Citizen Kane / Tropes N to Z

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 E to M

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• Name of Cain: Charles Kane.
• New Media Are Evil: The film is very critical of newer forms of media, especially newsreels, which are shown to be just as constructed, story-driven, and biased as anything else and certainly not objective.
• Newsreel: This has one of the earliest (if not the earliest) examples of an in-movie fake newsreel. Furthermore, Welles had RKO use their own newsreel department to create it to make it look authentic.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Kane's final attempt at reconciling with Susan almost works out, until the Wounded Gazelle Gambit backfires on him:
  Kane: Susan. Please don't go. No. Please, Susan. From now on, everything will be exactly the way you want it to be, not the way I think you want it, but — your way. 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? Oh, yes, I can.
• No Antagonist: Kane brought his miserable life upon himself.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Kane was probably based on William Randolph Hearst, though Hearst was not pleased with the allusion.
• No Party Given: Justified; Kane is running for governor as an independent. Boss Gettys' political affiliation isn't mentioned. New York State had extremely corrupt Democratic and Republican political machines during that period.
• Oh, Crap!: Kane displays a very subtle one when his first wife Emily tells him she is going to investigate the house of Kane's mistress, Susan Alexander, after receiving an anonymous tip about it.
• Old, Dark House: Xanadu is often presented this way.
• Old Media Are Evil: The film is one of the earliest criticisms of Old Media. While Kane imagines himself as a crusading reformer and at least when he was young he apparently really was, he was also an irresponsible yellow journalist as well as a warmonger.
• Ominous Fog: The opening sequence where the camera zooms into Xanadu is made ominous by the ominous music, but also by the fog shrouding the grounds.
• The Oner: Long shots zooming into Susan's café through a skylight and up a ladder at the opera.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. The film has characters named Jim Gettys and Jim Kane (Charles' father).
• The One That Got Away:
  Mr. Bernstein: A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.
• One True Love: Charles and Susan really were meant for each other. She loved him for who he is, but Charles was incapable of understanding that he didn't need to buy her love, nor that they should seclude themselves away from society. She leaves him because he doesn't know how to return her love. In fact, if Charles ever admitted that love is a two-way street, she'd return in a heartbeat. As one of her friends said, any other day but on the day of Charlie's death, she enjoyed talking about him.
• Parents as People: Kane's mother seems like she truly thought she was doing what was best for her son by sending him away to be raised in wealth and prosperity (and away from his implied physically abusive father) even if it meant she couldn't be close to him anymore, not realizing that she set him down a very lonely path that ended with him Dying Alone.
• Patriotic Fervor: "I am, have been, and will always be, an American."
• Percussive Therapy: After Susan leaves him, Kane tears her room apart.
• Playing Both Sides: A young Kane invests in the Public Transit Company while also attacking it in the Inquirer'. He lampshades it when Thatcher comes to visit.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: When Susan decides that she has had enough of Kane and his ego and wants to walk out on him, Kane desperately begs her to stay. During this, he inadvertently tips her off that he doesn't truly realize what he has done wrong by including a "You can't do this to me!" in his plea, making her even more resolute to leave him.
• Plot Hole: Legend has it that someone once asked Welles how anyone could have known Kane's last words if he died alone. Welles supposedly paused for a long time and then said, "Don't you ever tell anyone of this." However, Raymond the butler later says he heard the word, implying that the scene was shot from his point of view.
• Plot-Triggering Death: The plot is kick-started by Kane's death.
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: When many films are said to be "the Citizen Kane of horror/comedy/action" or someone says "[Bad or mediocre movie] is Citizen Kane compared to [worse movie]," folks get the idea that Citizen Kane is a great movie. Many people stop there.
• Posthumous Character: Charles Foster Kane, his wife, and son.
• Powerful and Helpless: All of Charles Foster Kane's wealth and power can't stop the world from finding out about his adultery, which kills his political career. In fact, one of the overarching themes of the film is that all of Kane's wealth and power fail to gain him the love of others, which is the one thing he truly wants and never really gets.
