American Dream in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane
... determine what had been driving the media magnate, and what the misterious "rosebud" pronounced on Kane's deathbed was to stand for. The fabulous rise of young Charles Foster Kane happens due to the large inheritance of his mother, a woman running a boardinghouse somewhere off the beaten track. The household income of the family cannot afford the son's decent life, and she ships him off to someone capable to give him the American dream. This is the perennial dream of infinite possibilities, of overpassing all kind of limitations, but in the end the movie suggests that it has its own limits, though this is the dream Kane doesn't seem to wake from. On the contrary, Kane with his vast anarchic power everytime seeks to confirm it. Deprived of joys of childhood and affectionless, Kane grows up into a selfish and senseless egomaniac, speaking for American people and running a manifest on the first issue of his newspaper,which his friend Jed ironically compares to the Declaration of Independence. Regardless of his enormous power, he remains somewhat boyish in his utterances and ambitions. Endowed with charm a...