Simple Stereotypes in Citizen Kane

In 1941, Orson Welles released one of the great films of all time: Citizen Kane; a film that has not only been compared to great writers of the past, but also was voted as the best movie of all time by the AFI (American Film Institute). The film begins with an amazing sequence, showing the final moments and the death of the famous newspaper tycoon Kane (Orson Welles), and captures his last word: "Rosebud." Then a newsreel reporter named Jerry Thomson (William Alland) is sent to find out the meaning of "Rosebud." To this end he interviews people from Kane's past, and he searches through Kane's enormous collection of property, which leads the view through a retrospective of Kane's life, told by flashbacks of the people closest to him. Even with the beautiful narrative by Orson Welles, one can still find stereotypes, such as the relation between upper and lower economic classes, graven into the spine of the story.

A stereotype is a construct that humans use to unclutter our overly complex lives. Expanding on this, Walter Lippman quoted John Dewey as stating, "All strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting stranger" (Lippman 31). This quote illustrates the idea that as people we see our sounding world as simply as possible, to allow us to function in the ever more complicated world we live in. To further this problem in movies there is the constant lack of time, and pressure to keep the story moving. William Goldman, the famous screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the Presidents Men, Absolute Power and The Princess Bride, writes, "GET ON WITH IT-that is what the camera demands, and when we write movies, we have no choice but to obey" (Goldman 209). The usual forces that we use to unclutter our lives, coupled with the restraints of film lead to a very stereotyped world, within which Citizen Kane is no exception.