> The reporter searching for the "meaning" of Kane's life seeks a "key," and the ending _can_ be taken as showing something like his (the reporter's) failure to see how that key could be a single childhood
disappointment, as the key (rosebud) is thrown onto the fire with all the other detritus of Kane's life. Or the movie could be exhibiting the foolishness of even looking for such a 'key.'
Pauline Kael described "Rosebud explains C.F. Kane's life" as "dollar-book Freud."
I would like to believe that Welles was being ironic about there being any key in childhood that will explain a person's adult life, but after looking at all his work, I am not sure that is the case. In many of Welles films there is a palpable sense of loss (Kane, Ambersons, Chimes at Midnight), but his psychological insight into character wasn't great (think of his cartoon Nazi in The Stranger; the thin ironies of Touch of Evil; the cardboard characters of Mr. Arkadin). I think he was merely reproducing the standard psychosocial construct of the day: the psychologically "deep" person whose problems have roots in childhood/family incidents. I think Welles himself believed in this construct.
A great book on this subject is Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse by Joel Pfister. Here is excerpt from a review:
". . . the way the notion of the psychological self was created for a burgeoning professional-managerial class anxious about its producer-status under capitalism. Following through on his thesis that Hawthorne began the work of producing a psychological identity for an emergent middle class, Pfister shows how O'Neill helped to secure that identity (and his reputation) by staging the psychological self according to a model of "depth." Based upon popular interpretations of Freud, O'Neill constructed his version of the psychological self as a web of neuroses and desires which encoded the fractured history of the individual and his/her relationship to the family. Pfister discusses how O'Neill's plays not only bracket this tortured and agonizing self apart from its cultural and material context, but aestheticize the pathologized self as emotionally-fraught, intellectual, and/or "deep."
For more about the book: http://www.eoneill.com/references/95900.htm
Welles was a great visual artist and actor, but for all his "liberalism," there wasn't much depth/nuance to his social vision. For me, the one movie where he excelled and achieved insight into the social system is the one most people find cold and distasteful: The Trial. Maybe it was that Welles was adapting Kafka, but for me this film is his one sustained achievement.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister