Citizen Kane / Tropes E to M

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

This page is for tropes that have appeared in Citizen Kane.

For the rest:

• Tropes A to D
• Tropes N to Z

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• Epic Tracking Shot: Both the tracking shot into El Rancho, and the tracking up the ladder during Susan's opera performance — and yes, it used a visual effect (miniature ladder).
• Establishing Character Moment: The first major scene with Welles as a 24-year-old Kane has him arguing with Thatcher over how he was running The Inquirer. It does extremely well with establishing how money was simply not a concern of his in any way, shape, or form.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Lampshaded by Susan when the Inquirer gives her a bad review:
  Susan: Stop telling me he's your friend! A friend don't write that kind of review! All these other papers panning me, I could expect them, but when the Inquirer writes a thing like that, spoiling my big debut...!
• Everyone Has Standards: Even Jim Gettys is shocked Kane won't listen to his wife or Susan and spare them humiliation.
• Expy Coexistence: An attempt that backfired big-time: a throwaway line at the very beginning of the movie compares Charles Foster Kane to the Real Life media magnate William Randolph Hearst, acknowledging that Kane is a completely different (not to mention fictional) person. Hearst still felt incredibly insulted at what the movie supposedly implied of him and used all the power of his media empire to try to censor the film and make Orson Welles' life a living hell.
• Exty Years from Publication: The present year is 1941. Charles Kane was taken from his parents in 1871 (70 years ago).
• Face Framed in Shadow: The film has a few shots of Kane's face framed in shadow and stepping into light, or the other way around.
• The Faceless: The reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) is always shown from behind, or from a long distance, or with his face hidden in shadow, along with all of his reporter colleagues. According to Welles, it was a tribute to the hardworking reporters behind those film reels that were never seen. Roger Ebert called Alland's performance the most thankless, since he's the character who is the Audience Surrogate, yet he never got due credit because no one saw his face.
• Fatal Flaw: Kane wanted to be loved, but on his own terms. Kane also doesn't Know When to Fold 'Em.
• Fat Suit: Welles wore one to play the older Kane. Back in the days before he didn't need one.
• Fiction 500:
  • Kane is a media tycoon who has more than enough money to spend on constructing Xanadu (which is described in-universe as "the world's largest private pleasure ground") and filling it with exotic animals and priceless art from around the world. One early scene has his adoptive father Mr. Thatcher argue with him over how much money he's losing on running a newspaper and Kane's response?
    We 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... sixty years.
  • The above quote is said when he is still just starting out, and he's currently #5 on the Forbes Fictional 15. One million dollars at the time is approximately $27 million today; thus, "starting out" and thanks to his family's gold holdings (and his mother's management), Mr. Kane is worth at least $1.6 billion.
• Film Noir: Although there's no crime involved, the movie has a lot of tropes associated with the genre.
• First-Name Basis: "He doesn't like that 'Mister' / He likes good old 'Charlie Kane'!"
• Flashback: Lots of them.
• Forced Perspective: Used on multiple occasions. Maybe most notable in the early scene where Thatcher and Bernstein are sitting at a desk signing papers, in front of some ordinary-looking bay windows. Kane enters the frame, and then walks away from the desk—and walks quite a bit further than one might have guessed, revealing that the far wall is actually further away than it looked and that those bay windows are some seven feet off the ground. This also has the effect of making Kane look tiny in a scene where he is being humiliated by having to sign away much of his media holdings.
• Foregone Conclusion: The fake newsreel spells out the whole plot, minus "Rosebud".
• Foreshadowing: It's very subtle, but in his first meeting with Susan Alexander, Kane says that 1) he had all the stuff from his childhood home carted up and delivered, and 2) he wanted to go take a look for old times' sake. This sets up The Reveal about "Rosebud".
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: The newsreel reveals that Kane's first wife and their son die in a car crash. They are never again mentioned in any scene that takes place after they died. Nobody suggests that among Kane's many personal problems, losing his only child might be one of them.
