In a series of vignettes, the film Citizen Kane tells the story of a man’s life in the most perfect way possible. A person’s life is so much more than the big achievements that he or she accomplishes. Kane’s greatest successes are largely over-looked, quickly passed over in a brief newsreel or completely left out of the narrative entirely such as Kane’s reaction to his wife and son’s deaths. Instead the director Orson Welles focuses in on brief almost mundane episodes in the fictional Mr. Kane’s life. Each short view into Kane’s life reveals a different aspect of his personality, both in terms of what he believes and how his beliefs change over time. He starts off as an idealistic young man and becomes a middle aged miser dedicated to making people love him. We learn so little about him, and yet so much. At times we can read Kane like a book and others he is as incomprehensible as a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces. The film was incredibly ahead of its time for this, most leading men of the 1930s and 1940s were, for lack of a better term, simple. Mr. Smith went to Washington to do good and succeeded, George Bailey became depressed until everyone told him he had a wonderful life, Dorothy was lost but then the Wizard brought her home. Movies from that time were cut and dry. The good guys win, the bad guys lose. Citizen Kane has no “bad guy”, rather we are watching a man trying to be the best he can be, reaching immense heights of power, but by the end of his life nothing is quite right. The audience feels pity for the elderly Kane who was so much and additionally so little. The film is a story which humanizes this fictional man into someone we care about. For decades we have wondered about Kane and his Rosebud.

I can’t help but wonder how much of Orson Welles inadvertently became a part of Charles Foster Kane (or perhaps how much of Kane became a part of Welles?). Reading about Welles’ life story there are unusual parallels, in particular a sense that Welles himself was never quite satisfied with his life. An interesting project could be a retelling of Citizen Kane but base the life story around Welles himself instead of Hearst. Films made by Welles are considered to the greatest ever made and yet he seems like such a mysterious figure, Citizen Kane really being his only well known work. In addition he achieved the status of a prodigy in the 1930s, but took on bit parts in movies later in his life to even stay relevant. Like Kane, Welles remains to an extent an enigma. He has multiple films which have never seen the light of day. Both Kane and Welles were the best in their fields of expertise but nevertheless seem incomplete, unfinished like Xanadu. And they will never be understood nor can we hope to make sense of their lives. The film Citizen Kane is so great because of what it leaves out, the incompleteness inherent to the story. It is impossible to put all the pieces together. That is the beauty of Citizen Kane, it is an insurmountable puzzle which we get to constantly put together.