Sunday, February 26, 2012
Rosebud
Rosebud is perhaps the most famous symbol in movie history. What is the significance of the name "rosebud?" What is the significance of the sled? Is it the key to understanding Kane's life or just one missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle that does not explain much at all? A meaningful symbol or a MacGuffin?
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Rosebud really has to be a very important piece of Kane’s life. Yes, it seems quite insignificant in the grand scheme of the movie. They look tirelessly for it, they do not find it and then nobody really cares about it. When you do finally see it, some worker picks it out of a huge pile of possessions Kane just had sitting in a room and throws it into a fire. It is really presented with no value and with nothing special about it compared to all the mindless junk he has laying around. It basically makes a mockery of their whole search. However, in context to the story about his life, it symbolizes a huge characteristic of an enormous character. He had been seeking out rosebud because he was looking to get back to his roots. He had gotten so caught up in public image, money and politics that he really wanted to escape. He was completely unhappy with what he had done with his life. It is almost as if it meant nothing. He wanted to find himself and find who he really was, the person he had lost many years ago. At the beginning we see that at a young age he had the right intentions and a genuine personality but that becomes corrupted and caught up in greed and power. He saw rosebud as the only way to find himself again and be the man he used to be. As he layed there dying and calling out rosebud, He was almost saying that he had failed.
ReplyDeleteRosebud I believe signifies Kane's lost childhood and the disconnectedness he feels from his parents. For a young kid to be taken away from his parents at such a young age definitely could leave some emotional scars. This rosebud I think is the only connection Kane can have with his past stable life of having a home and parents. The palace he creates I believe is not a home but simply another grandiose monument that Kane has built simply to impress others. The sled signifies again Kane's lost childhood, and when we see it being burned in one of the final scenes of the movie I think that the burning sums up the life of Kane in that everything that was held dear to him either left him or was destroyed. This symbol of rosebud is important in determining the meaning of the film. Kane's endless ego was the result of him always wanting to show himself as the higher man to other people. Everything that Kane did or bought for the most part was to promote himself or buy the approval of others. Being taken away from his family and friends as a child stripped him of all the valuable lessons we take for granted such as learning to share. Rosebud signified the lost childhood of Kane, and Kane could only realize his characteristic flaws at the end of his life.
ReplyDeleteThe entire premise of Citizen Kane is based on finding the meaning behind Charles Kane’s last word “Rosebud”. As the movie proceeds, the audience sees Kane starting as a child and progressing to his final days through the eyes of several different narrators. Throughout the entire quest for the meaning, “Rosebud” only appears in the movie a few times and it has no meaning to any of the other characters other than Kane himself. Because of this, I believe that rosebud is a MacGuffin that drives along the movie, but also a symbol that holds personal significance for Kane and no one else. Rosebud is the first word heard in the movie and the last word scene on the screen before the end credit. It drives the reporter to go on and interview the people closest to Kane which is where the audience instead learns the real story of Charles Kane’s life and very little about the meaning of Rosebud. In this way, rosebud has very little significance to anyone involved and is just used to keep the story moving. Rosebud is also very symbolic in this movie, but Kane is the only one who ever knows its meaning. The first time the audience seer rosebud Kane is a young child and he is about to have his life completely changed as he becomes an extremely wealthy individual. As the movie progresses, Kane makes one reference to going to search for an item in his belonging and this was probable rosebud. This movie mentions rosebud at two other points as well: first when Kane dies and much later in the film when he finds the snow globe in his ex-wife’s room. All of these references to rosebud show that it is symbolic for his childhood that was cut short by the deal made between his mother and Mr. Thatcher. Throughout the movie rosebud is used to show that Kane misses his life as a child without his enormous wealth, but it has no meaning to any other character and can be seen as a MacGuffin to them.
ReplyDeleteAsk anyone who just saw Citizen Kane what they learned from that movie. They're probably going to say that they learned about who Kane is. I haven't mentioned the word Rosebud yet, and neither did the person you just asked. That being said, Rosebud is a cutesy narrative device. It helps advance the plot forward without it really needing to be explored. In that sense, it is essential to the plot. The newsmen already had a news reel about Kane. It, as far as they are concerned, pretty much explains Kane. Except for Rosebud. If Thompson hadn't been sent out to find what Rosebud meant, the movie would have ended here.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the movie isn't about Rosebud. Sure it asks the question "Who (or what) is rosebud?" but that isn't the important question. The important question is "Who is Kane?" The idea of rosebud doesn't really come up in most of the movie. It really only crops up at the end, stuck on as almost an afterthought.
