movies

A lot of the hype was in the metanarrative around the movie - remember that it bombed in theaters and was only carried to far later acclaim. Newspaper journalists loved the fact that it called out one of their worst nightmares (W.R. Hearst) in very specific ways. Then the cinematographers caught all the tech that Welles used and tried to figure out how to make it all work for them. Actors loved it because it was a lot of great character work. 'Film buffs' started to enjoy it thereafter, in part because it had inspiration from films like Rashomon. Then you have the auteur directors who will always love Orson Welles, in spite of everything and anything against doing so. Mercury Theatre on the Air fans also liked the movie because it shared a lot of the same cast (and was only 3 years out from that show).

I'll admit, that's where I came at it from. My family was in papers, and was in a paper that actively fought the Hearst syndicate; one of the characters in the movie has elements of my grandfather in him, because he made sure to have people go into NYC to review Mercury Theatre productions and thus Welles cared about him as an editor. And then my experience having gotten briefly into stage and screen: The performances are amazing. Many of the sets are so perfectly evocative that they become a character unto themselves. The montages are technically inspiring to this day, and the scene transitions are pure technical excellence.

That's just what makes Kane good as a film.

The plot is one of a death-mystery of a 'great' man, of trying to approach a man's life and sum him up in just a few inches of text on a page. While Rosebud is the butt of jokes (and may well have been a nasty jab at Marion Davies), it's more of a chilling point. The point is not about the thing itself. It's the treatment of the thing. It's the last thing he thought about, and the whole movie is a quest to figure out what it "means" - and no one finds out, even though they spend this whole film exploring who the man was from vignettes of his existence. In the end, if it meant anything but a fleeting final thought, it still just goes in the furnace with the rest of his identity that can't be sold off at auction. It didn't define him, not really - in spite of what the editor in the smoke-filled newsroom wanted to push as his narrative. One word is never enough to define a person who lived a full life. But a full life that ended up hurting a lot of people is best defined by the wreckage left behind (human and junk). A drunk ex-wife, dead children, a disgraced media empire, a half-built house full of stuff for the furnace, and most painfully, no true friends to really speak well of him.

That's what makes Citizen Kane good as a movie.

So I'll say this - Rosebud is meaningless. It's a cheap parlor trick of misdirection, and like all such tricks people latched onto it. Instead, ask yourself something when you're watching that movie. When you're gone, what will you leave behind? And what will you do, starting right this moment, to leave behind the legacy you want?