• Framing Device: The story is told mostly via interviews of people who were close with Kane with a reporter.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Kane's parents forfeited custody of their son to an emotionally distant banker. Yeah, he's sure going to turn out A-OK in adulthood...
  • On the sled symbolism in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles remarked: "It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud."
• From a Certain Point of View: Jerry comes to the conclusion that Rosebud was just something Kane wanted and lost. He is right, though while Kane eventually got Rosebud back, what it symbolized him losing, his happiness, he never did get back.
• Gave Up Too Soon: Thompson, after spending all the movie looking for the answer to the Driving Question gives up precisely in the very room the answer lies.
• The Gay '90s: A good chunk of the film takes place in the 1890s, when Kane is at his height as a media mogul.
• Get Out!: Kane, when caught in an affair and Gettys threatens to go forward with the scandalous story:
  Gettys: You're making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would, Mr. Kane.
  Kane: I've got nothing to talk to you about.
  Gettys: You're licked. Why don't you—
  Kane: Get out! If you want to see me, have the warden write me a letter!
  Gettys: If it was anybody else, I'd say what's going to happen to you would be a lesson here... only you're going to need more than one lesson... and you're going to get more than one lesson.
  • The widowed Susan Alexander is so embittered, she refuses Mr. Thompson's request for an interview:
    John: Miss Alexander? This is Mr. Thompson, Miss Alexander.
    Susan: I want another drink, John.
    John: Right away. Will you have something, Mr. Thompson?
    Thompson: I'll have a highball, please.
    Susan: Who told you you could sit down?
    Thompson: I thought maybe we could have a talk.
    Susan: Well, think again. Can't you people leave me alone? I'm minding my own business, you mind yours.
    Thompson: If I could just have a little talk with you, Miss Alexander, I'd like to ask you—
    Susan: Get out of here. Get out!
• Gilded Cage: How Susan feels about Xanadu.
• Gilligan Cut: When Kane announces his intention to make Susan Alexander an opera star, a reporter asks if she'll sing at the Met:
  Susan: Charlie said if I didn't, he'd build me an opera house.
  Kane: That won't be necessary.
  [Cut to newspaper headline: "KANE BUILDS OPERA HOUSE"]
• The Greatest Story Never Told: No one, except the audience, will ever know what Rosebud really means or signifies. It becomes a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle and a Riddle for the Ages. Thompson hangs a Lampshade on it at the end:
  Thompson: Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything... I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.
• Greedy Jew: Subverted. It's Kane's very Jewish business associate Mr. Bernstein who says that there's more to life than money.
  Bernstein: Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money... if all you want is to make a lot of money.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The election between Kane, whose flaws are expounded upon for the whole movie, and Gettys, who seems to be every bit as corrupt as Kane portrays him. In the race between these two, who would you vote for?
• Hail to the Thief: After Charles' and Emily's wedding:
  Emily: Sometimes, I think I'd prefer a rival of flesh and blood.
  Kane: Oh Emily, I don't spend that much time with a newspaper.
  Emily: It isn't just the time, it's what you print: attacking the President!
  Kane: You mean Uncle John?
  Emily: I mean the President of the United States!
  Kane: He's still Uncle John, and still a well-meaning fathead who's letting a pack of high-pressure crooks run his administration. This whole oil scandal--
  Emily: He happens to be the president, Charles, not you.
  Kane: That's a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.
• Happiness Realized Too Late: Introduced isolated inside his unfinished palatial mansion, media mogul Charles Foster Kane lies Dying Alone, having lived in seclusion from the world for many years after the wholesale failure of his ambitions and relationships. With his final breath, he utters the word "Rosebud." The movie unfolds in flashback as Intrepid Reporter Jerry Thompson tries to unravel the significance of Kane's dying declaration through interviewing those who knew him. However, no one he talks to knows just who or what Rosebud was, the closest answer he gets is from Kane's butler who concludes he was just saying a nonsense word. Thompson never does solve the mystery, though the answer is shown to the audience in the final scene: It Was His Sled from his childhood that represented a simpler, happy time that Kane could never recover. The conclusion? It is indeed Lonely at the Top.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Kane, who envisions himself as a crusader for the little guy against corruption, becomes a cynic and a reactionary.
• Hidden Depths: While W.P. Thatcher comes off as stoic and distant as Kane's adoptive father, he does genuinely care for Kane throughout his life, even bailing him out during the great depression and allowing him to keep the majority of control over the Inquirer. Kane may lament the loss of his mother, but it's not an enormous leap to recognize that Thatcher was an infinitely better father figure than Kane's actual father would have been.
• High Hopes, Zero Talent: Susan Alexander gets put out on a huge opera debut by Kane. While her voice may be pleasant for something singing in the shower, she is not cut out for opera in any way.^note Specifically, she's way out of her range. She's a contralto (low register) trained/forced to sing as a soprano (very high register). This could ruin any vocal potential she did have. Her vocal teacher loudly proclaims she is unteachable and more or less facepalms every time she sings. Kane won't listen to Susan, the instructor, or every newspaper critic in America and insists she keeps going on stage. Welles later regretted this part of the film, as people assumed she was based on screen actress and William Randolph Hearst's paramour Marion Davies, who Welles (and many others) felt was actually a fairly talented actress and a nice person. Marion Davies was well-suited to romantic comedies; unfortunately, Hearst saw her as the second coming of Mary Pickford and kept putting her in lavish, sentimental dramas that didn't take advantage of her talents.
• Hitler Cam:
  • Orson Welles was the Trope Codifier. Refers to the practice of shooting a solitary figure from a slightly lower angle. This magnifies the figure's height and presence in the mind of the viewer. Greatly popularized by the film.
  • In the newsreel, a ground level shot features Kane with Adolf Hitler played by Carl Ekberg, a Norwegian-born actor who would portray Hitler in several other movies, in addition to portraying German soldiers among other roles throughout his career.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Averted with Susan Alexander. To get the effect of a realistically overmatched singer, Welles got a professional alto opera singer and had her sing a soprano part, so yes, the actress who played Susan Alexander can sing, but doesn't have much range.
• How We Got Here: The film starts with Kane's death. Thompson's investigation then serves as the framework for telling Kane's life story, which is then told in roughly chronological order.
• I Am Not What I Am Not: Strangely, two characters come to terms with the fact that they can’t be the men they once wanted to be when they are before their In-Universe Catharsis.
  • When he is forced to give up the control of his empire, Kane reflects that his advantages had stolen his chance at true greatness.
    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.
  • When 'Boss' Jim W. Gettys tries to Black Mail Kane, he admits that even he, the archetype of the Sleazy Politician, has more standards than Kane.
    Kane: In case you don't know, Emily — this — this gentleman [Kane puts a world of scorn into the word] — is —
    'Boss' Jim W. Gettys: I'm not a gentleman, Mrs. Kane, and your husband is just trying to be funny calling me one. I don't even know what a gentleman is. [Tensely, with all the hatred and venom in the world] You see, my idea of a gentleman, Mrs. Kane — well, if I owned a newspaper and if I didn't like the way somebody else was doing things — some politician, say — I'd fight them with everything I had. Only I wouldn't show him in a convict suit, with stripes — so his children could see the picture in the paper. Or his mother. [He has to control himself from hurling himself at Kane] It's pretty clear — I'm not a gentleman.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: Inverted Trope by Kane, when he is forced to give up the control of his empire. Hardly a nobody. Very disillusioned, he reflects that it was his advantages that denied him his chance at true greatness:
  Charles Foster 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?
  Charles Foster Kane: I think I did pretty well under the circumstances.
  Thatcher: What would you like to have been?
  Charles Foster Kane: [Death Glare] Everything you hate.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: This is Kane's main motivation. Deconstructed, as, despite how innocuous a motivation it seems, it makes him a Jerkass — he wants to be loved, but on his own terms, and he doesn't understand that it just doesn't work that way.
