All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
This page is for tropes that have appeared in Citizen Kane.For the rest:
- Abusive Parents:
- Mr. Thatcher seems to be very distant from his young ward. Have you ever wondered how any human being could ignore that to have love, you have to give love? Well, just imagine him being raised by Mr. Thatcher.
- Emotionally, Mrs. Kane towards her son as she wants to ensure that he has wealth and "proper" upbringing at the cost of being raised by his parents. The irony is that by trying to protect Kane from his physically abusive real father, his mother condemned him to emotional neglect by Mr. Thatcher.
- Kane's father, physically speaking, which is partly why his mother sends him away in the first place. Although, in his defense, the one time he threatens to strike his son is after Charles violently pushed Thatcher down with his sled.
- Actor Allusion: Kane knows plenty of magic tricks that amuse Susan. Orson Welles himself was an amateur magician.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Leland writes a scathing review of Susan's opera performance, passing out from drink afterwards. Kane reads it over his shoulder and can't help laughing.
- Actually, That's My Assistant: When Kane is buying the Inquirer, the editor of the paper mistakes Leland for Kane.
- Age Cut: "Merry Christmas" [cut forward about 15 years] "and a Happy New Year".
- Aimlessly Seeking Happiness: Alongside his desperate need to be loved "on his own terms", this is the Tragic Dream of Citizen Kane, hence the mysterious "rosebud": it's the sled he owned when he was a child, symbolizing the last time in his life he was truly happy and contented with his lot, before Mr. Thatcher took him away from his parents; he found the sleigh again as an adult, but he couldn't regain the sense of innocent joy. In much the same way that he tried to find love by lavishing people with pointless gifts and sacrificing nothing of himself, Charles Foster Kane tried to find happiness by collecting artworks and junk in equal measure, but none of it brought him any real happiness — to the point that some of the statues he bought were never even removed from their crates.
- Air Quotes: In-Universe and a Plot Point: Jed chuckles that Kane was determined to make Susan an accomplished opera star to Take That! the newspaper describing her as a "singer".
- All in the Eyes: Kane's eyes are lit at the opera house during Susan's disastrous debut. It shows his monomania and disconnection from the audience reaction.
- All Take and No Give: Kane's main problem. He wants everyone to love him, but he doesn't have any love to give in return.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: In-Universe with the opening newsreel in which Kane is denounced as both a communist and a fascist.
- Ambiguously Gay: Leland the "Broadway critic" is coded as gay (couldn't be stated outright under The Hays Code) and was possibly infatuated with Kane in his early years.
- Ambiguously Jewish: Mr. Bernstein. In fact, it's implied in one scene that Kane's first wife feels uncomfortable around Bernstein for precisely that reason.note Emily also complains about a Noodle Incident with Bernstein.Emily: Your Mr. Bernstein sent junior the most incredible atrocity yesterday, Charles. I simply can't have it in the nursery.
- The atrocity in question is a mezuzah, a box containing sacred Hebrew texts (usually the Ten Commandments), affixed to a doorpost, often believed to act as a warding or protection (and thus a protection over the child). Additionally, if "Mr. Bernstein is apt to pay a visit to the nursery now and then", he'd kiss his fingers and then touch the mezuzah upon entering and leaving the room.
- Anachronic Order: The film starts with the title character's death, gives us a brief newsreel outline of his life, then fills in the details of his life with a series of flashbacks. The flashbacks are not in chronological order; their order depends on the order in which a reporter interviews people.
- And Starring: The final image of the credits, after all the secondary characters have had clips shown of them with their actors' names, is a list of the bit part actors. Then at the bottom it says "Orson Welles as Kane". Roger Ebert stated it was a blatant example of false modesty on Welles' part. He adds that listing Gregg Toland's cinematography credit alongside his directorial credit on the same card was true modesty.
- Anger Montage: The room trashing sequence. The movie commentary tracks note that this scene was a bit of "method acting" that got out of control. Welles broke his hand very early in the sequence; you can see him favoring it at the end. Also different from the typical example in that it is shown in a couple of long master shots, rather than an actual montage of closeups: this is because they could only do one take.Welles: (after shooting the scene) I felt it. I felt it.