• Pretty in Mink: Emily and Susan naturally wore a few furs.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Charles Foster Kane, obviously. He turns from an idealistic muckraker to a mogul whose life is slowly spiraling out of control.
• Protagonist Title: Not a very good protagonist, morally speaking, but he is the Citizen Kane.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: While Kane is finishing Leland's review:
  Kane: Hello, Jedediah.
  Leland: Hello, Charlie. I didn't know we were speaking...
  Kane: Sure, we're speaking, Jedediah... [Forcefully hits carriage return on his typewriter, ka-CHUNK]… you're fired.
• "Rashomon"-Style: An Unbuilt Trope since it preceded Kurosawa's film by several years (and Kurosawa adapted a Japanese short story that was published years before Kane's release).
  • Each narrator has a view of Kane based on their experiences and relationships with him. Notably, Bernstein dismisses Thatcher as an Unreliable Narrator, but later Jed Leland says that Bernstein's story is a Rose-Tinted Narrative. Thatcher's narrative from his diary presents Kane as a resentful Ungrateful Bastard who never cared for the trouble and headaches the young man gave him, and who still backbites him even when both of them are old. Bernstein presents Kane largely from his youthful days at the Inquirer while passing over his more inconsistent and erratic middle part of his life, and most notably leaving out the part that he took Kane's side in his fallout with Leland and trying to hide from the reporter the fact that he and Leland aren't on speaking terms with one another. Leland and Susan have stories that don't conflict with another so much, though we do see Another Side, Another Story in that we see Leland present himself as a critic trying to be honest about his opinions and intentions while in Susan's narrative, we see Leland in the audience bored during the performance and making cut-out papers to pass the time, puncturing some holes in his pretenses.
  • The opening newsreel is a very subtle example. The newsreel shows a brief glimpse of Kane after his wedding to Susan attacking newspapers and Kane coming off as a coot and eccentric in his later years. When that scene is revisited again, we see the footage continue where after Kane finds out one of the reporters is from the Inquirer, he becomes all smiles and welcoming, and happily goes off on his second honeymoon, implying that his second marriage could have turned out all right after all.
• Real After All: After Thompson Gave Up Too Soon to find what Rosebud is, the audience gets The Reveal: It Was His Sled.
• Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Averted. Characters regularly talk over one another.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Kane gets the same lecture three times from Leland, Susan, and Boss Gettys: I Just Want to Be Loved is a Tragic Dream if you truly believe It's All About Me. Does Kane understand or accept it? No.
  • Kane himself gets off a very short and sweet zinger at Thatcher's expense (see I Coulda Been a Contender! above).
• Red Scare: Thatcher accuses Kane of being a communist near the beginning of the movie. A politician addressing a crowd of workers however accuses Kane of being fascist, and we see Kane hanging out with Hitler and Mussolini while stating "there will be no war". Essentially Kane is a demagogue who uses politics to his advantage and ego.
• Retraux: Editor Robert Wise scratched the "newsreel" with sandpaper to make the "old" footage look old.
• The Reveal: "Rosebud" was Kane's sled.
• Rich Recluse's Realm: One of the most famous examples of this trope: after ruining his political career and making himself a laughingstock, Kane orders the construction Xanadu as a kiss-and-make-up gift for his second wife, Susan. It's so vast it actually consists of an artificial mountain and over forty-nine thousand acres of grounds, and once there, Kane settles in so well that he almost never leaves the building except on business and the occasional picnic on the Everglades, gradually becoming a total recluse once Susan leaves him. The building itself becomes a reflection of himself: big and impressive, but ultimately empty. For good measure, it's never officially completed and by the time of Kane's death, Xanadu has already begun collapsing into disrepair.
• Roadside Wave: This is how Kane meets Susan Alexander; she sees him splattered when a carriage passes by.
• Roman à Clef: Welles denied this, but Hearst, one of the Real Life inspirations for Kane, believed this.
  • The film actually attempts to avert this by having Hearst mentioned by name in an early scene (the reporters discussing the newsreel), establishing Kane as a different individual.
