of Rosebud is ushered by this obvious type of foreshadowing.  However, our measure and criticism of how predictable of Kane's story is  testament to our culture's affinity with the success story/loss of childhood story.  Perhaps we are too close to see the entirety of the picture, because we are too focused on its details.  Indeed, Citizen Kane may be the first and most prevalent manifestation of this psychological motif in American art and life.
Other such great American tragedies, The Death of a Salesman, Our Town, illustrate the tendency for persons to live in anticipation of the future, or of an alternate world of success.  These plays and this movie is an illustration of the American Dream as a fallacy; either achieved or not, one finds that the price and compromise is too much.
Much of modern America is in a period of economic affluence and extended leisure time whose effect is, ironically, the loss of relationships and leisure to a drive to work more.  By accumulating, reaching, and fueling the ambitiousness liked to Kane’s struggle for political office, we collapse under the weight of our own faults.  In Kane’s selling off the Inquirer newspaper, we see his downfall, and the loss of his first ambition to the reality of money.  In his move for office, we see him ruined politically by his affairs with Susan Comingore. we see Kane pushing more and more for the glory of reluctant Susan’s opera career, perhaps in his own desires to associate with success, until her attempt at suicide.  We are left only with Xanadu, a symbol of isolation and over-indulgence that is populated by Susan’s complaints about the loneliness of wealth (“Forty-thousand acres of nothing but scenery and statues”).
Rosebud’s destruction is the zenith of Kane’s motif.  Nothing is left in the end but the end; from ruined political careers and failed marriages, to the end of a life itself.  Rosebud’s burgeoning message, in all it’s prosaic foreshadowing and “anti-climactic” ending is that the need for survival should never develop into the desire for excess, and remain secondary to what we can devote our attention, love, or enjoyment to at the present.  In the face of a collapsing sense of family and relationships due to the maintenance of economic integrity, the industrial face of America’s safe haven is in relishing the simplicity of innocence, childhood, the present, or Rosebud, before it’s inevitable end.