Citizen Kane went ahead of time

Citizen Kane is such a great movie and this is the second time I watched it. The first time I watched was in high school, which I was amazed by the story of the movie and the performance of Orson Welles. It was a big disappointment when Citizen Kane did not win the Oscar for the Best Picture of 1942. It deserved to win all the categories that year.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes

Telling a story from a non-chronological way

Citizen Kane has a famously fragmented narrative, in which five different narrators give contradictory information about the main character.

The life of a big tycoon in the media, Charles Foster Kane, was being told from mouth to mouth after he died. All they wanted to do was find the meaning of the word “rosebud” in which his last word before he died. Rosebud, in everyone’s minds, must be a person who Charles loved a lot. Thompson, a journalist, was on his mission to find “Rosebud'' and each person he met was a story which related to Charles Kane.

Director Orson Welles had done a great job when he let every supporting character do the narrator in this movie. Telling the story from the view of people who passed through the life of the main character was the best way to bring the audience to understand, to judge and to feel who the supporting characters were talking about. Charles Kane’s life was complicated even though he was rich, famous, and charming but people did not understand him or why he did what he did. If this movie was being told from just one person and chronologically from beginning to end, the audience could only see one side of the story and judge Charles Kane and they would feel bored. They would see Kane as an arrogant man, or a terrible man, or a successful man, or a crazy man. That would make the movie terrible. The audiences wanted to see why this man was so special and why rosebud was so important that Thompson must find out. It should be told from different views because the life of Charles Kane was special so that the audience could know more about him.

Citizen Kane shows the media (especially in the form of newspapers) as forces for good or evil in society.

The lesson of the media in this movie was so important because as you are watching the movie, you can see that each person who told the story about Charles Kane was a source for Thompson to get closer to the word “rosebud” but those were unreliable sources coming from people who loved and hated him. Charles Kane himself was the big boss of the newspaper industry and he definitely brought his newspaper from the glorious time to the down time. In the early years of his career, Kane was interested in the newspaper industry and usually published articles about Spanish-American or articles attacking Thatcher. What he was doing back then was bringing the reliable information to the readers so that his newspaper, the Inquires, could gain more trust. That was what a journalist should do. As his life was falling down from the top because of failed marriages, governor election failure, it had affected him a lot especially in his point of view. He was no longer interested in the real stories and started to use newspapers to attack other people, especially writing negative reviews about the opera performance of Susan, fired Leland. Newspaper career of Kane could have been better and stronger if he just focused on making them and followed his purpose. Because maybe he thought he was rich and popular, it was time to try something else bigger. The bigger he got the faster he fell. That was why he turned from good to evil.

Citizen Kane contains 5 different narratives of the main character. Each narrative gives different information on the same person. I think Citizen Kane would have had a more organized storyline of the main character if it had a single narrator telling it chronologically, from beginning to end, but it would lose some of its unique aspects the film had. Each narrator has a different view and perspective on the main character, providing different information on him. Each person was affected by Kane differently, showing multiple sides of the protagonist. If it was narrated by one person, there would be limited information on Kane and only one perspective, having more bias. Having multiple perspectives allows for a more accurate description of how Kane really was. The media has always held a great power and influence, one can either use it for good or bad. In the beginning Citizen Kane uses his newspaper business for good by advertising common things going on, for example politics, publicizing that he thought there would be no war . As the movie goes on you can later see how he changes what’s advertised in his newspaper to being more negative and spreading fake news, for example the scandal he had with his first wife and later him finishing the negative review of his own wife’s opera. You can see how his newspaper business changes from spreading the truth to lies and deception as more problems arise in his own life.