Can One Word Explain a Life?
What Citizen Kane reveals about the stories we live by.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 139 | James Gibb
The idea that one word could explain a life is tempting—and almost certainly wrong.
“Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained everything… I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle… a missing piece.”
—Citizen Kane (1941)
Charles Foster Kane left behind a story. His story. But no one, not the journalists, his friends, his lovers, or those who knew him best, could make sense of it. Perhaps only Kane truly knew it. But I don’t think he did.
Citizen Kane transformed Hollywood after its release in 1941, bringing a cinematic language, storytelling, and technical craft that hadn’t been seen before. It would go on to shape the next 80 years of film. In 1998, the American Film Institute polled 1,500 film professionals and Citizen Kane topped the list. Ten years later, the AFI ran another poll. It retained top spot. Film critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, “Nobody who saw Citizen Kane at an impressionable age will ever forget the experience.” I wouldn’t disagree.
I first saw the movie in the Glasgow Film Theatre in the winter of 1998 with my friend Gavin. We walked out in silence. We knew we’d seen something special. The power and legacy of the film still resonate more than a quarter of a century later.
The film tells the story of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper tycoon from humble origins who amassed a great fortune and influence in American society. On his deathbed, he utters a single final word: “Rosebud.” A reporter, Thompson, is sent to speak to those who knew Kane best, to try and find out who or what Rosebud was or is. They want a story to explain the man. “Find Rosebud and we find the man,” the editor tells his team. “It’ll probably turn out to be something very simple.”
The story unfurls through the memories of others, recollections of Kane that span a half century. We see these as a series of flashbacks. As questions are answered, new questions are raised. We go back and forth, from his youth to middle age to eventual isolation, his newspapers, his wives, his political ambitions, his principles, and his follies. And his hubris.
“There’s only one person in the world who’s going to decide what I’m going to do and that’s me.”
—Charles Foster Kane
One of the pleasures of rewatching Citizen Kane is you can never remember what scene comes next. It remains fresh and vivid, unconventional, always something new to pick up on; another appreciation of the camera wizardry or the immaculate photography by Gregg Toland, considered the best cinematographer in the world at the time. Toland showed up one day and was reported to have said, “My name’s Toland and I want you to use me on your picture. I want to work with somebody who never made a movie.”
That somebody is Orson Welles. The story of Citizen Kane is also the story of Orson Welles. A brash prodigy of stage and radio, Welles marched into Hollywood at the age of 25 with an unprecedented contract of a three-picture deal, a massive budget, and final cut of his first film, which was almost unheard of. It was a huge gamble by RKO Studios.
Welles loosely based the character of Kane on William Randolph Hearst, one of the most powerful men in the world. Hearst, upset with the portrayal, laid his full wrath upon Welles and RKO Studios. All this created a massive wave of publicity for the film, but the film was blacklisted in major papers owned by Hearst.
While the film was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, it won only one (Best Writing, Original Screenplay) and was booed each time its name was mentioned as a nomination. Welles would later remark almost Kane-like, “If Hearst isn’t rightfully careful, I’m going to make a film that’s really based on his life.”
That lone Oscar was well deserved. Welles had brought in veteran satirist and hard-drinking screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz as his co-writer. Mankiewicz gave us dialogue like this:
“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since I haven’t thought of that girl.”
—Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s long-time business manager
Citizen Kane may explain what Rosebud is, but not what Rosebud means. The way the film tells Kane’s story shows how, once we’re gone, our lives survive only in the memories of others, prone to distortion, exaggeration, or, worse, disappearance.
Kane’s life is examined, but remains a puzzle even after the pieces are laid out. Not every life can be understood. Some resist explanation.
Even ones like Charles Foster Kane.
The story of Charles Foster Kane is inseparable from the story of Orson Welles.
Some years ago, I read Citizen Welles, a biography of Orson Welles. I learned he’d gone to Dublin, Ireland, at just fifteen, talked his way onto the stage, and held his own among established adult actors. By twenty, he was a star of Broadway. Then he was given the keys to Hollywood, or as he described it, “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.”
Welles was audacious. Certainly a genius. He didn’t wait to be invited. And now he had a third medium to conquer.
But for all the genius (and eventual acclaim) of Citizen Kane, Welles never again sat at that pinnacle of greatness in Hollywood. His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was butchered, re-edited with a ‘happy’ ending by the studio. He disowned it. Still, it’s considered one of the great works of American cinema.
On his next film, It’s All True, a documentary in Brazil, Welles was fired by the studio for allegedly going over budget. The same journalists who had once praised him now dismissed him as arrogant and overblown.
Did Welles rise too fast?
Though Welles would go on to direct twelve more films—called by one critic as twelve of the greatest films ever made—he never quite found his way back to the place he started. If he still had the keys, they no longer opened the same lofty doors.
Some critics called him a failure. That seems absurd. It’s a strange thing. How we punish early brilliance if it doesn’t evolve the way we expect.
Welles died in 1985. There was no final act, no Hollywood redemption arc.
Like his most famous character, Charles Foster Kane, Welles is remembered now though the memory of others. Kenneth Tynan placed him alongside Chaplin, Ellington, Picasso, and Hemmingway. Woody Allen called him “the only American director.”
The years have been kinder to Welles in the four decades since his death. History creates new voices. And new perspectives. Younger audiences discover works like Citizen Kane. And the stories behind it.
A reminder that a life, even one no longer physically here, can still evolve.
And that no single word can contain it.
“I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?”
—Charles Foster Kane
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