As Citizen Kane (1941) opens, we’re drawn into the grand estate of Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles, who co-wrote and directed the film). The elderly media tycoon is dying. Lying on his deathbed, he clutches a snow globe, which falls from his hand as he breathes his last word: “Rosebud.”
That final whisper will serve as our way into Kane’s world, setting in motion a narrative that traces his rise and fall, with the mysterious Rosebud at the center.
Rosebud is a dramatic device, but spoiler: it’s really a wooden sled that Kane once cherished as a young boy, a symbol of innocence lost. In Welles’s words, it’s “a little toy from the dead past of a great man.” At the film’s close, we watch as Kane’s staff, following his death, casually discard the sled into a furnace as if it were garbage, which it is to anyone not named Kane.
Turns out, Rosebud is no one’s trash. It would endure as a powerful symbol in cinema, particularly as Citizen Kane, which earned an Academy Award for its screenplay, remains highly esteemed as a masterpiece. The actual sleds created for the film, too, would become treasure—one of the last surviving Rosebuds has now made auction history.
