This movie is largely about the various personal accounts of the memories people have of other people. In this story, the various recollections of people are used to reconstruct an image of Mr. Kane who, himself appearing at the center of the story, doesn’t have his own personal account of himself accounted for in this story that incorporates at least 6 iterations of how people viewed him. Largely they recounted the aspects of their lives that the man directly influenced, such as for Susan’s recounting it was so heavily skewed about her singing career and Kane’s influence on this. I don’t think that hearing Susan’s story alone couldn’t give a reasonable understanding of who this guy actually was, in the way this story was written so as to show the various reflections of people for which there were many variations. She wouldn’t have heard him say the word rosebud per the film, therefore representing this as part of his personality outside of that formative moment.
In doing this, the assertion is such that there are inferences that can be made about interpretations on what personal identity is.
I had it asked of me once – that if you had to communicate to an “immortal soul” that wasn’t omniscent, where you were in the universe – how, exactly, would you go about doing this? It was one of the better questions I’ve had asked of me, ever, regarding personal identity and I’m certainly over-interpreting the nature of the question a bit, but much can be thought of in considering this. For one, it’s a large assumption that this immortal soul would even know what this thing was we call a physical universe, let alone the notions of energy and vibration – this entity conceivably exists apart from that, so how then how could one ever hope to tell it where you were? Suppose that it could perceive you, and was empowered to reach you, here, and in some way, you had to have the ability to communicate to it in such a way as to be able to find you, for a period. What would you consider to tell it? Would you start by attempting to tell it your own recollections of the formative events of your particular origin and childhood such as found in the rosebud interpretation, or would you rely on external recountings of yourself such as in the enigma interpretation to sufficiently tell such a thing where you’re at?
In general I consider each individual reflection of who Kane was in the film through individual recollection to be an allegory to the petals of a rosebud, where while there were all different petals on a rose varying from large to small and differing slightly, all still pertained to and were a part of the rose, which I considered to be a metaphor for Kane’s personality. In this case I find the mention of it to imply that Kane was the rosebud and as the stories were presented progressively through the story, viewers were able to get a more clear picture of the whole rosebud, the whole person, Kane.
In this light, I consider Kane to be slightly different from the stories presented, even. The point here is that I am in agreement with the enigma interpretation regarding Kane’s identity in that while each individual reflection, idea, or interpretation of who Kane in particular elucidating a particular aspect of his personality, many of the stories were required to be viewed through the accumulated lenses of who Kane was in order to come to understand Kane as a person. I don’t believe it was some single event of childhood alone that was the singluar formative event that created the identity that he carried with him in his human life. While I consider the event of his childhood to certainly be a formative event, it is one among many, more proximal or central to himself than many, that formed the agglomerated personality that could explain who Kane was. He wasn’t just chasing his lost childhood in this film any more than he was chasing any other lost thing to him that I perceive.
It was interesting to note that as the story progressed, I observed Kane being cast in an increasingly different light, as a progressive march toward a person that wasn’t exactly like the one the story opened up with. (blossoming or wilting like a rose). As he exited his wife’s room after she left, he walked by many people with internalized reflections of him that we could not outwardly see, nor could they all be the same. Then in the next scene he walked in front of a mirror with many iterations of his reflected self, all identical, that we could easily see. Possibly this was alluding to the fact that Kane’s personality was unchanged and iterative, and it was the interpretation of who he was that varied due to it having been cast in the shadows and biases of his peers’ recollections and individual personalities. This contrasts with the words he used to discuss with Susan prior to them separating – the discussion of what the people would think. I think this would mean that the perceived notions Kane would’ve imagined of the internalized versions of himself held by other people were taken into account to express himself and thus formed parts of his identity. This thereby gave some level of truth to the notion that an external observer could forge parts of an identity and the resulting person is an enigmatic aggomeration the constituent and recognized interpretations of the person being considered, which in this case was Kane.
It’s clear that his holding of the snowglobe indicates him holding onto his childhood, in memory and in doing so it’s likely the loneliness that he experienced through his whole life of having lost his mother who did what she thought was best to separate the guy from his father by sending him off. In doing this, Kane was inflicted with a childhood wound that caused him to collect impressive amounts of things through his whole life. My closest consideration here to this film is the sonnet Ozymandias. In this case, Kane’s life and identity were the result of constant reactions to external stimuli for which that event was one large part of.
I think that both of these concepts (rosebud vs. enigma interpretation of Citizen Kane) are mutually exclusive in that the essence of one interpretation involves that which was not had by Kane, whereas the other is defined explicitly by that which Kane lived through. To me, this is as straightforward as saying there would have been an apple there, but there was not, and separately that there was not an apple there and then there was – it’s quite possible that I’ve internally oversimplified both of these concepts but in general I conclude that the rosebud interpretation of the events of the movie are often conflated with the subsequent character traits that result in that in the same way folks can initially visually identify a person or thing most of the time, closer observation of the thing generally reveals further details.