Citizen Kane

First things first: ONLY IN RIDICULOUS COMEDIES SHOULD THE 4TH WALL BE BROKEN!
Ah, now that I've gotten that off of my chest, let us begin.
I saw bits and pieces of Citizen Kane before seeing the entire movie in class. Knowing that Rosebud was a sled kind of killed the mystery for me, but it also shed a little more insight on the man in question. He didn't appear overly sentimental throughout the film, but he clearly held at least a little sentimentality for his childhood. Perhaps it was because he beat a man about the head with his sled. Perhaps it was because his sled reminded him of his dear mother. Who knows?
In class, the question of why the mother gave Kane up was posed. Why didn't she just leave the abusive/drunk/otherwise wicked husband? Um, hello? What year was this? With the exception of Nora in A Doll's House, how many women in that time period actually left their husbands? The likelihood that she would have been able to make it in that world, husbandless, is slim to none. So the most logical thing to do is to get her son out of that situation so he could flourish and become a better person. Leastways, that's my take on it.
The mystery surrounding Rosebud was interesting to me. It's made obvious that Kane is a fairly casual man, who doesn't seem to take much seriously. His first marriage dissolves because of an affair with another woman. He takes his new newspaper and turns it into a tabloid. He doesn't really seem to think much about what happens in his life until after it has happened. He fires his best friend because he wrote a scathing (yet correct) review about Kane's woman's atrocious opera performance - or rather, started writing one. That Kane finished. In an equally scathing manner. This man had been with Kane for how long? And he just throws him aside like an old overcoat. Much like his first wife...
The other question raised was, "Why tell it from others' perspectives after Kane's death?" Another student said it exactly: if he's not there, he can't skew the story. He's a newspaper man; he's out to make money on a story. How would he have told his story? Would he have allowed his possible insanity to show? Would he have discussed his trashing of his second wife's room upon her departure? Would we have even seen the way his first marriage dissolved? The only way we could get the whole picture of Kane, his life, and his ways was to keep him out of the picture. Granted, the storytellers probably embellished, put their own spin on it, and altered some facts, but Kane would most likely have shown only the good side, and never discuss - or completely alter - the bad. And if he had been alive, the entire Rosebud scenario would have gone out the window. Certainly he would have shed light on Rosebud, why he cared so for his sled, and what his sled truly meant. The lack of explanation allows the viewer to take what he will about Kane and his final words, to read into it what he wants to see. Some might say that Rosebud was the only thing Kane ever trusted. I don't buy that, but it's a possibility. And others might say that Rosebud symbolized the simplest time in his life, before he became a rich playboy with a scandal sheet.