If It weren't for-

To spoil the opening images of Citizen Kane, (I'd Stop reading now if you haven't seen the movie), we see broken or unfinished ruins of the home of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate worth what would probably be billions, by today's standards. We hear his dying words: "Rosebud" as a snow globe with a snow-covered mountain cabin falls out of his limp hand, smashing on the floor. From then on, the entire movie is a search for the deeper meaning of his last words. A man with an untold fortune, with so simple a word as his dying breath? Surely it must mean something strange and earth shattering.

Little hints of Rosebud's significance are hidden throughout the entire film but like Kane, you as the viewer sort of lose sight of it in the grander and train wreck that Kane's life becomes. You see the impression of Kane's life summed up by the people who knew him best, and we like the reporter attempting to quantify his dying words kind of give up searching at the end and leave his mansion no wiser than before. We see a boy going from sledding on a snowy hillside without a care in the world to being sold off like property after his parents strike it rich. While his education and future are all but assured, being given away when you are at the most vulnerable and innocent time of one's life, by one's own mother no less, it no doubt marred his outlook on life. And as Kane ages his personality changes with it.

Realizing how rich he is been made by the clever investing of his guardian Mr. Thatcher by the time he turned 25, and how he has a knack and love for yellow journalism, Kane goes into the media industry and manipulates public opinions. We see the beginnings of his empire, and not a few moments later, the whimpering end of it, as Kane is forced to sell his empire to Mr. Thatcher. At one point signing the document turning everything over to Mr. Thatcher, the very man who helped make Kane what he was, he says, "If I'd not been born rich, I might've been a really great man." As the film ends and our reporter on the hunt for the earth shattering meaning of Rosebud comes to an anticlimactic end, the camera floats over a heap of treasures and possessions Kane filled his home and life with and we pause on one object alone; Rosebud, a child sized sled, the thing Kane had been searching for his whole life, as it is picked up and chucked into the roaring fire in Kane's own fireplace. The trade name of the sled bubbles and burns away, the camera follows the black smoke of Kane’s junk being burned and we end almost right at the exact spot we started the film.

So then what does Rosebud mean to Kane and to us viewers? Historically speaking, since Citizen Kane is based on the life of William Randolph Hurst, a newspaper magnate with high ambitions in his own right, and even murkier morality, ‘Rosebud’ is what Hurst used to call his wife Marion Davis’ private parts. It’s inclusion in the movie feel like a big middle finger from the filmmakers to Hurst himself. This and all the references to Hurst’s political manipulations, personal scandals, and intimate details he was touchy about. This point of fact is one of the biggest reasons Hurst did everything to try and destroy the film and nearly the reputation of its Director Orson Wells.

But to the character of Kane himself and maybe even us, Rosebud is more than just a sled. It reminds us of a simpler time and a simpler us before the world and our own devices made us unhappy or even ruined us, and it literally shows a man who “gains the world and loses his soul”. It’s a symbol of the fact that Kane was sold off like a vehicle to a cold system only interested in taking and not giving and could never find the happiness he had before all of that. And as he tried to fill that hole in his heart with more stuff, more information, more control, and love on his own terms, he could never reach that same feeling he had with something so simple. It begs the question of if how much of the American dream is only a dream, and how much more of it can become a nightmare, leaving us much like Kane, alone in our own broken down ruins thinking of what might’ve been if it weren’t for - .