B0041VYHGW EBOK (40 page)

E.
End credits

In
Citizen Kane,
two distinct sets of characters cause events to happen. On the one hand, a group of reporters seeks information about Kane. On the other hand, Kane and the characters who know him provide the subject of the reporters’ investigations.

The initial causal connection between the two groups is Kane’s death, which leads the reporters to make a newsreel summing up his career. But the newsreel is already finished when the plot introduces the reporters. The boss, Rawlston, supplies the cause that initiates the investigation of Kane’s life. Thompson’s newsreel fails to satisfy him. Rawlston’s desire for an angle for the newsreel gets the search for Rosebud under way. Thompson thus gains a goal, which sets him digging into Kane’s past. His investigation constitutes one main line of the plot.

Another line of action, Kane’s life, has already taken place in the past. There, too, a group of characters has caused actions to occur. Many years before, a poverty-stricken boarder at Kane’s mother’s boardinghouse has paid her with a deed to a silver mine. The wealth provided by this mine causes Mrs. Kane to appoint Thatcher as young Charles’s guardian. Thatcher’s guardianship results (in somewhat unspecified ways) in Kane’s growing up into a spoiled, rebellious young man.

Citizen Kane
is an unusual film in that the object of the investigator’s search is not an object but a set of character traits. Thompson seeks to know what aspects of Kane’s personality led him to say “Rosebud” on his deathbed. This mystery motivates Thompson’s detective-like investigation. Kane, a very complex character, has many traits that influence the other characters’ actions. As we shall see, however,
Citizen Kane
’s narrative does not ultimately define all of Kane’s character traits.

Kane himself has a goal; he, too, seems to be searching for something related to Rosebud. At several points, characters speculate that Rosebud was something that Kane lost or was never able to get. Again, the fact that Kane’s goal remains so vague makes this an unusual narrative.

Other characters in Kane’s life provide causal material for the narrative. The presence of several characters who knew Kane well makes Thompson’s investigation possible, even though Kane has died. Significantly, the characters provide a range of information that spans Kane’s entire life. This is important if we are to be able to reconstruct the progression of story events in the film. Thatcher knew Kane as a child; Bernstein, his manager, knew his business dealings; his best friend, Leland, knew of his personal life (his first marriage in particular); Susan Alexander, his second wife, knew him in middle age; and the butler, Raymond, managed Kane’s affairs during his last years. Each of these characters has a causal role in Kane’s life, as well as in Thompson’s investigation. Note that Kane’s wife Emily does not tell a story, since Emily’s story would largely duplicate Leland’s and would contribute no additional information to the present-day part of the narrative, the investigation. Hence the plot simply eliminates her (via a car accident).

The order, duration, and frequency of events in the story differ greatly from the way the plot of
Citizen Kane
presents those events. Much of the film’s power to engage our interest arises from the complex ways in which the plot cues us to construct the story.

To understand this story in its chronological order and assumed duration and frequency, the spectator must follow an intricate tapestry of plot events. For example, in the first flashback, Thatcher’s diary tells of a scene in which Kane loses control of his newspapers during the Depression (4e). By this time, Kane is a middleaged man. Yet in the second flashback, Bernstein describes young Kane’s arrival at the
Inquirer
and his engagement to Emily (5b, 5f). We mentally sort these plot events into a correct chronological story order, then continue to rearrange other events as we learn of them.

Similarly, the earliest
story
event about which we learn is Mrs. Kane’s acquisition of a deed to a valuable mine. We get this information during the newsreel, in the second sequence. But the first event in the
plot
is Kane’s death. Just to illustrate the maneuvers we must execute to construct the film’s story, let’s assume that Kane’s life consists of these phases:

Boyhood

Youthful newspaper editing

Life as a newlywed

Middle age

Old age

Significantly, the early portions of the plot tend to roam over many phases of Kane’s life, while later portions tend to concentrate more on particular periods. The “News on the March” sequence (2a) gives us glimpses of all periods. Thatcher’s manuscript (4) shows us Kane in boyhood, youth, and middle age. Then the flashbacks become primarily chronological. Bernstein’s recounting (5) concentrates on episodes showing Kane as newspaper editor and fiancé of Emily. Leland’s recollections (6) run from newlywed life to middle age. Susan (7) tells of Kane as a middle-aged and an old man. Raymond’s perfunctory anecdote (8b) concentrates on Kane in old age.

The plot becomes more linear in its ordering as it goes along, and this aids the viewer’s effort to understand the story. If every character’s flashback skipped around Kane’s life as much as the newsreel and Thatcher’s account do, the story would be much harder to reconstruct. As it is, the early portions of the plot show us the results of events we have not seen, while the later portions confirm or modify the expectations that we formed earlier.

By arranging story events out of order, the plot cues us to form specific anticipations. In the beginning, with Kane’s death and the newsreel version of his life, the plot creates strong curiosity about two issues. What does “Rosebud” mean? And what could have happened to make so powerful a man so solitary at the end of his life?

There is also a degree of suspense. When the plot goes back to the past, we already have quite firm knowledge. We know that neither of Kane’s marriages will last and that his friends will drift away. The plot encourages us to focus our interest on
how and when
a particular thing will happen. Thus many scenes function to delay an outcome that we already know is certain. For example, we know that Susan will abandon Kane at some point, so we are constantly expecting her to do so each time he bullies her. For several scenes (7b–7j), she comes close to leaving him, though after her suicide attempt he mollifies her. The plot could have shown her walking out (7k) much earlier, but then the ups and downs of their relations would have been less vivid, and there would have been no suspense.