Rosebud is a complicated symbol. It is at times essential. It is at times pointless. It is both a central figure and something the writers forgot about.
A MacGuffin is (yes I am quoting Wikipedia here, Doc. I): "a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue, often with little or no narrative explanation as to why it is considered so desirable.*" The whole point of Rosebud is that we don't know what it is (at least until the end), and, as I pointed out earlier, the central question isn't really about Rosebud anyway. So in this sense, Rosebud is the epitome of a MacGuffin.
Rosebud is almost completely unnecessary to understand the story of Citizen Kane. It becomes a very minor metaphor for Kane's life at the end of the movie, showing the purposelessness of his life, but then there are other things that hint at this theme as well. The only reason that I can think of for Rosebud's importance is to make an excuse to show Kane's life through a series of flashbacks. Welle's could have just shown Kane's life as it was, but using flashbacks creates some mystery around Kane. Rosebud also increases the mystery.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, I think that Citizen could have been rewritten without rosebud and it would have made just as much sense. It truly is the final piece of a puzzle that pretty much shows a complete picture. Welles could have found a completely different reason to film the movie in a flashback style. In fact, I remember reading that Welles himself stated that rosebud was just a simple trick, and a poor one at that. Looking back, Welles thought that he could have made Citizen Kane even better without mentioning rosebud at all.
The fact that the audience never finds out why rosebud was so important to Kane makes it the ultimate MacGuffin. We could make hundreds of inferences, but we will never know if any of them are true. My personal take is that rosebud is one of the only things left that he has to remember his mother back in Colorado, but I cannot figure out why it was the sled that was so important to him instead of the snow globe that he also keeps with himself. In the end, it does not really matter anyway.
I feel that Rosebud is shown to have significance in who Kane was. Rosebud was Kane's last words, he uses the sled Rosebud to push over Thatcher when he first meets him, and there is a scene where the sled is shown being covered in snow; this would seem to imply that there is a greater meaning to Rosebud, but little more is given. Rosebud could signify Kane's childhood or family, his mother's love or his humble origins. It is hard to confine Rosebud to just one meaning, and this could be seen as either increasing its significance or decreasing it. The complete lack of attainability for Rosebud's significance can be taken as implying that whatever it represented was unattainable as well, even to Kane himself. Such would make Rosebud's significance as something that Kane could not obtain even with his wealth; further shown with his possession of the physical Rosebud sled.
ReplyDeleteThe search for who or what 'Rosebud' is is what drives the plot of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. At the end of the movie it is revealed to the audience (and not to the main character, a news reporter) that Rosebud is in fact a sled that Charles Foster Kane kept from when he was young. The name Rosebud is not particularly significant; a rose bud is the flowering tip of the rose plant, a perennial species common throughout the world. The revelation that Rosebud is Kane's sled tells little about who he was, beyond the fact that he valued the sled, and perhaps by extension his childhood. Therefore one may conclude that Rosebud is a Macguffin, more precisely a, "...plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot..." (From wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn).
ReplyDeleteRosebud. The word echoes through the speakers as the narrator whispers the word multiple times in the film. Rosebud, a sled, but what else? The underlying story to all of the film Citizen Kane, but is it truly meaningful? In short, the answer is no, but why? We need to consider how the story was formed. The question that the investigator was asking everyone that he encountered was “What/who is rosebud?” And even though everyone who the investigator talks to seems to think they know who rosebud is, they never get the true answer and instead go off on some other tangent about an aspect of Kane’s life. Overall though, it is not an important story point, just a linking point between everything the director wanted to describe about Kane. If the film did not have this overlying theme, then it would just seem like an intense jumble of different stories of Charlie Kane’s life – it would not have any true linking factor. It would make much more sense though if the underlying theme had much more of an impact on Kane’s life. Rosebud although a childhood memory that he kept for his entire life, in the end of the film it was still treated like trash and burned in the incinerator. Yes, this might have been Kane’s most prized possession, but even his wives did not really know about it. He had so much stuff, art and other junk that it was overlooked amongst the vast wealth of his extravagant estate. In conclusion, Rosebud is definitely more of a MacGuffin in this story, but it still plays a somewhat important role in Kane’s life, even though it is not fully described in the film.
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