Citizen Kane as the King of Contradiction Lily Gross College

Citizen Kane seeks to identify the true essence of Charles Foster Kane from the perspectives of other people and the memories they had with him. It presents the multiple layers to Mr. Kane as the protagonist, and–through a series of flashbacks–recounts the important events and relationships of his life, from his broken childhood through his ultimate death. The film exposes Mr. Kane as a man who is constantly seeking to fill a void in his heart yet is never able to succeed. Shortly before Kane’s second wife, Susan Anthony, leaves him, the two of them exist, together but separate, in his hyperbolically large living room. In this sequence, Orson Welles uses mise-en-scene to construct the nature of Mr. Kane as someone who can only exist, and love others, as Leeland asserts, “on his own terms.”

Charles Foster Kane feels as though he must exert his power onto others. Encompassed by an overpowering–and often overwhelming–wealth, along with the fame, popularity, and luxury that comes along with it, he aims to control others by cultivating relationships that rely on an imbalance of power. Welles uses mise-en-scene to portray this dynamic through the relative positionality of characters and objects in the film sequence. For example, the...