This process of mentally rearranging plot events into story order might be quite difficult in
Citizen Kane
were it not for the presence of the “News on the March” newsreel. The very first sequence in Xanadu disorients us, for it shows the death of a character about whom we so far know almost nothing. But the newsreel gives us a great deal of information quickly. Moreover, the newsreel’s own structure uses parallels with the main film to supply a miniature introduction to the film’s overall plot:

1. Shots of Xanadu
   
2. Funeral; headlines announcing Kane’s death
   
3. Growth of financial empire
   
4. Silver mine and Mrs. Kane’s boardinghouse
   
5. Thatcher testimony at congressional committee
   
6. Political career
   
7. Private life; weddings, divorces
   
8. Opera house and Xanadu
   
9. Political campaign
   
10. The Depression
    
11. 1935: Kane’s old age
    
12. Isolation of Xanadu
    
13. Death announced
    

A comparison of this outline with our segmentation for the whole film shows some striking similarities. “News on the March” begins by emphasizing Kane as “Xanadu’s Landlord”; a short segment (A) presents shots of the house, its grounds, and its contents. This is a variation on the opening of the whole film (1), which consisted of a series of shots of the grounds, moving progressively closer to the house. That opening sequence had ended with Kane’s death; now the newsreel follows the shots of the house with Kane’s funeral (B). Next comes a series of newspaper headlines announcing Kane’s death. In a comparison with the plot diagram of
Citizen Kane,
these headlines occupy the approximate formal position of the whole newsreel itself (2a). Even the title card that follows the headlines (“To forty-four million U.S. news buyers, more newsworthy than the names in his own headlines was Kane himself….”) is a brief parallel to the scene in the projection room, in which the reporters decide that Thompson should continue to investigate Kane’s “newsworthy” life.

The order of the newsreel’s presentation of Kane’s life roughly parallels the order of scenes in the flashbacks related to Thompson. “News on the March” moves from Kane’s death to a summary of the building of Kane’s newspaper empire (C), with a description of the boardinghouse deed and the silver mine (including an old photograph of Charles with his mother, as well as the first mention of the sled). Similarly, the first flashback (4) tells how Thatcher took over the young Kane’s guardianship from his mother and how Kane first attempted to run the
Inquirer.
The rough parallels continue: the newsreel tells of Kane’s political ambitions (F), his marriages (G), his building of the opera house (H), his political campaign (I), and so on. In the main plot, Thatcher’s flashback describes his own clashes with Kane on political matters. Leland’s flashback (6) covers the first marriage, the affair with Susan, the political campaign, and the premiere of the opera
Salammbo.

These are not all of the similarities between the newsreel and the overall film. You can tease out many more by comparing the two closely. The crucial point is that the newsreel provides us with a map for the investigation of Kane’s life. As we see the various scenes of the flashbacks, we already expect certain events and have a rough chronological basis for fitting them into our story reconstruction.

Kane
’s many flashbacks allow us to see past events directly, and in these portions, story and plot duration are close to the same. We know that Kane is 75 years old at his death, and the earliest scene shows him at perhaps 10. Thus the plot covers roughly 65 years of his life, plus the week of Thompson’s investigation. The single earlier story event of which we only hear is Mrs. Kane’s acquisition of the mine deed, which we can infer took place a short time before she turned her son over to Thatcher. So the story runs a bit longer than the plot—perhaps closer to 70 years. This time span is presented in a screen duration of almost 120 minutes.

Like most films,
Citizen Kane
uses ellipses. The plot skips over years of story time, as well as many hours of Thompson’s week of investigations. But plot duration also compresses time through montage sequences, such as those showing the
Inquirer
’s campaign against big business (4d), the growth of the paper’s circulation (5c), Susan’s opera career (7e), and Susan’s bored playing with jigsaw puzzles (7h). Here long passages of story time are condensed into brief summaries quite different from ordinary narrative scenes. We will discuss montage sequences in more detail in
Chapter 8
, but we can already see the value of such segments in condensing story duration in a comprehensible way.

Citizen Kane
also provides a clear demonstration of how events that occur only once in the story may appear several times in the plot. In their respective flashbacks, both Leland and Susan describe the latter’s debut in the Chicago premiere of
Salammbo.
Watching Leland’s account (6i), we see the performance from the front; we witness the audience reacting with distaste. Susan’s version (7c) shows us the performance from behind and on the stage, to suggest her humiliation. This repeated presentation of Susan’s debut in the plot doesn’t confuse us, for we understand the two scenes as depicting the same story event. (“News on the March” has also referred to Susan’s opera career, in parts G and H.) By repeating scenes of her embarrassment, the plot makes vivid the pain that Kane forces her to undergo.

Overall,
Citizen Kane
’s narrative dramatizes Thompson’s search by means of flashbacks that encourage us to seek the sources of Kane’s failure and to try to identify “Rosebud.” As in a detective film, we must locate missing causes and arrange events into a coherent story pattern. Through manipulations of order, duration, and frequency, the plot both assists our search and complicates it in order to provoke curiosity and suspense.

Some critics have argued that Welles’s use of the search for “Rosebud” is a flaw in
Citizen Kane,
because the identification of the word proves it to be a trivial gimmick. If indeed we assume that the whole point of
Citizen Kane
is really to identify Rosebud, this charge might be valid. But in fact, Rosebud serves a very important motivating function in the film. It creates Thompson’s goal and thus focuses our attention on his delving into the lives of Kane and his associates.
Citizen Kane
becomes a mystery story; but instead of investigating a crime, the reporter investigates a character. So the Rosebud clues provide the basic motivation necessary for the plot to progress. (Of course, the Rosebud device serves other functions as well; for instance, the little sled provides a transition from the boardinghouse scene to the cheerless Christmas when Thatcher gives Charles a new sled.)