  Leland: He married for love. Love. That's why he did everything. That's why he went into politics. It seems we weren't enough, he wanted all the voters to love him too. Guess all he really wanted out of life was love. That's Charlie's story, how he lost it. You see, he just didn't have any to give. Well, he loved Charlie Kane of course, very dearly, and his mother, I guess he always loved her.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Kane ultimately drives away all his friends with his egotistical personality and self-centeredness, becoming Lonely at the Top.
• Impoverished Patrician: Leland is described as coming from an old, rich family where one day the old man shoots himself and they discover they have nothing.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • Jed Leland needs several to muster the courage to write an honest review of a Susan Alexander performance. He gets so plastered he can't even finish it. It's stated that he normally doesn't drink.
  • Earlier, Leland looks at the headline from Kane's own paper announcing his defeat, and then walks straight into a saloon..
• Intrepid Reporter: Jerry Thompson, the reporter who tries to find out the meaning of "Rosebud". And Kane himself during his younger years.
• I Take Offense to That Last One:
  Charles Foster Kane: You long-faced, overdressed anarchist.
  Leland: I am not overdressed!
• It's All About Me: Kane's mission in life is to be loved on his own terms. Lampshaded spectacularly:
  Kane: [Pleading] Don't go, Susan. You mustn't go. You can't do this to me.
  Susan: I see. So it's you who this is being done to. It's not me at all. Not how I feel. Not what it means to me. [Laughs] I can't do this to you? [Odd smile] Oh, yes, I can.
• It's All Junk: Kane is an obsessive collector of everything, who then treats people like objects and dies a lonely old man, surrounded by glorified junk in a ridiculously opulent estate. The last line of the film is, in fact, "Toss that junk."
  • And ironically, the only piece of "junk" that meant something really important to Kane is burned up because it can't be sold.
• It Was His Sled: invoked Despite being the Trope Namer, the sled is a MacGuffin. As Jerry muses over a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces, "Rosebud" is only a piece of the puzzle. (In addition, there were two sleds, each representing a time in his life. The second sled was "Crusader".)
• It Will Never Catch On:
  • Kane didn't believe, in 1935, that there would be a war. World War II started four years after that.
  • "I've got to make the New York Inquirer as important to New York as the gas in that light." Of course, this scene takes place shortly before gaslights became obsolete.
• Ivy League for Everyone: Kane is said to have attended and been thrown out of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell.
• Jekyll & Hyde: Kane tells Thatcher early on, "The trouble is, you don't realize that you're talking to two people," referring to himself as both a man of wealth and as a man of the people. One of the main points of the movie is the internal war between those two sides. It can be argued that both sides lose by the end of the movie.
• Jerkass: The movie amounts to showing how Charles Foster Kane turned into a big piece of shit, lost childhood or not.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When browbeating Kane about his sensationalistic headlines about corruption in the local railway business, Thatcher calls out Kane's hypocrisy, pointing out that Kane himself owns a huge amount of stock in the company his papers are condemning. Kane blithely agrees, noting that his stock is preferred, i.e., less risky than common stock if the company gets into trouble. Thatcher also notes that Kane's newspaper is losing a ton of money. Kane grins and agrees, then reminds Thatcher that he has so much money that the paper can last sixty years. But then he's forced to sign away the paper less than forty years later.
• Jump Scare: The screeching cockatoo near the climax of the film. Quite possibly the best non-horror example in cinema history.
• Large Ham: "Siiiiing Siiiiiing!" It works, though.
  • Mr. Exposition during the introductory voice-over could count, as well.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Playing with this trope is arguably the main conceit: it's a movie about the impossibility of finding the right details. "Rosebud" is an example, as is the famous "girl in the white dress" speech.
• Let the Past Burn: The ending is a loose example, differing only in that the whole house isn't burnt.
• Living Out a Childhood Dream: Averted. Charles Foster Kane's last words are one of the most famous examples of this trope, even if all he can do at that point is look back with regret to the childhood he never had and never will have instead of getting to actually live it.
• Lonely at the Top: As a core theme. One of the reasons why he tries to desperately cling to his wife, and eventually comes true when she leaves him. It's also the meaning behind "Rosebud": his life, though successful, was so unhappy that the time he was happiest was when he was a child and playing with his sled.
