Oversight Marathon: Citizen Kane (1941)

A while back I wrote about twist in movies and what I consider a twist in a movie.  Now I am going to write a sort of follow up on that topic about when you watch a movie and know its “twist” ending.  Beware of what follows.  I’m probably going to spoil a few movie endings throughout this.

My inspiration for writing about this topic is the fifth movie of the Oversight Marathon, Citizen Kane.  The movie is about finding out who Rosebud was.  Only at the end do we, the viewers, realize that Rosebud was not a person.  Rosebud was a thing.  In fact, Rosebud was a sled that Charles Kane had as a child.  It is an important piece of information, and a spoiler to anyone who hasn’t seen the movie.  The thing about Citizen Kane though, is that the movie isn’t even about discovering what Rosebud is.  That is just a framing device to tell a good story about a man’s life and eventual downfall.  Rosebud is only a small piece of the puzzle that the movie puts together.

This is where I get to the point of my writing today.  Does knowing the end twist of a movie ruin the movie?  Like a twist being good or bad, it really depends on the twist itself as to whether the movie works or does not.

Sometimes a twist can unravel everything that came before it.  This is something that I can say for a movie like High Tension.  I think I’m remembering it correctly when I think that the main character ended up being the killer, but couldn’t have possibly been where the killer was at certain points.  It’s like something that Donald Kaufman would write.  This type of thing can completely ruin a movie upon rewatch because you think about every little detail and how implausible some of the situations would be.

There are other times in which a twist can shed new light upon everything that came before it in the movie.  This could be said of a movie like The Sixth Sense, which I may have mentioned in the previous twist writing.  Knowing that Bruce Willis was dead the entire time, you can notice the little details including the fact that only the child notices him.  It brings another layer of depth to the movie that wasn’t there through the initial viewing.

The final thing I want to quickly go over is when a twist can either be removed completely, such as in the case of The Village, or doesn’t even matter in terms of the main story, such as in Citizen Kane.  The bulk of the story doesn’t involve or need to involve the twist and if you completely separated the two, a solid story would still exist.  In the case of The Village, removing the twist that they are actually in present day, there is still a solid story about a village of people and how they interact with anything outside their border as well as inside their village.  With Citizen Kane, removing the entire Rosebud thing would still leave a great story of a man’s rise to fame and fall to isolation.  There is still a great story to be told, regardless of the final little twist.

All in all, if you know the twist of a movie, it may not necessarily ruin the movie upon initial watch or rewatch.  I went into Citizen Kane knowing that the meaning of Rosebud was the sled.  It didn’t make the movie any less great.  In fact, knowing that made the movie all that much better because it helps to highlight the aspects that truly make the movie good.