- Angry Cheek Puff: Herbert Carter starts puffing out his cheeks as he gets increasingly exasperated by Kane's yellow journalism methods. This gets heavily exaggerated in the 4-minute trailer for the movie, where several of the characters in the story are asked over the phone for their opinions on Charles Foster Kane, and all Carter can do in response to the question is angrily puff his cheeks out over and over all while spitting out borderline Angrish (which the trailer cuts to repeatedly between the responses from the other characters).
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Given that he was based on William Randolph Hearst, Kane qualifies.
- Arc Words: "Rosebud" is a possible Ur-Example. This was the last thing that Kane said before he died, and the Driving Question of the movie is figuring out what he meant by that.
- Arch-Enemy: Walter Parks Thatcher and 'Boss' Jim W. Gettys to Charles Foster Kane.
- Aside Glance:Thatcher: "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper." Hmmph!
- Badass Boast:Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... [Smirking] 60 years.
- Became Their Own Antithesis: Kane begins with a declaration of principles, championing the Inquirer and himself as a tireless seeker of truth and justice and the defender of "the common man", until he slowly becomes a power-hungry controller of information who wants the common man to love him but who has none to give back, exemplified when he loudly proclaims that the people will think "what I tell them to think."
- Betty and Veronica: Kane's wives, Emily and Susan, respectively. Emily is a starchy, proper society woman; Susan is Kane's brash, working-class mistress.
- Big Eater: Kane, as evidenced by this early exchange:Jedediah: Are you still eating?
Kane: I'm still hungry. - Big Fancy House: Xanadu, which is cited as the largest private estate in the world, the cost of which to maintain quote "No man can say."
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: Rosebud does not apply, but the snow globe might.
- Blunt "Yes":Leland: Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt? Am I a horse-faced hypocrite? Am I a New England school marm?
Bernstein: Yes. If you thought I'd answer you any differently than what Mr. Kane tells you... - Book Ends: The same shot of Kane's house and the fence in front with a sign reading "No Trespassing".
- Brainless Beauty: Susan Alexander Kane is naïve more than stupid, really. It's just that her voice has "bimbo" connotations. (She does however seem to believe that there might be a 12-hour difference between New York and Florida.)
- Broken Ace: Under all his wealth and prestige, Kane is a broken man who can't hold down a relationship with anyone and desperately longs for his stolen childhood.
- Burn Baby Burn: The last shot is of Kane's childhood sled burning. Ultra close up on the sled's name, which is Rosebud.
- Bus Crash: Thanks to the Moral Guardians (divorce, at the time, being considered immoral), Kane's first wife and son had to be killed in a car crash so Kane could marry Susan.
- Byronic Hero: Kane is an archetypal example. As a little boy, he gets snatched from his family and introduced into the cold, ruthless worlds of media, politics, and business. By rising to the top of that ruthless world through cutthroat cunning, he becomes an internationally famous media tycoon and one of the richest men of all time. But under all that wealth, he's a broken man who can't hold down a relationship with anyone and desperately longs for his stolen childhood.
- Calling the Old Man Out:
- Kane delivers one to his adoptive guardian, Mr. Thatcher:Kane: You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.
Thatcher: Don't you think you are?
Kane: I think I did pretty well, under the circumstances.
Thatcher: What would you like to have been?
Kane: Everything you hate. - This is displacement. Kane's really angry at his mother, for sending Kane away when he was young, and putting him into Thatcher's hands. Implicitly, Thatcher is a decent (if very conservative) middle-aged banker who did his best while (ahem) raising Kane.
- Kane delivers one to his adoptive guardian, Mr. Thatcher:
- Censor Decoy: The birthday/song scene originally took place in a brothel. Welles knew he'd never be able to get away with that, but he kept it in the screenplay so the execs at RKO wouldn't notice the jabs he was taking at Hearst.
- Central Theme:
- How will the world remember you when you are gone?
- Money can't buy love or happiness. Even the most powerful people in the world often truly desire simple things—like having a real childhood.
- Even in a world of mass information, it's sometimes impossible to "know" the people around us truly.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The now-legendary sled appears very early in the film when Thatcher, in his memoir, recounts his first meeting with Kane, who was a child at the time.
- Also the Declaration of Principles, which Leland sends back to Kane after Kane has betrayed those principles.
- The snowglobe Kane drops upon his death is first seen in Susan Alexander's bedroom when Susan invites Kane into her home. It reappears again after Susan leaves Kane.
