The Greatest Generation’s Citizen Kane

Charlie Kane sold to a bankCharlie Kane sold to a bank 

Film Friday

Several weeks ago I wrote about the impact that the movie Citizen Kane had on my father in the months before he was drafted into the army in 1942. I was so fascinated by his response that I collaborated with him on an article about what Citizen Kane had meant for people of his generation.

We arrived as some interesting new insights into the film, but that is not what I am going to write about today. What made the article special for me was the experience of collaboration itself—what I learned about my father and about myself in the process.

We began by looking at what “rosebud” would have meant for people of the time. My father, who is a superb researcher, discovered some unknown adolescent diaries of Orson Welles where he talks about roses. Emerging from our research was a drama in which roses represent innocence for Welles and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (and also for William Randolph Hearst, the model for Kane). The film is about this innocence desecrated: young and innocent Charlie is, for all intents and purposes, sold to a bank as a boy, a trauma that has a lasting effect on his relationships.

Young men like my father felt their own innocence—and their belief in the American dream—ripped from them by the Great Depression and the on-coming war. The film articulated their inner turmoil and sense of loss. Citizen Kane essentially said to them, “I will take you into the innermost area of your hurt. Others may not understand you, just as they do not understand Kane. But I do.”


It was a challenge writing an article with my father because I didn’t experience the rosebud symbol in the visceral way that he did. For a while I felt frustrated that we couldn’t see eye-to-eye on the film. But then I realized that our different historical circumstances made complete agreement impossible. That, in the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses about his son Telemachus, “He works his work, I mine.” It was hard but necessary for me to acknowledge that we were different.

My father’s vision of the film is tragically romantic whereas mine is ironic. By this I mean that, for him, the rosebud symbol explains everything whereas I, living in a less catastrophic age, tend to agree with those scholars who call it (along with Welles himself) “dollarbook Freud.” Put another way, my father’s reading is more modernist, mine more post-modernist.

There is no right or wrong here, no definitive final reading. Our different interpretations are shaped by our different histories. I realized somewhere along the line that we couldn’t write the article as “we” because our differences were too profound. But my father was generous enough to let me write the article as I wished, and I in turn used the first-person singular to describe my coming to understand why he responded as he did.

Our collaboration has been one of the most meaningful things that I have ever done with him. It helped me find my own identity apart from him, and it gave me a deep appreciation for how he views the world.

I wish I could link to the article somewhere (“Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud’s Impact on Early Audiences”) but, on-line, I think it is available only to those who have access to JSTOR (available at most college libraries).  At least you can find the first page here. It appeared in Cinema Journal 26 (Winter 1987) and also as a chapter in Ron Gottesman’s book Perspectives on Citizen Kane (G.K. Hall and Company).

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