  • But also shoots itself in the foot in the first scene with Kane as played by Orson Welles, in which he says: "You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war". Substitute "pictures" for "prose poems", and this is a word-for-word quote of something Hearst himself said to a photographer.
  • Herman Mankiewicz, who came up with the story, was a frequent guest at San Simeon (aka Hearst Castle). As much as Welles sometimes denied it, much of the story clearly was based on Hearst's life. Some similarities between the real and fictional men:
    • Both were muckracking newspaper publishers who egged on the Spanish-American War, as noted above.
    • Both had a family fortune that came from mining precious metals (Hearst's father George struck it rich with the Comstock Lode).
    • Both had huge media empires, which wound up getting downsized to some extent in the Great Depression.
    • Both had estates of staggering size (San Simeon/Xanadu).
    • Both were failed independent candidates for governor of New York (Hearst actually ran for office several times and served two terms as a Democratic congressman from New York).
    • Both had beautiful young mistresses and both bankrolled their mistresses' show business careers.
    • Marion Davies and Susan Alexander were both alcoholics with a fondness for crossword puzzles. Furthermore, both are considered reasonably talented in light entertainment, but were shoehorned into more serious artistic fields that were considered seriously out of their depth.
    • Of course there were many differences between Kane and Hearst as well, which helped Welles maintain Plausible Deniability. Hearst's parents never abandoned him (in fact, this more closely resembles Welles, who was orphaned at the age of 15). He never married Davies; instead she remained The Mistress and stayed with Hearst until his death.
    • Herman Mankiewicz's original script, American, included even more overt parallels to Hearst's life, showing that Kane's opponents stole the gubernatorial election by dumping ballots in the East River and a scene modeled after the death of Thomas Ince.^note Ince, a film director turned studio boss, died aboard Hearst's yacht in November 1924. No inquest was held for Ince's death, leading to long-standing rumors that Hearst or someone who worked for him murdered Ince. Peter Bogdanovich's 2001 film The Cat's Meow fictionalizes this incident. Welles removed these scenes after one of Hearst's biographers sued the filmmakers for copying the incidents from his book.
• Rule of Symbolism: Some critics think Kane stretches the Willing Suspension of Disbelief in order to include symbolic elements. It certainly is packed with symbols. For example:
  • Rosebud, Kane's childhood sled, was the last thing Kane was holding onto on the day Mr. Thatcher came to take him from his parents. Rosebud represents Kane's lost childhood, along with everything else he lost when he moved away from home, and the last time that he was truly happy.
  • When Charles turned 25, he takes full control of his fortune and tells Mr. Thatcher through writing that he's not interested in his primary sources of income like mines and oil wells. But he was interested in the newspaper known as The Inquirer. At which point, he almost completely ignores the rest of his fortune to focus on running his newspaper and using it to critique the wealthy class of America — which he is also a part of. Initially, The Inquirer represented Kane's young ambitious dreams of making a real difference in the world and helping out poor people, but once Kane's corruption and ego get the best of him, he drops his good intentions and tries to tell them what he wants them to think, meaning the newspaper also helps chart Kane's Protagonist Journey To Villainy. Eventually, Kane loses his newspapers in the Great Depression which just about spells the end of his young idealism.
  • Rather than spend a lot of his money on investments and things that would make him even richer, Kane chose to buy up a bunch of statues. He even loses a huge part of his fortune buying those statues. Kane's statue collection represents who Kane wants his people to be, which is objects that he can look at and that will do whatever he wants them to.
  • Our title character, is eerily similar to William Randolph Hearst in terms of how things went down. They both ran newspaper tycoons corruptly, they both built their own private estates, they both and they both had a great love interest who they tried to boost up beyond her talents. Not to mention the real-life story of the battle between Hearst and Welles.
• Scenery Porn: The sets (the political rally, the newspaper office, the library, Xanadu) are all lavish, grandiose... and empty like the main character.