- Chiaroscuro: Like many tropes, the usage of Chiaroscuro in film was widely popularized by Citizen Kane, although it was already common in German expressionist cinema. This ties into the film's use of "Deep Focus" (one of the techniques cinematographers rave about in the movie). The way they managed to bring foreground and background objects into focus in the same shot required the more distant objects to be extremely brightly lit, encouraging the heavy-shadow Chiaroscuro compositions. Which is why Welles put Gregg Toland's name on the same card as him.
- Classical Antihero: The titular character, albeit one Played for Drama.
- Clue of Few Words: A mystery derives from wondering why Kane's final word was "Rosebud".
- Collector of the Strange: Kane is one. He collects so many things — animals and plants, everything he had in his life — that after his death, a lot of his collection is not catalogued nor even unpacked, and has to be sold off or destroyed:Newsreel Narrator: [At beginning of news reel on Charles Foster Kane's death] Legendary was Xanadu where Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure ground. Here, on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu's mountain. Contents of Xanadu's palace: paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many another palace — a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised, enough for ten museums — the loot of the world. Xanadu's livestock: the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the beast of the field and jungle. Two of each, the biggest private zoo since Noah. Like the pharaohs, Xanadu's landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave. Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself. Here in Xanadu last week, Xanadu's landlord was laid to rest, a potent figure of our century, America's Kubla Khan — Charles Foster Kane.
- Conversation Cut: This happens more than once. The Age Cut where Thatcher says "Merry Christmas", and after a 15-year Time Skip "and a Happy New Year", is also a Conversation Cut. Another such cut comes when Leland is delivering Kane's standard stump speech to a small crowd, cutting smoothly to Kane delivering the speech to a huge crowd in a large arena.
- Creator Cameo:
- Cinematographer Gregg Toland appears as a reporter in a brief scene in the opening montage.
- Pretty much every male in the cast plays one of the reporters in the opening projection room scene as well. This is one of the reasons why it was shot so darkly and shadowed, even compared to the rest of the film. Joseph Cotten is still clearly visible in the corner, however, when the editor is asking "What were his last words?"
- Dark Reprise: As Kane is embarking on his political career, he brings a marching band and a line of chorus girls into his conference room to sing a very upbeat rendition of "There Is a Man, a Certain Man" to the assembled businessmen and politicians at the conference table. ("Who is this man? It's Charlie Kane! He doesn't like that 'Mister'; he likes good old 'Charlie Kane'!") Much later, after Kane has lost the race for New York governor under extremely humiliating circumstances, a much slower and even dirge-like version of "There Is a Man" is played as an instrumental tune as Kane's campaign workers clean all the confetti off of the stage.
- Dead-Hand Shot: At the beginning, with the snow globe, when Kane drops it as he dies.
- Dead Sparks: Charles and Emily Kane, as shown in the dinner table sequence, when their once warm relationship ends with them not speaking to each other.
- Death Glare: Orson Welles gets off a Death Glare that could have melted steel, right after Thatcher asks "What would you like to have been?". Kane answers "Everything you hate."
- Decade-Themed Filter: On the "News on the March" segment, clips such as Kane's first marriage were undercranked and sandpapered to give out an 1890s feel.
- Deconstruction: In the context of the '40s, and even today to some extent, Citizen Kane radically subverts the conventional Hollywood narrative.
- Citizen Kane was in many ways an attack on the narrative style of The Golden Age of Hollywood as well as several American types like the Self-Made Man and The American Dream. Namely, that the idea of defining life in terms of social success and wealth ultimately makes you value people less and makes you want to control and buy people around you.
- The theme of the story, that of an antihero Dying Alone, unredeemed, an unpleasant, manipulative Jerkass who never learns his lesson even in his old age and who leaves behind several disappointed friends and broken loved ones was fairly harsh, in terms of absence of easy conflict resolution, putting across the futility of life and the passage of time. Likewise the characters are not consistent or slaves to type. Rather than being marked by a single trait and attribute, they have multiple traits and attributes. Kane goes from an idealistic, flamboyant young man to a reclusive, paranoid hermit; the Character Development isn't drastic or cordoned to a single transforming event.
