Kendra Horvath Wrongful Restoration March 24, 2010

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Wrongful Restoration

Kendra Horvath

March 24, 2010

Humanities 30

Mr. Kabachia

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In literature, many text creators explore the ways in which a human will react to their competing

demands. The texts usually involve a character’s struggle against their exterior competition, which in

turn will result in an interior moral struggle. In the film Citizen Kane, the audience is shown the life of

Charles Foster Kane and his struggles from being one of the world’s biggest tycoons to his personal life

ups and downs. The text creator (Orson Wells) develops ideas about Charles Kane’s struggle to regain

his honor and certainty in their life. The idea behind Kane’s struggle to restore the certainty in his life

comes from his inability to love or show any real affection towards another human being, which makes

it impossible for any other person to make any emotional connection to Kane. The reason why Kane is

unable to make that connection is because of the loss of his childhood and the need to replace that

childhood.

At a very young age, Charles Kane’s mother wanted the best in life for him, so Kane’s parents

made him a warden of the banking company, Thatcher and Co. because Kane would one day be very

wealthy from all of the investments that his parents had made in different companies. Eventually, the

investments did grow into a large sum of money so Kane bought a newspaper company. This in turn

grew to a large media press, and his wealth also grew with it. Although Kane’s wealth grew, his

happiness did not. Since losing his childhood from being placed under the care of the bank, he tried to

find it in other ways, including people. In the film we see a relationship developed between Kane and a

lady by the name of Susan Alexander. She was a young, playful woman who always had big dreams.

Kane saw her child-like personality as a way to get his lost childhood back, so he intended to keep her.

Kane bought Alexander everything she asked for, from an opera house to a mansion on a high hill just to

keep her (what he thought) happy. Contrary, to Kane’s intentions, Susan Alexander became unhappy

because Kane was unwilling and unable to show affection towards her. So she, along with many others,

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left him in order to pursue their own happiness and certainty in their lives which left Kane back to where

he started, alone.

Overall, Orson Wells did an outstanding job of showing the struggle of Charles Foster Kane to

regain his honor and certainty in life in the film Citizen Kane. Wells showed us how human nature can

be, in this case, tragic by our response to our struggles in life. The film also shows us how we as people

will try to restore certainty the way we think it should be restored, even if it is the wrong way.