Citizen Kane Response

One part of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” that intrigued me was the ending of the movie. The very last to shots were interesting to me. The first shot showed Kane’s childhood sled, with the name “Rosebud” painted on it, thrown into the fire and then burning. At the end of the movie I was left wondering why the Rosebud sled had been so important to Kane that he chose it to be his last living word. I had to think back to the “Civil War” scene where the sled was previously seen. This is the last scene before Kane is taken away from his family and plunged into a completely different life than the one he had before. It can be argued that this new life that Kane leads is not a happy one for him. Rosebud was something from the life with his mother and therefore represented that life where Kane was truly happy, and therefore Rosebud was important enough to be Kane’s last word. The second shot was the final shot of the movie, which was a tilt of the chain link fence outside of Xanadu; the same shot as the movie opened with.  This shot intrigued me because it had symbolism. Because the movie started and ended with the same shot it shows that the movie symbolically started and ended in the same spot, and therefore so did Charles Kane. At the start of the movie Kane is from a poor powerless family. By the end of the movie Kane’s large empire has regressed and he again is at a lack of power.