- The opening newsreel montage also parodies the glib, cheery newsreel style reportage at the time, pointing out that even if the information is objectively correct, the tone, interpretation, and drastic editing only give a shallow, superficial idea of the subject. The multiple-narrators approach, which is still quite revolutionary, directly puts across the problem of objectivity, since there's always at least one missing side of the story, and ultimately the reporter, William Alland, decides that the full mystery of Kane or his motivations cannot really be known and gives up on finding out what Rosebud is. Even if the film supplies The Reveal and gives viewers a resolution to the Driving Question of "What is Rosebud?", the idea that it can explain Kane any more than the other stories we see remains up in the air.
- Decoy Protagonist: The film is a double subversion. Even though Kane is the title character, he's actually the person we learn about through multiple third-person perspectives of him, since he died at the beginning. The real protagonist is Jerry Thompson, whose goal throughout the film is to find out what "Rosebud" meant.
- Depth Deception: The film used this subtly:
- In one scene, a window turns out to be both much larger and much higher up than it initially appears, which means that when Kane approaches it, he suddenly appears much smaller and less significant. This, of course, is used for symbolic effect.
- Also done with the fireplace in Xanadu, which is revealed to be large enough to burn whole trees when Kane goes back to it.
- Determinator: One of Kane's Fatal Flaws, such as forcing the world to accept Susan as an opera singer, which drives her into a suicide attempt.
- Digital Destruction: The film got an accidental taste of this. In one scene, there was supposed to be rain outside the window; the person in charge of the film's restoration thought it was excessive film grain, so it was digitally edited out of the restored print. Later, the Blu-ray boasted a new restoration, which brought back such details as the aforementioned rain.
- Downer Beginning: Kane dies in the first scene of the film.
- Downer Ending: One of the most famous examples in cinema. By the end of the movie, the viewer realizes that, despite being on top of the world, Kane was tremendously unhappy and what he wanted above all else in his life was to be loved. Kane dies alone, as the movie opens, as he remembers the last time in his life when he was truly happy; when he was playing with his beloved sled, Rosebud. Plus the fact that the reporter and the rest of the world never do find out what "Rosebud" is. The only way the viewer finds out is when it's too late; when the sled is being burned, along with some of Kane's other belongings. The real tragedy is that he had the sled as part of his property throughout his whole life. Still, owning it didn't change a thing — the past is the past. This also means that Kane died with one cherished secret only he knew. The press and the populace could never get their hands on what was closest to his heart. And the snow globe, which Kane held until he died, had belonged to Susan, who had loved him for himself. He was thinking of her, too.
- Dramatic Drop: The snowglobe that's dropped as Kane dies.
- Dramatic Irony: Susan rips into Kane for publishing Leland's nasty review ("Stop telling me he's your friend!"), but she never finds out that Kane himself wrote most of it.
- Dramatic Shattering: The snow globe at the beginning.
- Driven to Suicide: Susan eventually decides that she's done with the opera singing and all the scathing critiques it brings and tries to overdose. She survives however, but nonetheless stops singing.
- Driving Question: The last thing Charles Foster Kane said before he died was "Rosebud". What did he mean when he said that? While the characters never find out, the audience does with the Wham Shot to close the film: "Rosebud" was the name of the sled that Kane had when he was a child. Kane was Aimlessly Seeking Happiness for his entire adult life, and the simple memory of playing in the snow with his sled as a child was the last time Kane felt like he was truly happy.
- Droste Image: This effect is shown when Kane passes between two mirrors.
- Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend: Kane funds an elaborate opera show for the sole purpose of casting his girlfriend in the lead role.
- During the War: Kane manipulates the public sentiment to incite the war. Bear in mind that the film came out before America entered World War II.
- Dying Alone: Kane at the beginning. The rest of the movie is devoted to showing why he was alone.
- Dying Candle:
- Throughout the opening montage showing Kane's vast Xanadu estate, a single lit window is visible on the upper right hand corner of every shot, getting closer all the time. At the end, the light goes out, leading to the memorable scene of Kane uttering his dying word.
- Susan's failed opera career is shown through a chaotic montage punctuated by a flashing lightbulb (supposedly the one used to cue the actors backstage). The montage ends abruptly with the bulb burning out, followed by Susan in bed with some sleeping pills next to her bed, implied to be a suicide attempt. Subverted in that Susan survives, although the burned-out bulb can also symbolize the death of her opera singing career.
