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Society for Cinema & Media Studies Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences Author(s): Robin Bates and Scott Bates Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 3-26 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225336 Accessed: 17-06-2016 15:02 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225336?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Texas Press, Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences by Robin Bates with Scott Bates When I first saw Citizen Kane with my college friends in 1941, it was in an America undergoing the powerful pressures of a coming war, full of populist excitement and revolutionary foreboding. But cynical Depression kids that we were, we had little hope for salvation through armed uprising. Nor did we believe any longer in America's self-proclaimed values. Nevertheless, those values were still part of us, and it was America's blind self-destruction that we instinctively recognized in the shattering experience of watching a little wooden sled go up in flames. From the moment the huge lips opened and said "Rosebud," to the sled's final immolation in the furnace of our desires, we were both thrilled and terror-stricken. It was the flaming consummation of sex and politics that we had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives. We somehow knew that we had experienced our own flaming love-death and that it had taken place in the tragic heart of our country. Welles and Mankiewicz had revealed, in two short hours of perception, how en- ergetically Miss America had been raped of her dream, of her promise, of her rose; and then how she had dutifully prostituted us, her own bastard children. We no longer had a place we could call home. Pessimistically, and yet with the hope of finding some sort of transcendence through great eschatological events, we let ourselves get drafted into the army.... -Scott Bates' For my father, a freshman at Carleton College, the final moment of Citizen Kane was cathartic. As the sled was thrust into the burning furnace and the rose and the lettering took over the screen, he and other members of his generation were convinced that Thompson, the reporter in the film, was wrong: one could sum up a man's life in a word. As Tangye Lean wrote for Horizon, "If you accept the discovery of 'Rosebud' as something more than an 0. Henry ending, a vast pattern of interrelated human themes becomes clear-as a different one does in the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu."2 And Cedric Belfrage raved in the leftist film review Clipper, "The people are going to see Citizen Kane, and not one of them will be quite the same person after seeing it as he was before. It is as profoundly moving an experience as only this extraordinary and hitherto unexplored medium of sound-cinema can afford in two hours. You leave it with regret, wishing you could see it all through again, feeling all of your own belief in the medium restored, all of your shattered illusions made whole."3 Although there were several attacks on the Rosebud plot, especially from Robin Bates is associate professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Scott Bates is professor of French at The University of the South. He is currently completing a book on eroticism and Guillaume Apollinaire. Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 3 This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms the left,4 many viewers had an experience somewhat like Belfrage's: The film seemed to have healing powers. Yet the Rosebud revelation has now become a critical embarrassment. In 1963 Orson Welles dismissed Rosebud as "a gimmick really, and rather dollar-book Freud,"5 and others have followed suit. In an important PMLA article, Robert L. Carringer sums up the recent critical down- playing of Rosebud's importance, and he himself regards it as "a rather shameless piece of melodramatic gimmickry."6 The tendency now, in line with general deconstructionist thought, is to regard Rosebud as indicating a deferral of mean- ing. Thus Carringer sees it as a Hitchcock McGuffin, a way of "making us care about one thing when it's really something else that matters." The real meaning of Rosebud, he says, is the way that "there are parts of Kane that are knowable and-others that will always remain beyond our interpretation."7 In the most recent article I have seen on Citizen Kane, Leonard J. Leff takes a similar approach. The film only seems to say that Rosebud is the answer, but then undercuts it with what Leff regards as anticlimactic closing shots and the Mercury Theatre tail credits. He concludes: "Our consistently revised assumptions permit us to experience and learn the very object lesson, the danger of closing on a text."8 This article attempts to reconstruct what the Rosebud search meant for middle-class liberal males of the 1940s and 1950s, the group for whom the film probably had the most profound impact. It will also speculate on why we no longer share their response. I am involved in more than an attempt to understand why the film means so much to my father, although this is what propels my search. The task is undertaken with the assumption that a text will show different faces to different historical periods, and this multifaceted nature is part of its complexity: A text engages with a particular set of audience needs and expec- tations and changes as these needs and expectations change. Therefore if, as Pauline Kael claims, Citizen Kane was more highly praised by the American press than any other movie,9 that response has to be taken seriously. If, on the other hand, the Rosebud search seems a plot gimmick today-if the end product seems too insignificant, or the closure too final -it is not because we have become more sophisticated, but because audience needs have changed. Today's "gimmick" may have been yesterday's icon. Early liberal audiences found in the Rosebud revelation a successful con- densation of their major psychological, aesthetic, and political concerns. The film articulated their deepest anxieties in these areas and then, in the final shots, provided a symbolic transcendence. To understand their response, I will follow two lines of investigation. First, treating Rosebud as a totalizing symbol, I will determine what associations rosebuds and roses had for audiences at the time. In the intersection of the private associations that roses had for Mankiewicz and Welles (and even for Hearst), one can see how the Rosebud symbol became a locus for the psychological, the aesthetic, and the political. Second, disassembling the symbol, I will isolate these concerns and show how the film works on each level separately. Thus, when viewers explained their response, they praised the film for its psychological complexity, its artistic virtuosity, and its political audacity. 4 Cinema Journal 26, No. 2, Winter 1987 This content downloaded from 128.91.220.36 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:02:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Rosebud worked for these viewers, I believe, because it offered revelatory insight into the historical moment and suggested a way to situate oneself in a world on the edge of cataclysm. Mankiewicz, Welles, and Rosebud. Citizen Kane started as a screenplay about William Randolph Hearst. As Mankiewicz and John Houseman worked on the script, they noted how it became a film about Orson Welles. And if one reads Richard Meryman's illuminating biography on Mankiewicz, one realizes the extent to which the film is about the scriptwriter.'? The critical debates over authorship-who is really responsible for Citizen Kane?-are irresoluble because the overlap is so great. This overlap can be seen most clearly in the rose symbolism and what it meant to Mankiewicz and Welles. The conjunction of private as- sociations points to a more general significance. It is necessary to clear up one point before exploring private associations. Rosebud could not have been the brand name of an actual boy's sled because no self-respecting boy would own a sled called Rosebud." For one thing, in the nineteenth century, rosebud was a word applied almost exclusively to little girls and virginal debutantes. By the twentieth century, the word had become too effeminate even for the Girl Scouts, who changed the "Rosebuds" to the "Brown- ies." We may sense that there was never a sled called Rosebud as we watch the final shots, and yet curiously, the significance of the word has hardly been explored.

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