Citizen Kane is the story of Charles Foster Kane, who is a massively wealthy and famous media personality, and who dies at his estate while holding a snow globe and uttering the words “Rosebud”. Kane’s death makes newspaper headlines, and reporter Jerry Thompson attempts to unravel Kane’s life and to discover the meaning behind his last word. Thompson interviews all the former members of Kane’s life, and is able to reconstruct the celebrity’s past. He learns that while Kane enjoyed enormous financial and professional success, he was incapable of leading a cohesive private life for a significant time period. After two divorces and the strange absence of his son, Kane dies alone in his cavernous palace.
Consistently present in the film is the inclusion of thunder and lightning. This ominous foreshadowing is characteristic in drama films and film noir, and represents the dark and elusive life of Kane.
Charles Kane’s enormous wealth leads to his power, and to his abusive nature in his second marriage and his ultimate demise. Kane himself remarks, “If I hadn’t been really rich, I might have been a really great man.” His drive to succeed and own property was a vicious cycle: once he started buying, he couldn’t stop. Everything for him was about power. He then needed attention, because he was too busy for any personal relationships. Gary Simmons writes in his article Smoke and Mirrors in Citizen Kane: “So the film can also be viewed as a psychological drama, or psychodrama. It is clearly located in the psyche of Kane… The film is a case study of a number of psychological characteristics such as megalomania, hubris, narcissism and delusion…” Leland, Kane’s former employee and friend, remarks about his boss later on to Thompson: “He married for love -- that's why he did everything. That's why he went into politics. It seems we weren't enough. He wanted all the voters to love him, too. All he really wanted out of life was love. That's Charlie's story -- it's the story of how he lost it. You see, he just didn't have any to give. He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane.” The truth is this statement is manifest at every turn in the story. Kane loses two wives because of his inability to reciprocate love. Kane’s first wife leaves him because he never has time for her, but he expects her to shower him with unconditional love anyway. His second wife too divorces him, because it finally dawns upon her that when they married, they became one unit. And that unit was Charles Foster Kane. He forces her to sing, even when she protests and pleads with him; he berates her enjoyment of doing puzzles, and he forces her to accompany him on a picnic. When she finally tries to leave, he slaps her. Although Kane is seen as an enormous success story by the media, in truth, he isn’t. He is physically and publicly a strong character, but emotionally, he is weak and power-hungry, and it leads to his tragic solitary death. He has no friends or family by his side when he dies, and no one personally cares. Ultimately, this film is a story about the corruption of wealth: when Kane became wealthy, he became powerful, and desperate for love and approval. When he couldn’t reciprocate love in his shallow relationships, his personal life went to pieces, and he died a lonely man.
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