The Loss of Childhood

Rating: 10/10 (3 November 1999)

"Rosebud" is the last word that is uttered by a rich but unhappy man. Then he dies and takes his secret into death: What is the meaning of "Rosebud"? An investigating committee is quickly installed that illuminates and unwinds his life once again, like in a time-lapse film. The tragical existence of the powerful newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane becomes visible, his solitude. Although married twice, he always stayed alone, because of his incapacity of feeling love, of giving love - a love related to somebody else but himself. All women finally leave him behind on his enormous mountain palace Xanadu, on which he sits enthroned high above all human beings, so high that he finds it impossible to get anywhere near them. A distant God, resident on earth, a symbol for the inability of Man to communicate with God, for God's unrelenting distance? Maybe we can also find that. But Charles Foster Kane has got a human touch, too. His life ends in failure, despite all the accumulated power and wealth. And the key to this failure might be found in childhood, or rather the loss of childhood.
For only when being a child he felt safe, somewhere in the immensity of the American North, under the loving care of his mother - probably the only person in his entire life he was ever able to show feelings for. Then he becomes rich by accident, by some happy (or must we say unhappy?) constellation of parentage. He is hurled out his familiar surroundings, taken away from the protection of the snowy landscape - the kingdom of his childhood. However much he resists and clings to his modest wooden sledge, he irretrievably has to go out into the "big world", where he is raised, far away from his mother, and where he eventually builds up his empire. Of course, it is only a hollow construction and finally turns to dust. The wooden sledge, called "Rosebud", is taken away by the flames like all the other goods and possessions that he has accumulated in the course of time and which he has conserved in the wide chambers of his palace: souvenirs from his journeys, sculptures, vases or jewelry - things without a lasting value for posterity. Death sweeps it all away. And so, at the end of the film, you see nothing but an endless pillar of smoke, which is rising up into a darkly clouded sky, and in which everything definitely dissolves, our childhood, our memories, our entire life.