B0041VYHGW EBOK (41 page)

Citizen Kane
’s narrative revolves around an investigation into traits of character. As a result, these traits provide many of the motivations for events. (In this respect, the film obeys principles of the classical Hollywood narrative.) Kane’s desire to prove that Susan is really a singer and not merely his mistress motivates his manipulation of her opera career. His mother’s overly protective desire to remove her son from what she considers to be a bad environment motivates her appointment of Thatcher as the boy’s guardian. Dozens of actions are motivated by character traits and goals.

At the end of the film, Thompson gives up his search for the meaning of Rosebud, saying he doesn’t think “any word can explain a man’s life.” Up to a point, Thompson’s statement motivates his acceptance of his failure. But if we as spectators are to accept this idea that no key can unlock the secrets of a life, we need further motivation. The film provides it. In the scene in the newsreel projection room, Rawlston suggests that “maybe he told us all about himself on his deathbed.” Immediately, one of the reporters says, “Yeah, and maybe he didn’t.” Already the suggestion is planted that Rosebud may not provide any adequate answers about Kane. Later Leland scornfully dismisses the Rosebud issue and goes on to talk of other things. Characters’ skepticism about the Rosebud clue helps justify Thompson’s pessimistic attitude in the final sequence.

The presence of the scene in which Thompson first visits Susan at the El Rancho nightclub (3) might seem puzzling at first. Unlike the other scenes in which he visits people, no flashback occurs here. Thompson learns from the waiter that Susan knows nothing about Rosebud; he could easily learn this on his later visit to her. So why should the plot include the scene at all? One reason is that it evokes curiosity and deepens the mystery around Kane. Moreover, Susan’s story, when she does tell it, covers events relatively late in Kane’s career. As we’ve seen, the flashbacks go through Kane’s life roughly in order. If Susan had told her story first, we would not have all of the material necessary to understand it. But it is plausible that Thompson should start his search with Kane’s ex-wife, presumably the surviving person closest to him. In Thompson’s first visit, Susan’s drunken refusal to speak to him motivates the fact that her flashback comes later. By that point, Bernstein and Leland have filled in enough of Kane’s personal life to prepare the way for Susan’s flashback. This first scene functions partly to justify postponing Susan’s flashback until a later part of the plot.

Motivation makes us take things for granted in narratives. Mrs. Kane’s desire for her son to be rich and successful motivates her decision to entrust him to Thatcher, a powerful banker, as his guardian. We may just take it for granted that Thatcher is a rich businessman. Yet on closer inspection, this feature is necessary to motivate other events. It motivates Thatcher’s presence in the newsreel; he is powerful enough to have been asked to testify at a congressional hearing. More important, Thatcher’s success motivates the fact that he has kept a journal now on deposit at a memorial library that Thompson visits. This, in turn, justifies the fact that Thompson can uncover information from a source who knew Kane as a child.

Despite its reliance on psychological motivation,
Citizen Kane
also departs somewhat from the usual practice of the classical Hollywood narrative by leaving some motivations ambiguous. The ambiguities relate primarily to Kane’s character. The other characters who tell Thompson their stories all have definite opinions of Kane, but these do not always tally. Bernstein still looks on Kane with sympathy and affection, whereas Leland is cynical about his own relationship with Kane. The reasons for some of Kane’s actions remain unclear. Does he send Leland the $25,000 check in firing him because of a lingering sentiment over their old friendship or from a proud desire to prove himself more generous than Leland? Why does he insist on stuffing Xanadu with hundreds of artworks that he never even unpacks? By leaving these questions open, the film invites us to speculate on various facets of Kane’s personality.

