If Rosebud were a McGuffin, or a symbol of unknowableness, why wouldn't it refer to, say, a brand of toothpaste, or something on the ingredients list of the last breakfast he ate?

I'm not sure the movie could be supported by a framework in which a reporter interviews a dozen people, who reminisce for hours about a man's life without ever being able to figure out what the word "Colgate" might refer to. It might lessen their credibility a little. Although now that reminds me of the SNL parody. But the point isn't that it's something insignficant to Kane. It's that we'll never know what that signficance was. It's not a symbol of unknowableness; it is an unknowable symbol.

You can know; you've been shown the sled earlier on; and the real significance is

But just as Betsy said, I can know what Rosebud is. I can't know what it meant to Kane. I can't know if it symbolized youth or simplicity or family or poverty or innocence or civilization or sex or none of those things or all of them.

The sled combined with the snow globe, which could be construed to Kane remembering winters, raises more possibilities that he was at least thinking of his youth. Whether it was anything of any psychological depth or merely mental wanderings is a separate question.

I don't know. This is Orson Welles we're talking about. Dude was into expansive visions of American mythology. I don't think he would be satisfied with an unknowable symbol, and I certainly don't think the viewing audience of the time was into that sort of thing. In The Killers, which works on the same disordered-flashback structure, we certainly find out why the Swede waited passively for his own murder.

Since this is the Literary thread, and since only one person other than me has read The Custom of the Country (and she's in a hurricane!), can anybody else suggest novelistic American-mythology, expansive representations of that country-to-city, rise-in-social-standing story? I'd like to interrogate the basic plot-eventuality further, and clearly Kane is too debatable at this point to qualify.

I wouldn't call it great literature, but Louis Lamour's Sitka explored some of that following its protagonist from his humble beginnings to increased status and sophistication later in life.

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Casper reccomends The Great Gatsby. Which, there's some potential there, although Gatsby is the country-to-city character, and we never get his viewpoint, only hints from Sam Waterston. (What is that character's name?? I am a dunce.)

But Gatsby himself always struck me as a story about reinvention -- he changes his name, throws some money around, presto! he's someone else.

Daisy Buchanan's story, now there's a character who needs to be beaten with a stick, and her flaws are associated with her living the monied life. And being a twit, I mean, but it's a lot harder to be a twit and get away with it if you live in a tenement on the Lower East Side.

(What is that character's name?? I am a dunce.)

Nick.

I don't think Kane is the point of the movie, particularly. It's a story about storytelling, not about him.

I *heart* Strega. That's what I loved about the movie. It's a narrative about narratives.

Also, since this is a lit thread, I thought I would proclaim The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time supremely underwhelming, and not worth your time if you have other options.

P-C, I appreciated it as an exercise in narrator voice and as a study of Ausberger's (which, according to my father, it's pretty accurate as), but I didn't enjoy it, per se.

I read Curious Incident to kids I was looking after, and it seemed to really interest them. It had them asking the questions it was supposed to, I think.