Yes, we all know it is the sled he was playing with the day he was plucked from the bosom of his family and set on the path to material riches and spiritual poverty; and the more salaciously minded know where Kane got the idea of putting Rosebud on the lips of his thinly disguised WR Heart clone ... and we can all work out that the deeper meaning of Rosebud is something about losing innocence, the way that dreams destroy the dreamer, how success and wealth are empty without love and so on.
Bradshaw posits a new idea that is very interesting; that, on his deathbed, is that Kane is thinking not of himself, but of his son, who we are told dies very young in an car crash:
It is in fact the moment that isn’t there, a shocking, ghostly absence that Welles allows you to grasp only after the movie is over: the death of his first wife and his son in an automobile accident. We only hear of it in the newsreel about Kane that begins the film – the brief roundup that we are invited to believe does not get to the heart of the man. But that is the last we hear of it. It happens two years into his second marriage. When does Kane hear this terrible news himself? How does he react to the death of his first wife and his adored little boy? We never know.Kane's reflecting, on his death bed, of how he seems to have visited his own fate upon his child - denied his family; trapped in a pampered but bleak, loveless life; and in the case of his son, his childhood literally destroyed.
Kane realises he's become Thatcher, ripping a child away from his parents and setting him on the road to perdition. All because of his vanity and self-deceiving, selfish self-indulgence. His pain at the end is that he has done this to everyone - his first wife, his second wife, his friends and colleagues at the Inquirer ... But most of all his son.
This (possible) interpretation is highlighted in the 'News on the March' clip that immediately follows the 'Rosebud' opening. It's Poe's idea of concealing in plain sight. We miss it because we assume the answer to the riddle will be revealed at the end; but, brilliantly, the answer is right there, before the question is even asked. It is one of the few avenues not investigated by Thompson. And we all miss it, too.
We can live with our own failings and disappointments, but the way we fail and disappoint others is what truly haunts.