• Seemingly Profound Fool: At the beginning of the movie there is a scene where a Corrupt Corporate Executive reunion claims that Kane is one of the Dirty Communists. It follows a scene where someone at a workers' rally declares Kane a fascist, and then we have Kane's own declaration that he is an American. This shows Kane as a human Rorschach test: Other people project what they most fear onto him, and will insist on their interpretation of his words and deeds with a desperate will no matter how contradictory they are. The three interpretations are wrong, because the Dirty Communists, the fascists, and even the patriotic nationalist all believe in something bigger than themselves. The movie shows us that Charlie Foster Kane is only for Charlie Foster Kane.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Framing Device ends with Thompson not only giving up to find what Rosebud means, but admiting that knowing it will not explain Kane.
  • Kane's dream was a Tragic Dream and so, it was never achieved.
• Single-Issue Psychology: All of Kane's problems result from him not knowing how to love due to being taken from his parents as a child. At his mother's urging, because his father was abusive towards him. This does not make it better, however. Welles when dismissing the story's gimmick as "Dollar Book Freud" regretted it because of this implication, he didn't believe in Single-Issue Psychology, and used "Rosebud" as a deliberate "Shaggy Dog" Story to hook the movie around.
• Slimeball: In one sense, Kane is revealed to be something of a slimeball by his best friend after Kane's failed election campaign, who observes: "You just want to persuade people that you love 'em so much that they oughta love you back!"
• Slow Clap: After the disastrous operatic debut of his wife Susan, Kane stubbornly stands up and does a Slow Clap; the rest of the audience begrudgingly follows suit.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Mary Kane, Charles' mother, only appears in one sceneinvoked throughout the film, but she's single-handedly responsible for sending Charles away to live with Thatcher and most of his wealth and fame.
• Snow Globe of Innocence: One of the best known examples is Citizen Kane. The film opens with the title character gazing upon a snow globe containing a log cabin that looks much like the one he lived in as a small boy who spent his days sledding. Kane whispers his dying word "Rosebud" and the snow globe tumbles from his hand as he dies, symbolizing how he lost his innocence a long time ago.
• Snow Means Death: Not a straight example, but the snow globe should get an honorable mention.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: This is a pretty sad film, but don't worry, the end credits should pick you right up.
• Spinning Paper: A standard trope of early 1930s B-Movies, especially in films dealing with organized crime. It went out of style at around the time The Hays Code was adopted; any use after the mid-1930s is a deliberate invocation of the trope as tribute and parody. Citizen Kane is one of these. Making later parodies parody parodies.
• Stage Mom: At their first meeting, Susan tells Kane it was really her mother's ambition for her to be an opera singer.
• Staggered Zoom: It's a lot slower-paced than most staggered zooms, but the opening sequence still qualifies, being a series of cuts showing Xanadu as the camera creeps closer.
• Starts with Their Funeral: The film start with Kane's death, and then moves onto a newsreel about his life, before diving right into the flashbacks.
• Stock Footage: The film contains a lot of this. For example, the newsreel has a scene where a man speaks to a political rally, denouncing Kane as a fascist. The crowd was simply stock footage and the man was an actor, filmed in a low-angle shot to hide the fact that no crowd was present.
• The Stoic: Mr. Thatcher seems to be very distant from his young ward... and everyone else, really.
• Strawman News Media: Not at first but the Inquirer eventually becomes a Type 1, serving basically as Kane's mouthpiece.
• Symbolic Distance: One of the most famous examples, this trope is employed by Welles throughout the movie to symbolise Kane's emotional separation from his wife, through usage of an increasingly-long breakfast table (an effect achieved via clever camera-work). This separates him and his wife further and further. Towards the end of the movie, they are reading rival newspapers to really solidify their severance.
• Table Space: A very clever use of this trope to illustrate the deterioration of Kane's first marriage in a brief montage. The Kanes are shown at a small breakfast table being intimate and affectionate. We see snippets of arguments at other breakfasts. Then the scene ends with the Kanes dining in silence at opposite ends of a long table.
• Take That!:
  • Co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz was a regular invitee to Hearst's San Simeon until he earned their disfavor and was kicked out. Many of the satirical details of Kane come from his own resentment and desire to mock Hearst.