• Love Hungry: As desperate as Kane is for love, he is too selfish to understand that one cannot force others to love them. It just doesn't work that way.
• Loving a Shadow: The end of the film shows that Kane idolized his childhood with his parents before Thatcher adopted him, but the little we see of them they don't seem particularly much more loving than Thatcher was.
• MacGuffin: The identity of "Rosebud". It never gets obtained... by the characters, that is...
• Malevolent Mugshot: Regardless of whether one views the titular character as a Villain Protagonist, this image◊ certainly counts as the Trope Maker in film, beating Nineteen Eighty-Four by seven years. Since the point of the film is to tell Kane's story and let the audience decide if he is a hero or villain (or both), it is also an Unbuilt Trope.
• The Man Is Sticking It to the Man: Discussed in the film, where Charles Foster Kane, heir to the sixth-largest private fortune, becomes a crusading publisher/editor who takes a progressive platform against wealthy interest holders. Walter Thatcher specifically brings up Charles' attack on the Public Transit Corporation of which he himself is a shareholder, to which Kane responds by noting that a rich man taking the cause of reform might keep communists from doing so:
  Charles: The trouble is, you don't realize you're talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane who owns 82,364 shares of Public Transit Preferred — see, I do have a general idea of my holdings — I sympathize with you. Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be closed, a committee formed to boycott him. If you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of $1,000. On the other hand, I am the publisher of the Inquirer. As such it's my duty... I'll let you in on a little secret. It is also my pleasure to see that the working people of this community aren't robbed by a pack of money-mad pirates, just because they have no one to look after their interests. You see, I have money and property. If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, somebody else will. Maybe somebody without money or property. That would be too bad.
• Match Cut: The entire opening sequence. Watch how the light never moves.
  • Also after slapping Susan. Her left eye matches with an eye decoration in the next scene. Hard to catch.
• Mathematician's Answer:
  Reporter: Mr. Kane, How did you find business conditions in Europe?
  Kane: With great difficulty!
• Matte Shot: The outside of Xanadu is mostly a series of matte paintings.
• Memento MacGuffin: "Rosebud", which partially drives the plot.
• A Minor Kidroduction: Sort of—we get a glimpse of Kane as he dies and then we see him again in the newsreel, but the story proper starts with eight-year-old Kane.
• The Mistress: Susan Alexander, before Kane marries her.
• Mockumentary: Early in the film. Welles was good at these. People in the 1940s who were used to seeing the "March of Time" newsreels regularly would have been much more amused by the satire. Possibly the earliest example of an in-movie fake newsreel.
• Morally Bankrupt Banker: Subverted because Mr. Thatcher isn't shown doing anything evil. Implicitly, Thatcher is a decent (if very conservative) middle-aged banker who did his best while raising Kane... as The Stoic, in a stage in Kane's life he needed love more than anything. Little wonder Kane grew up to be dysfunctional.
• Mouthscreen: One of the most iconic examples in film history. The first we see of the title character is a close up of his lips as he says his last word: "Rosebud."
• Musical Pastiche: Salammbô, the opera in which Susan Alexander stars, is Bernard Herrmann's pastiche of French grand opéra à la Jules Massenet. Pauline Kael suggested that it was originally supposed to be a real Massenet opera, Thaïs; but Herrmann angrily refuted it when Kael said it was a compromise because they couldn't get the rights:
  Bernard Herrmann: Pauline Kael has written in The Citizen Kane Book (1971), that the production wanted to use Massenet's "Thais" but could not afford the fee. But Miss Kael never wrote or approached me to ask about the music. We could easily have afforded the fee. The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served the emotional purpose of the film. I wrote the piece in a very high tessitura, so that a girl with a modest voice would be completely hopeless in it.^note There are several real Salaambô operas; more in Trivia.
• Mythology Gag: Also a Shout-Out. In one scene dated 1935, Kane tells a reporter not to believe everything he hears on the radio. Considering who is playing Kane that is true.

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