‘You don’t wanta make any promises you don’t wanta keep,’ says Mr. Bernstein. ‘These’ll be kept.’ Kane finishes to read aloud a declaration of principles making himself an audience, more so than the close collaborators in the room or the people who are going to read it on the front page of his newspaper the following morning. Then he signs it, whispering his full name like a kid would do—the one he was—acknowledging to have done something true after a long time. His candid stare hesitates on those little dark symbols neatly put one next to the other not just to affirm, this is who I want to be, but rather to challenge himself and prove that that is who he really his. Sottovoce, Charles Foster Kane.
I could be completely overwhelmed by the beauty of this moment only because I know the full journey Kane will be going through, and what Rosebud means. Even the famous rage scene has now taken a completely different shape. Not the frustration of a man who’s accustomed to considering himself almighty, let alone that of a husband who’s been abandoned by his wife, but rather that of someone who has let his own self down just like others once did. And failed to be better.
We spend half of our lives fighting against what we secretly fear we are, trying to be what we hoped the child we were would have become. In that tragic instant where we can’t hide anymore from admitting that that person was never to exist, that’s to me where Citizen Kane is. And once again, my heart sinks.
