Citizen Kane follows the story of Charles Foster Kane through the eyes of a reporter, Jerry Thompson. Kane lives an empty life, never knowing true companionship. He is wrought with the inability to navigate personal relationships, and his childhood spent unwillingly away from his family certainly plays a role in his dysfunctional relationships. I thought the movie was thought-provoking and deserving of the high ratings given my critics.

Throughout the movie, I was most intrigued by the role perception played in developing Kane’s character. The film is set up as flashbacks from interviews Thompson conducts of people in Kane’s life, all to find the meaning of “rosebud,” the last word Kane uttered before his death. Thompson never finds the meaning of rosebud, which is revealed to the audience in the closing scene as the name of his Kane’s childhood sled. The fact that this remained unknown to researchers delving deep into Kane’s life shows how individual the human experience is, and how little we can read about the lives and minds of others. It’s very possible to gather information about a person’s life through events and encounters and piece together who that person is, but the accuracy of this completed puzzle is difficult to ascertain. Indeed, the very idea of “accuracy” implies that there is a truth to a person’s life, and I’d argue there is no such thing. Our individual experiences of life are shaped by how we perceive events in our lives, and this perception may be entirely different from how other perceive the same situations. This difference in perception is something Kane never comes to understand, and is one cause of the destruction of his relationships.