  • In an in-universe Take That!, Emily is reading The Chronicle, Kane's biggest rival newspaper.
  • Another in-universe example: Kane finishes the bad review Leland began, and instead of cleaning it up (as Leland assumed he would), he keeps the same vitriolic negativity. Bernstein snarks, "That'll show you."^note Kane fires Leland while continuing to write the review.
• Tantrum Throwing: Upon his wife leaving him, Kane goes in a room and smashes/throws everything he sees. He stops at the crystal ball that Susan owned (and reminded him of his mother), making him utter, "Rosebud."
• This Cannot Be!:
  Kane: Susan. Please don't go. No. Please, Susan. From now on, everything will be exactly the way you want it to be, not the way I think you want it, but — your way. You mustn't go. You can't do this to me!
  Susan: I see. It's you that this is being done to! It's not me at all. Not what it means to me. I can't do this to you? Oh, yes, I can.
• Time-Passes Montage: One of the most famous: Kane and his first wife sitting at breakfast. Each shift into the future has their conversation becoming more and more hostile, until the final scene in which they don't say a word — he reads his newspaper, and she reads a rival newspaper.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Being a fictionalized biopic, the film presents Kane in all ages. All of them are Orson Welles in makeup, except for eight-year-old Kane, played by Buddy Swan.
• Trade Your Passion for Glory: Kane, a young crusading newspaper owner, becomes "The Man" in his later life.
• Tragedy: Kane ends up dying alone and unloved thanks to his narcissism.
• Tragic Dream: Kane's dream is to be loved. Unfortunately, that dream is available to everyone but him: given the way he was raised, Charlie is used to paying for everything with money, and the idea of investing time and sacrificing his own interests for a relationship is absolutely beyond his comprehension.
• Tragic Hero: Kane, lampshaded by Leland.
  Leland: That's all he ever wanted out of life... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give.
• Unbuilt Trope: It Was His Sled is a Trope Namer, but the sled is actually the unbuilt trope of the MacGuffin, long before Alfred Hitchcock coined the term.
• Understatement:
  Kane: [To Susan] I run a couple of newspapers, what do you do?
• Unrequited Love: Susan to Charlie. She never stopped loving him, ever. She left simply because it was the only way she could express her own feelings. Had Charlie said the right words, she'd have returned to him in a heartbeat.
  Manager: Why, until he died, she'd just as soon talk about Mr. Kane as about anybody.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Charlie was once a happy, innocent child who was content with what he had. Unfortunately, his aloof upbringing under Mr. Thatcher robbed him of that, turning him into the cynical, media mogul he was known as by most. His desire to recapture his childlike innocence was part of his desire, to the point that he even tracked down and regained the sled he played with as a kid. Unfortunately, not even that was able to make him happy again.
• Video Credits: A clip of each major character is shown in the credits, except Kane himself.
• Vocal Range Exceeded: Susan Alexander can't hack being an opera singer. Instead of Hollywood Tone-Deaf, Welles got a professional alto to sing a soprano part.
• War for Fun and Profit: Kane does this in order to sell newspapers. Based on the manipulations of real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst:
  "Dear Wheeler: You provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war."
• Wham Shot: The shot near the end showing the name "Rosebud" on Kane's old sled.
• Whip Pan: These are used in the breakfast table montage showing the deterioration of Kane's first marriage.
• White-Dwarf Starlet: Susan Alexander is a bit out of the ordinary: Now she's running on the fumes of her former notoriety, but initially she was pushed into the limelight somewhat against her will and found stardom humiliating.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Kane started off as one, and was moderately successful as such, exposing corruption successfully and ascending the ranks in journalism.
• Worthless Treasure Twist: "Rosebud" is a "Lost Heirloom". And it gets tossed into the incinerator along with the wealthy protagonist's other worldly possessions. Nobody in the story ever finds out what his lost love/lost treasure "Rosebud" meant, though the audience gets the reveal.
• Yes-Man: Bernstein, who always supports Kane and remains devoted to him even after people like Leland and Susan become disillusioned.

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