Parallelism doesn’t provide a major principle of development in
Citizen Kane
’s narrative form, but it crops up more locally. We’ve already seen important formal parallels between the newsreel and the film’s plot as a whole. We’ve also noticed a parallel between the two major lines of action: Kane’s life and Thompson’s search. In a different sense, both men are searching for Rosebud. Rosebud serves as a summary of the things Kane strives for through his adult life. We see him repeatedly fail to find love and friendship, living alone at Xanadu in the end. His inability to find happiness parallels Thompson’s failure to locate the significance of the word “Rosebud.” This parallel doesn’t imply that Kane and Thompson share similar character traits. Rather, it allows both lines of action to develop simultaneously in similar directions.

Another narrative parallel juxtaposes Kane’s campaign for the governorship with his attempt to build up Susan’s career as an opera star. In each case, he seeks to inflate his reputation by influencing public opinion. In trying to achieve success for Susan, Kane forces his newspaper employees to write favorable reviews of her performances. This parallels the moment when he loses the election and the
Inquirer
automatically proclaims a fraud at the polls. In both cases, Kane fails to realize that his power over the public is not great enough to hide the flaws in his projects: first his affair with Susan, which ruins his campaign; then her lack of singing ability, which Kane refuses to admit. The parallels show that Kane continues to make the same kinds of mistakes throughout his life.

The order of Thompson’s visits to Kane’s acquaintances allows the series of flashbacks to have a clear pattern of progression. Thompson moves from people who knew Kane early in his life to those who knew him as an old man. Moreover, each flashback contains a distinct type of information about Kane. Thatcher establishes Kane’s political stance; Bernstein gives an account of the business dealings of the newspaper. These provide the background to Kane’s early success and lead into Leland’s stories of Kane’s personal life, where we get the first real indications of Kane’s failure. Susan continues the description of his decline with her account of how he manipulated her life. Finally, in Raymond’s flashback, Kane becomes a pitiable old man.

Thus, even though the order of events in the story varies greatly from that given in the plot,
Citizen Kane
presents Kane’s life through a steady pattern of development. The present-day portions of the narrative—Thompson’s scenes—also follow their own pattern of a search. By the ending, this search has failed, as Kane’s own search for happiness or personal success had failed.

Because of Thompson’s failure, the ending of
Citizen Kane
remains somewhat more open than was the rule in Hollywood in 1941. True, Thompson does resolve the question of Rosebud for himself by saying that it would not have explained Kane’s life. To this extent, we have the common pattern of action leading to greater knowledge. Thompson has come to understand that a life cannot be summed up in one word. Still, in most classical narrative films, the main character reaches his or her initial goal, and Thompson is the main character of this line of action.

The line of action involving Kane himself has even less closure. Not only does Kane apparently not reach his goal, but the film never specifies what that goal is to start with. Most classical narratives create a situation of conflict. The character must struggle with a problem and solve it by the ending. Kane begins his adult life in a highly successful position (happily running the
Inquirer
), then gradually falls into a barren solitude. We are invited to speculate about exactly what, if anything, would make Kane happy.
Citizen Kane
’s lack of closure in this line of action made it a very unusual narrative for its day.

The search for Rosebud does lead to a certain resolution at the end. We the audience discover what Rosebud was. The ending of the film, which follows this discovery, strongly echoes the beginning. The beginning moved past fences toward the mansion. Now a series of shots takes us away from the house and back outside the fences, with the “No Trespassing” sign and large K insignia.

But even at this point, when we learn the answer to Thompson’s question, a degree of uncertainty remains. Just because we have learned what Kane’s dying word referred to, do we now have the key to his entire character? Or is Thompson’s final statement
correct
—that no one word can explain a person’s life? Perhaps the “No Trespassing” sign hints that neither Thompson nor we should have expected to explore Kane’s mind. It is tempting to declare that all of Kane’s problems arose from the loss of his sled and his childhood home life, but the film also suggests that this is too easy a solution. It is the kind of solution that the slick editor Rawlston would pounce on as an angle for his newsreel.

For years critics have debated whether the Rosebud solution does give us a key that resolves the entire narrative. This debate itself suggests the ambiguity at work in
Citizen Kane.
The film provides much evidence for both views and hence avoids complete closure. You might contrast this slightly open ending with the tightly closed narratives of
His Girl Friday
and
North by Northwest
in
Chapter 11
. You might also compare
Citizen Kane
’s narrative with that of another somewhat openended film,
Do The Right Thing,
also discussed in
Chapter 11
.

In analyzing how
Kane
’s plot manipulates the flow of story information, it’s useful to consider a remarkable fact: The only time we see Kane directly and in the present is when he dies. On all other occasions, he is presented at one remove—in the newsreel or in various characters’ memories. This unusual treatment makes the film something of a portrait, a study of a man seen from different perspectives.

The film employs five character narrators, the people whom Thompson tracks down: Thatcher (whose account is in writing), Bernstein, Leland, Susan, and the butler, Raymond. The plot thus motivates a series of views of Kane that are more or less restricted in their range of knowledge. In Thatcher’s account (4b–4e), we see only scenes at which he is present. Even Kane’s newspaper crusade is rendered as Thatcher learns of it, through buying copies of the
Inquirer.
In Bernstein’s flashback (5b–5f), there is some deviation from what Bernstein witnesses, but in general his range of knowledge is respected. At the
Inquirer
party, for example, we follow Bernstein and Leland’s conversation while Kane dances in the background. Similarly, we never see Kane in Europe; we merely hear the contents of Kane’s telegram, which Bernstein delivers to Leland.

Leland’s flashbacks (6b, 6d–6j) deviate most markedly from the narrator’s range of knowledge. Here we see Kane and Emily at a series of morning breakfasts, Kane’s meeting with Susan, and the confrontation of Kane with Boss Gettys at Susan’s apartment. In scene 6j, Leland is present but in a drunken stupor most of the time. (The plot motivates Leland’s knowledge of Kane’s affair with Susan by having Leland suggest that Kane told him about it, but the scenes present detailed knowledge that Leland is unlikely to possess.) By the time we get to Susan’s flashback (7b–7k), however, the range of knowledge again fits the character more snugly. (There remains one scene, 7f, in which Susan is unconscious for part of the action.) The last flashback (8b) is recounted by Raymond and plausibly accords with his range of knowledge; he is standing in the hallway as Kane wrecks Susan’s room.

Using different narrators to transmit story information fulfills several functions. It offers itself as a plausible depiction of the process of investigation, since we expect any reporter to hunt down information through a series of inquiries. More deeply, the plot’s portrayal of Kane himself becomes more complex by showing somewhat different sides of him, depending on who’s talking about him. Moreover, the use of multiple narrators makes the film like one of Susan’s jigsaw puzzles. We must put things together piece by piece. The pattern of gradual revelation enhances curiosity—what is it in Kane’s past that he associates with Rosebud?—and suspense—how will he lose his friends and his wives?

This strategy has important implications for film form. While Thompson uses the various narrators to gather data, the plot uses them to furnish us with story information and to
conceal
information. The narration can motivate gaps in knowledge about Kane by appealing to the fact that no informant can know everything about anyone. If we were able to enter Kane’s consciousness, we might discover the meaning of Rosebud much sooner—but Kane is dead. The multiple-narrator format appeals to expectations we derive from real life in order to motivate the bit-by-bit transmission of story information, the withholding of key pieces of information, and the arousing of curiosity and suspense.

Although each narrator’s account is mostly restricted to his or her range of knowledge, the plot doesn’t treat each flashback in much subjective depth. Most of the flashbacks are rendered objectively. Some transitions from the framing episodes use a voice-over commentary to lead us into the flashbacks, but these don’t represent the narrators’ subjective states. Only in Susan’s flashbacks are there some attempts to render subjectivity. In scene 7c, we see Leland as if from her optical point of view on stage, and the phantasmagoric montage of her career (7e) suggests some mental subjectivity that renders her fatigue and frustration.